The author says:
An assassin is a kidnapped girl’s only hope…
Former CIA assassin Thomas Caine was burned, betrayed, and left for dead. Now he struggles to stay off the grid, and hides from his dark past in the seedy underworld of Pattaya, Thailand. But when human traffickers target a woman Caine swore to protect, the vengeful assassin wages a bloody one-man war to get her back. He soon finds himself taking on the Russian mafia, and an insane criminal warlord who claims to be the devil himself. For years Caine has kept his killer instincts locked inside. Now, they’re about to be unleashed. And his enemies have no idea what’s coming for them…
“Fast, hard-hitting, and deftly-plotted… a must-read for fans of Mark Greaney and Barry Eisler.” — The Real Book Spy
The bestselling Thomas Caine thriller series starts here, with this action-packed novella.
Nathan says:
It solidly hits all the bases for its genre. Two comments, though:
- If it’s set in Thailand, why is all the signage in Chinese, and China Town-related?
- This is a peeve carried over from Lousy Book Covers: If you’re bestselling by a specific standard — NYT, USA Today, Amazon, etc. — say that. The vague “International Bestselling Author” seems too much like blowing smoke.
Other comments?
Uh, yeah: what our esteemed host said. I could believe the signs in Mandarin Chinese if this story were taking place in Taiwan (although the parts in English wouldn’t mention anything about “China Town” since no Taiwanese city has any such section any more than any American city has a “Britain Town” section), but Thailand is a decidedly different place with its own distinct language which has its own distinct written (and printed) alphabet; so either you’re thinking of Taiwan rather than Thailand, or you need to correct the imagery on the cover to make it look like it’s somewhere in Thailand. As for the “International Bestselling Author” boast, that could simply mean (and will more than likely be assumed to mean) “It sells pretty well with my friends and family, who live in more than one nation” if you aren’t willing to tell us exactly who says you’re an international bestselling author.
I should probably also mention that while nothing about the imagery specifically says there’s anything supernatural or foreign-to-this-temporal-sphere about the story, the pink-and-purple color washes on this cover draft would tend to suggest the story includes something magical or at least not-entirely-scientific to it. If you want to make it look more like it’s set in some gritty urban part of Thailand in a world exactly like our own except where otherwise stated, you should go with more of a green-and-gold color wash particularly common to pictures of Pattaya’s urban landscape (pink-and-purple neon lights are mostly exclusive to the English-speaking tourist district, not the seedier parts of the city), and then tinge all the darker parts of the picture with a deep ruby red to hint at this being the “red light” district, i.e. a place where underworld activities (including—but by no means limited to—prostitution) typically take place. Bottom line: get your location and color scheme right with the kind of imagery you’ve got on your cover now, and the rest of the cover should more or less take care of itself.
I mean…Bangkok’s Chinatown is one of the largest in the world. This image does look to be text-generated, though, which may explain the lack of Thai script.
Agree that the pink and blue glow doesn’t set the right tone and that “international best selling author” sounds fake.
In my experience, A.I. text-generated imagery typically isn’t very good at producing any kind of lettering, let alone Thai. For instance, I just fed my ideas for what should be on this cover into DeepAI, and well… it did give me something like the urban imagery I had in mind (though the color wash was more red-and-blue; maybe I shouldn’t have used the “Dystopian Cyberpunk” setting), but I’m pretty sure all the lettering on the signs in it is utter gibberish.
That’s a good point, text generated images do suck at lettering even when you explicitly tell it what lettering you want. I think we agree that the image is of *a* Chinatown, somewhere possibly but probably not Thailand and definitely not Pattaya, which is the only setting mentioned.
I clicked your link but it just led me to a tiny square, disappointingly.
Eh… Worked well enough yesterday even after I closed the browser and reopened it, but today the link’s giving me a “cannot be displayed because it contains errors” statement. I guess unlike some of these generators, DeepAI doesn’t hang onto every image it generates and keep newer images from overwriting it.
Avoid the self aggrandizing. No one takes it seriously.
Also, if that was Pattaya there would be 49,000 people on that street. The only areas that would be empty would be very bland and uninteresting.