The author says:

The supreme Celtic goddess of war awakes in modern times and brings magic back with her.

Nathan says:

You get extra points for polydactylism, but…

Is this supposed to be comedic? The title, coupled with the font choice, seem to indicate it, but the imagery doesn’t reinforce it.

The compositing of the various images needs work.  The light source on the model is very different in both direction and color than the light coming from the moon, and the glow coming from his six-fingered hand is strangely confined to the hand itself, not showing up on his wrist or anything.

It was only after several looks that I realized that the female silhouette is in the center of the moon; before that, it was just oddly close to the male figure, leaving the right side of the cover empty and unbalanced.

I’m not sure if it’s better to tweak it or to come up with a new cover idea entirely.

Comments?

The author says:

In the early 1980s, four people in central Missouri are haunted by the past.

Ngo, a writer of children’s books, is crippled from a wound received in Vietnam. His writing makes him come to terms with the loss of his country, as does letters he writes to Nguyen, an old friend who betrayed him.

Ngo’s best friend is Judith Vogel, a teacher who can’t forget the oppression she saw in Guatemala. This leads her to befriend Concepcion, a girl from that country who is in Missouri to study music. Concepcion rebuffs Judith’s efforts and throws herself into her music…which helps fight off nightmares she has about Guatemala. Judith loses herself visiting an abandoned cemetery, many of whose graves are those of German settlers massacred by Confederate guerrillas in the last months of the Civil War.

Jonathan Amesbury runs a small-town newspaper while he decides whether to return to London or save his family’s ancestral mansion. He wants to find out Concepcion’s secret, and joins forces with a reluctant Judith. Will this be the big story he sought, or will their haunted pasts overwhelm him?

(genre: literary fiction with a mystery, but not a mystery category)

Nathan says:

It’s really hard to tell if the cover captures the feel of the book, because the description doesn’t even capture the feel, or *a* feel; it’s all over the place, with no real theme or storyline to latch onto.  Welcome to lit-fic!

I think the biggest mistake here is the bloody lettering. That kind of thing promises a story of menace and violence, which definitely isn’t what the description promises.

The second design problem is the way that the window frame in the upper image interacts with the cover’s border — it almost-but-not-quite-but-almost runs parallel, just enough to set my teeth on edge.  It’s like a flat note.  At the very least, zoom the image in and shift it slightly so the window frame disappears on the right, so the figure doesn’t seem captured by conflicting double-frames.

Beyond that… I dunno.  The cover seems to say it’s a violent story about a piano player and corn. Even if that were true (which doesn’t seem to be the case), I have no idea how you’d market that.

Other comments?

The author says:

Tatum Rolf knew there were things about her life that just weren’t right. It wasn’t right living in the human world as a wolf shifter. It wasn’t right to be the female head of a male household. And it certainly wasn’t right that she was taller than most of her male peers. Sure, she could provide protection, education, and a livelihood for her two brothers and great-grandfather, but she couldn’t offer them a traditional shifter life. The only solution? Find a pack that would accept them all. And when the entire shifter race is threatened, she’ll need to use all her strength and wiles to ensure their survival and prove to the male-dominated world just how important she is.

Nathan says:

I appreciate the efforts to harmonize the individually sourced figures into a coherent image.  I think there are still spots where the different light sources are jarring — the left male figure’s face is a lot brighter than the others, and the right male figure’s right arm is so bright that it undermines the foreground female figure’s arm and gun, which is a more important detail.

By biggest complaint, though, is that in the thumbnail, all wolfish details to the cover are lost. Simply making the foreground brighter for contrast would go a long way.

Other comments?