The author says:
The book is about a PI who’s given a missing person’s case after the police decides the man to be a runaway. It’s a mystery book, targeted to young adults up and no specific genre (though probably to women than men).
Nathan says:
I think you can immediately see the biggest problem when you look at the cover in thumbnail: The lilies are practically invisible.
My advice: Move “Bloody” and “Lilies” together, and increase both brightness and saturation until the flowers look like flowers. (You can always burn it darker at top and bottom around the text.)
Other comments?
It’s A. too literal and B. too uninformative.
The title is Bloody Lilies and there’s blood under the word “blood” (if you look hard enough to find it) and there are the lilies. But none of this really conveys anything significant about the theme, nature or idea of the book. I know there is a tagline with the word “mystery” but you should not depend on a tagline to get the idea of a book across. Finally,
I would not spread the title across the cover this way. Keep the words together.
I can see this working as an illustration of white flowers, black background, and strategically-placed splatters of red on the white flowers. Weave the illustration and title together for an interplay of foreground and background. It would be much more dramatic.
Also the back cover text has such tight leading (space between lines) that the ascenders and descenders of the letter forms touch. Cut a couple lines of superfluous text, increase the leading for a more comfortable read and either justify or make the text flush left instead of center.
I’m not against on the nose imagery, especially for literary type mysteries.
I do think your image needs to be clarified a bit. something like the linked where the lilies are obviously lilies and the coloring ‘say’s thriller.
https://imgur.com/2NHqKJp
(you can have the image if you want it)
I realized I spelled Lillie wrong so updated the image
https://imgur.com/MqcPlWB
https://imgur.com/nVr3MW3 fun with fonts
Eh, it’s not the worst cover I’ve ever seen here—not by a long shot—but the image on the cover does seem awfully generic: if not for the title with its vaguely violent implications, one could just as easily imagine this to be the cover of a cook book or a poetry collection. In part, that’s because the image is too dark and de-saturated; while that rusty red could be coagulated blood, it could also be rain-drenched red clay (if this were a poetry book) or spices (if it were a cook book). I recommend being a bit more specific by showing these bloodied lilies and dill flowers in an actual bouquet laid across some recent victim’s chest as specified in the description on your back cover; bumping up the saturation and luminescence via some gamma correction to make the blood look like… well, like blood wouldn’t hurt either.
Speaking of the description on the back cover, I couldn’t help noticing it contained a redundancy (“…only known only…”), a verb in disagreement with its subject (“The police has…”), and a considerable lack of clarity in general. (Does “disappeared on a road” mean the missing fellow in question was last seen hitchhiking on that road, playing in the road, or traveling down the road? Also, is this cold case twenty years old, ten years old, or actually two cold cases that are respectively twenty and ten years old?) Moreover, your odd wording and awkward use of the passive voice in a description intended to make the story sound exciting (e.g. “…pulled by the evidence…” and “…a target is placed on her back…”) is making your protagonist sound like she’s a rather dull and passive participant in her own story, i.e. she mostly tends to sit around and wait for stuff to happen to her.
I’ve taken the liberty of rewriting your back cover while working under several assumptions (i.e. that the police don’t know whether this “Lily Killer” is a man or woman, that Ian disappeared while hitchhiking, and that the “strange messages” and box she received at her house are clues coming from a contact who prefers to remain anonymous feeding her inside information about the case). If I’ve gotten something wrong, feel free to correct me, but I think this description should be far more compelling to any of the few prospective readers who first encounter your story when they happen to see the back cover of a physical copy of your book. See for yourself:
Oops… dropped an “a” in that first paragraph. That should read “The killer’s calling card is a small bouquet of lilies and dill placed on each victim’s chest.”