The author says:
It is set in a mysterious town, guarded by a dragon. It is fantasy romance. The targeted audience is both male and female.
Nathan says:
The art’s great. However:
- Unless this is an audiobook release, don’t make it square.
- Your text is scrunching up against the woman’s face, and you’ve completely hidden the dragon.
- Don’t capitalize “Of.”
- Using an internet handle instead of a name makes this seem like a dashed-off messageboard posting, not a for-real novel.
- Nobody cares who edited a novel, especially if it’s yourself.
- No colon in the byline.
As good as the art is, unless there’s room in the original uncropped artwork to move text off of and away from the most important parts of the image, you need different artwork.
Other comments?
The idea is nice enough, it just needs some fine-tuning. In no special order: Do not place so much emphasis on “of”, at the very least don’t capitalize it. Close up the line spacing in the title. Delete “written and edited by”—that screams “self-published.” Don’t put your name on the cover twice. Watch the alignment of the tagline with the girl: the lines look like they are coming out of her face. And, finally, the art looks very AI-generated.
Other than that (slightly) intriguing tagline, the cover and the pitch both seem entirely generic, so my advice for the cover will be entirely generic too.
1. As our esteemed host says, square covers are pretty much only for audio stuff like music albums and audio books. Rectangular covers that are wider than they are tall are for picture books (which are usually children’s books, but occasionally also used for grownup professional photographers’ collections). Rectangular books taller than they are wide are for pretty much everything else, with 2:3 being a good ratio for physical books and 5:8 or 9:16 being well-suited to electronic books likely to be displayed on people’s phones and tablets; if this is a printed novel for grownups (physical or electronic), you should go with this third kind of cover.
2. The title(s) should go at the top and byline at the bottom, or vice versa. Taglines can sometimes go in the middle, but are best placed somewhere they don’t cover up anything important on the cover image. On most romance novels, this location is usually somewhere up near the title or down by the byline.
3. Yes, whenever you’re using “of” in a title, it should never be capitalized unless it’s the first word (e.g. Of Mice & Men). I should also add that while the A Song of Ice & Fire series and its television adaptation Game of Thrones popularized making everything in fantasy novels and their titles a “thing of nouns” (as Honest Trailers ever so aptly put it), titles in which “The X of Y” refers to X as something Y possesses or generates (what’s known as the “genitive case” in Greek and Latin and other ancient languages) are needlessly using a rather passive voice to make this connection, which makes the connected words seem a bit boring. Changing the title to the more active-sounding “Willowbrook’s Whispering Secrets” would make those words sound a little more exciting and make the title a little more concise (and that much easier to place on the cover) too.
4. Speaking of boring things, the title font’s a bit boring too. Hitch is more or less our resident expert on lettering here, but I will say something with a little more weight to it (i.e. thicker) that looks like some style of ye olde medieval calligraphy would probably suit the cover better for a classic dragons-and-princesses fantasy novel like this one.
5. Yes, an obvious alias like “Rare Emerald” does make you sound a bit like an amateur writer of fan fiction; which might actually increase the potential appeal of this book to avid fan fiction readers, but will probably decrease its appeal for everyone else. Bearing in mind that fan fiction readers usually aren’t too fond of paying for their reading material, you might want to use something that sounds more like a real name. Note that when she took her Fifty Shades of Grey story mainstream, the author formerly known by her handle “Snowqueens Icedragon” used the pen name “E.L. James” for her byline; which still isn’t her actual name (Erika Mitchell), but (just like C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin) sounds like it could be, right? Go thou and do likewise.
6. Unless you’re doing an anthology or compilation of several authors’ works (which your book clearly is not), then as our esteemed host says, nobody cares who the editor is. Besides, you only need one byline for your book, and that’s the one you’ve already got at the bottom. Moreover, that byline should be a lot bigger so that (A) it’ll be legible in the thumbnail and (B) you won’t look like you’re ashamed of your work; hey, let your prospective readers know you’re proud of having written this entire original novel, which is probably more than most of your online colleagues have ever done.
7. While I can understand you’re trying to snag some of those Game of Thrones fans with your fantasy romance (specifically the ones who’d like to see less bloodshed and disturbing imagery and more sweet LUVIN’ in their fantasy novels and shows, along with a more satisfying ending to the story), I’d recommend finding a fair-haired model for your cover who doesn’t look like a dead ringer for Dragon Queen Daenerys Targaryen in her traveling clothes if you want to avoid potential legal trouble. (I’ve never even watched Game of Thrones, just the Honest Trailers for it, but I can see the resemblance; so imagine how easy it would be for HBO’s lawyers to spot the similarities…)
Here’s my five-minute cover mock-up demonstrating my points. The image is by DeepAI, the lettering and resizing courtesy of my laptop’s rather limited font library and old (but good!) image editing program. The princess/warrior gal’s feathery hair makes me think the image looks a lot like a fantasy movie poster from back in the eighties, but at least no one would mistake her for a Game of Thrones character, right?