Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
Well, you've got two lines of important coloured text placed exactly where a dark part of the image meets a very light part. The line of the toilet bowl disrupts the eye trying to read the title and the author - I was unable to fully read either in the thumbnail, so dealing with this is essential for ebook covers especially. The contrast is all wrong with the light-ish green fighting with both black and white, and being particularly difficult to read over the white parts of the image. Either placement or colour/shade needs changing. Personally I'd try making the image a little smaller so that the text sits more fully in the darker areas of the cover, and see how that looks, if you're DIY and not very acquainted with cover design/image manipulation. I'm not a big fan of your font pairing either; I don't think the two harmonise well.
Read a few articles about typography on book covers and about common errors in book cover design, and you'll find plenty to work with.
Is the audience you're looking for the same as the audience for your other book? Was it a particularly successful work, which will add to your marketing? I'd be put off by "Author of 'Mounting the Fat Lady'", and it's visual clutter also. Also, your cover gives me no sense of what kind of book this is - is it SF? Literary? YA? There's a visual language to genre and book covers, so if your book is a certain genre it's worth considering how and whether to work with that. "The People in the Toilet" sounds like a children's book to me, but there's no way you'd put "Author of 'Mounting the Fat Lady'" on a children's book.
Do you have access to a better quality image? This one has all sorts of artifacts on the toilet seat, which I'm finding distracting.
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Thank you for your thoughts. It seems as if most of the comments here agree with you on this - about a complication of image meeting with font.
The audience is the same, in that I am looking for readers who enjoy encountering something that's a "bit off" when they read. I want them to encounter something unusual. Too, the familiar tropes one encounters in reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and/or Lin carter will be used. In fact, it's a kind of 'burlesque' on those familiar tropes.
This is a short story, so I'm not certain if that aspect should be promoted on the cover.
To clarify a bit further: The "Mounting" story I saw as literary; whereas, the current short story (for this cover I'm talking about) is more genre-based.
Thank you for your comments, which I'm paying very close attention to.
