The author says:
My Mother is told mostly in the first-person narrative and from the author’s point of view. Set mostly in St. Lucia, the memoir juxtaposes the author’s personal experience of his mom, his mother’s researched life story (and that of her relatives), and St. Lucia’s contemporary history. It dwells on the workings of a family, holds up Philomene, the heroine and protagonist of the story, for both inquiry and honoring, and draws intricate connections between the historical, cultural, psychological, and economic context and the lives of individuals and families. The book should appeal to readers of the works of Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid.
Nathan says:
The problem here is that none of the points of interest you mention in your description — the contemporary history of St. Lucia, the historical/cultural/psychological/economic context, etc. — is indicated at all on the cover, even by the text. The only appeal the cover has for potential readers is whether they happen to like that face.
Even the title — My Mother — gives the potential reader nothing to gravitate toward. After all, the reader already has a mother; why would the reader want to learn about yours?
Something screenwriters learn is that every screenplay pitch needs to include a “strange attractor” — something that the audience doesn’t see every day, that they want to know more about. Is it the setting? Is it a particular unusual episode in your mother’s life?
If your book were included side-by-side in a row of books about authors’ mothers, what would you have on your cover to make it stand out from the rest?
I agree with Nathan. The title is “My Mother” and, well, there she is. It’s a very nice portrait, but the cover really doesn’t convey and sense of the sort of things you describe.
Indeed, when I first saw this in thumbnail, I thought it was probably a personal biography intended exclusively for the family (and maybe some family friends) of said mother; no self-publishing platform has any rule requiring books to be published for the author’s profit (as long as the platform gets paid). For that kind of personal family heirloom in literary form, a crude (and obviously hand-drawn) portrait such as this would be quite appropriate. If you’re looking to sell to a broader audience (i.e to complete strangers who’ve never heard of your mother and her family and have no idea what’s so special about her or anybody she’s known) for profit as stated, however, you’ll need a “hook”—some kind of broader appeal—to reach that more commercial target audience.
For broader public consumption, I recommend using—at the very least—an actual photograph and a catchier title; a “strange attractor” as our esteemed host puts it. Obviously, if you’re writing about your mother, you have many vivid memories—good, bad, and indifferent—of ways she impacted your life and made you whatever kind of person you are today; she’s doubtless very special to you. The question your cover needs to answer is “What’s (potentially) so special about your mother to other people?”
In fact, even before picking out a photograph for your cover (to emphasize that yeah, this is a true story about a real person), you need to think of a better title. Unless you happen to have an unusually immediately recognizable name (e.g. if your byline happened to be “Jeffrey Dahmer”), using a title as bland and generic as My Mother is about as compelling to prospective readers as beginning an autobiography with “I was born on [date].” Again, the first thing your prospective readers need to know is what’s so special about your mother; even something decidedly negative like My Mother, The Whore would bring your book more attention (and sales).
So what particularly memorable (and potentially intriguing) things did your mother do? Even if it was something a lot of other people’s mothers probably did too (e.g. she raised lots of children on not very much income back in the 1950s), at least writing about that in your title would tell prospective readers what’s so special about her to you, which might be interesting to them too. Case in point: Deb Mulvey’s book We Had Everything But Money is basically an otherwise unremarkable gal’s autobiography about growing up in an otherwise unremarkable family during the (very remarkable) Great Depression; sure, a lot of other unremarkable people grew up in unremarkable families during the Great Depression, but did they write a book about having “everything but money” doing so? (I think NOT!)
As such, you likewise should latch onto something memorable and unique about your mother when writing a title; even something vague and generic like Skinned Knees & Home Remedies or She IS TOO My Mommy! or The Most Beautiful Face (To Me) or And She Was There can be intriguing as long as it points to something specific. Tell us (in not so many words) why there was something special about her family, or spending most of her life in St. Lucia, or having the given name of Philomene (not a very common given name, admittedly), or… anything really. Even if you can’t fit everything in a concise title, a sub-title or tagline (such as the aforementioned We Had Everything But Money, which had both) can generally clarify more of the specifics once you’ve got a prospective reader’s attention.
Beyond that, what kind of picture of your mother you include on the cover can speak volumes: a black-and-white photograph, for instance, would suggest she grew up earlier in the twentieth century when most people couldn’t afford color photography; a grainy and slightly over-saturated photograph from a cheap home camera would point to an era from the 1960s to the early 1990s; and a digitally enhanced color photograph would point to the Information Age and beyond (i.e. up to the present). In addition, whether the photograph is an amateur “selfie” or glossy professional shot taken in a studio would say a lot about her (specifically how hard she was trying to look her best for the picture), as would her hairstyle and what kind of clothing she’s wearing (more clues to the time and place she grew up). Finally—and most importantly—it can help to enhance or contrast with something in your title, e.g. while your mother doesn’t look conventionally attractive to me in the sketch you’ve provided on this cover draft, it’s well known that children usually consider their own parents to be the most beautiful people they know while they’re growing up since their own parents’ appearances are what’s most familiar to them; so if you mention something about her being beautiful in the title, the picture will indicate to prospective readers that you mean she’s specifically beautiful in your eyes.
On a final note: not to be rude, but I’ve never heard of any of your other books mentioned in your blurb at the bottom of your cover (though Death By Fire sounds a bit intriguing), nor of these “M&C” and “CDF” awards you say you’ve won. As such, mentioning them won’t help your book’s sales and the latter may actually detract from them; vanity awards in particular (which are tagged four of five dentists agree over on Lousy Book Covers) are a transparent form of self-flattery that signals only the desperation and/or egotism of a rank amateur among self-published authors. As such, I advise that you lose the blurb altogether and focus on selling your book on its own merits, which should be quite sufficient by themselves.