The problem with Papyrus, Tom, isn’t that it’s too “non-mainstream,” but that it’s TOO mainstream — it’s a marginally useful font with huge kerning issues (as you can see above on the “E” in “Ember” and the “T” in “Tom”) that every dang amateur who’s ever designed a baby shower invitation thinks, “Oh, THAT’LL look classy!”
I agree with that statement and my wife hates my typography. Ironically, she is a professional Graphic Designer. I was stubborn and made my own cover. She complained about my type all of the way.
I designed the cover nearly 10 years ago and used Papyrus in the original designs. So, it’s not Avatar inspired (Avatar isn’t Papyrus, anyway).
I’m an advocate of freedom of speech, which includes positive and negative. Having the link to my book on Amazon is a nice gesture. I suspect I will get increased sales, even given the criticism. lol
For the record, you might even enjoy the book.
As for the tag “pseudohumans”, I think Ember looks better than most of those other Poser/DAZStudio-looking book covers you see. I used the highest quality model and textures and significant pre/post editing. She rendered at 4000x4000PX at 300DPI
The rendering quality is not the issue. She has the blank stare of death that we see so often on Poser/Daz Studio models. Is she happy? Sad? Scared? Alive?
I love the cover
It is what attracted me to the book in the first place
Are we going to see a sequel to Ember of the New World
Keep up the great writing
Thanks
Helen
I am working on the sequel, even now! The book has gotten some good reviews, so a sequel is needed. When I publish I will be hiring an illustrator to make me a cover for both books and reissuing the first book as a second edition. After all of that proofing people have still found a few spelling errors lol
Also, I will add a little more side information about the characters (no changes to the story, of course).
I have been considering going to a publisher instead of self publishing… we shall see.
Thanks for the comment! 🙂
Karl
9 years ago
“I agree with that statement and my wife hates my typography. Ironically, she is a professional Graphic Designer.”
Oi. Kudos to your wife for her patience, and a dope-slap to you for not taking advantage of the expertise under your own roof!
She is designing the next covers for our up-and-coming six book series. My wife was going through a bad time due to several unfortunate events in life, so I didn’t want to pressure her into making my cover. She would have done it, but she didn’t need to strain. She’s a perfectionist (her university is 4th best in the nation for graphic design, so they sort of made her that way lol).
Still, you might find the book quite nice. It’s under $5 on Amazon as an eBook and around $20 as a full book.
On a side note, the image posted to this site is too wide. The actual cover is more narrow. This deforms Ember’s face 🙁
I think this might have been an issue with the distributor and how they posted my image. I have found it like this in ads all over the net. No big deal, just annoying.
The Amazon Kindle cover is squished vertically. At Lulu, the paperback cover of Ember of a New World is properly proportioned and does look better.
I still wanted to kern the “Ember” and “To” properly and broke down and used cut’n’paste in a paint program to get it out of my system.
Waffles
9 years ago
As far a psuedohumans go, she is a good step up from what we are used to, that is for sure.
I would suggest that the facepaint looks burnt onto the image, rather than something she is wearing. A bit of colour, randomness, and depth to that black and it could look really good.
I must correct you though: The movie Avatar did famously use Papyrus font, much to the criticism of graphic designers and critics everywhere. Your wife is right, as is Nathan, Papyrus is a terrible choice in font for anything because of what people as a collective species have done to it. I have said this before and will again whenever I see it: There is absolutely nothing that cannot be made worse by using P apyrus font.
If your wife is a graphic designer you really have no excuse for the layout of this cover. Make her a nice dinner, tell her she was right, and ask her to fix this up. You have a perfectly serviceable cover hidden here under your stubborness.
Like I said before, she is having a terrible time with a family event that happened (her family). I am not going to trouble her with my book.
She will build beautiful covers for our new books and is 100% in charge of that. For me, I’ll stick with the writing.
Naaman Brown
9 years ago
Does Papyrus even have kerning values for character pairs?
In my computer typesetting experience in the 1970s for the VideoComp, the fonts had no kerning pairs. But for heads and titles, the formatting language had a backspace tag for “manual” kerning if needed.
If ’twere me today, I would modify Papyrus with proper kerning pair definitions and call it Platypus. No excuse in today’s font technology for not having reasonable kerning, especially for Papyrus “E”.
I actually agree with Tom that Ember here looks better than most 3D models I’ve seen on book covers. The problem here is that it’s still a 3D model. This kind of thing on book covers just doesn’t seem right to me, for some reason, and this cover really isn’t changing my mind on such matters.
Of course, the bigger problem is that this cover gives me no idea as to the book’s genre or contents. I can gather that it’s about a girl called Ember, but other than that…well, yeah.
RK
9 years ago
The point isn’t that there’s anything “ugly” about the font or the computer-generated woman, or that these have anything to do with Avatar. The point is that just as the use of Papyrus font in Avatar (among so many other things) betrayed a certain laziness and lack of imagination in its designers, so too does this book cover reveal its designer to be awfully amateurish.
Sometimes, as demonstrated by the box office revenues for that crappy propaganda movie Avatar, Hollywood’s famous people can get away with being amateurish, lazy, and unimaginative. The rest of us can’t.
Catie
9 years ago
Don’t dismiss 3D art just because people who are not 3D artists misuse it. I bet none of you would mind if this guy’s pseudohumans were on your cover: http://www.cgmeetup.net/forums/gallery/album/997-my-portfolio/
Although, I doubt any of us could afford him 🙁
Notice what makes his computer-generated humans better looking, however: their textures are 3D just like the real thing, their hair looks and is placed just like the real thing… For all practical purposes, they’re exactly like the real thing. For as much money as he’s probably charging, it would be more cost-effective just to hire and photograph some professional models for your cover.
For that matter, I could see a situation in which pseudo-humans on a cover would be good: specifically, if you were doing a video game novelization the way F.X. Nine did, or something related to video games. In that case, you’d want the people on your cover to look artificial, something like the characters in the game. It could also be a kind of stylized choice of art for storytelling, like the “machinmas” one sees on YouTube.
A cover with wholly artificial people and a simulated background on it could also be a clever foreshadowing if you wanted to tell a story in which the big twist at the end is the characters finding out they all live in some kind of virtual simulation. (No wonder they don’t look real: they’re not!) In every case, though, this has to be fairly obviously a deliberate choice, not just “I wanted some oddly dressed people with pointy ears for my fantasy novel’s cover, and was too cheap/lazy to go find some good-looking cosplayers at some nerdy convention to pose for me.”
I know you folks hate CGI people, but I am glad to see that you find mine better than the average. Most CGI people you see are… strange looking lol
I used to be a photographer years ago and posing 3D people is very similar, in many ways. I also either use extremely high quality textures and objects or make my own. I render on maximum settings using a special graphical system.
What do you mean by, “For as much money as he’s probably charging”? I have made very little off of my book, though it gets nothing but good reviews from the few who have bought it.
A real model would have been a trouble as the look of modern Europeans is not what it was in early Neolithic Europe. A model would have been costly and she would either have needed a harsh fake tan or some photoshopping. 🙁
I agree with you on video game sort of use for a CGI person cover, by the way. That would be neat.
No, I don’t presume you made much money from your book. I was talking specifically about the CGI person maker at Catie’s link: he’s amazing, but if you could afford that guy’s talents, it would still probably be cheaper and more cost-effective just to pose and photograph real people.
![cover[1]](https://lousybookcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/cover112.jpg)
“Papyrus! Um… I mean… Avatar“
Damn, honey, that’s a really serious case of blackheads. Time to buy some Clearasil!
The “Blackheads” are paint (she’s from a tribal society in early Neolithic Europe).
As for Papyrus, it is a beautiful font. It clashes with most mainstream typography, but mainstream is for those inside of the box.
The problem with Papyrus, Tom, isn’t that it’s too “non-mainstream,” but that it’s TOO mainstream — it’s a marginally useful font with huge kerning issues (as you can see above on the “E” in “Ember” and the “T” in “Tom”) that every dang amateur who’s ever designed a baby shower invitation thinks, “Oh, THAT’LL look classy!”
I agree with that statement and my wife hates my typography. Ironically, she is a professional Graphic Designer. I was stubborn and made my own cover. She complained about my type all of the way.
I designed the cover nearly 10 years ago and used Papyrus in the original designs. So, it’s not Avatar inspired (Avatar isn’t Papyrus, anyway).
I’m an advocate of freedom of speech, which includes positive and negative. Having the link to my book on Amazon is a nice gesture. I suspect I will get increased sales, even given the criticism. lol
For the record, you might even enjoy the book.
As for the tag “pseudohumans”, I think Ember looks better than most of those other Poser/DAZStudio-looking book covers you see. I used the highest quality model and textures and significant pre/post editing. She rendered at 4000x4000PX at 300DPI
The rendering quality is not the issue. She has the blank stare of death that we see so often on Poser/Daz Studio models. Is she happy? Sad? Scared? Alive?
The hair, even though it’s rendered quite well on its own, on the head looks like a wig that hadn’t sat right.
Yeah, I agree that the rendering is actually quite good, because we’ve seen a flood of awful. But her stare is indeed vacant.
And I don’t mind the hair. Compared to the plastic hair we’ve seen, even if some think this looks like a wig, it’s still an improvement.
But I guess it goes to show that even a finely rendered pseudohuman is still a pseudohuman.
I love the cover
It is what attracted me to the book in the first place
Are we going to see a sequel to Ember of the New World
Keep up the great writing
Thanks
Helen
Thanks!
I am working on the sequel, even now! The book has gotten some good reviews, so a sequel is needed. When I publish I will be hiring an illustrator to make me a cover for both books and reissuing the first book as a second edition. After all of that proofing people have still found a few spelling errors lol
Also, I will add a little more side information about the characters (no changes to the story, of course).
I have been considering going to a publisher instead of self publishing… we shall see.
Thanks for the comment! 🙂
“I agree with that statement and my wife hates my typography. Ironically, she is a professional Graphic Designer.”
Oi. Kudos to your wife for her patience, and a dope-slap to you for not taking advantage of the expertise under your own roof!
She is designing the next covers for our up-and-coming six book series. My wife was going through a bad time due to several unfortunate events in life, so I didn’t want to pressure her into making my cover. She would have done it, but she didn’t need to strain. She’s a perfectionist (her university is 4th best in the nation for graphic design, so they sort of made her that way lol).
Still, you might find the book quite nice. It’s under $5 on Amazon as an eBook and around $20 as a full book.
On a side note, the image posted to this site is too wide. The actual cover is more narrow. This deforms Ember’s face 🙁
Here’s the actual cover in correct ratio: http://emberofanewworld.com/book.png
I think this might have been an issue with the distributor and how they posted my image. I have found it like this in ads all over the net. No big deal, just annoying.
The Amazon Kindle cover is squished vertically. At Lulu, the paperback cover of Ember of a New World is properly proportioned and does look better.
I still wanted to kern the “Ember” and “To” properly and broke down and used cut’n’paste in a paint program to get it out of my system.
As far a psuedohumans go, she is a good step up from what we are used to, that is for sure.
I would suggest that the facepaint looks burnt onto the image, rather than something she is wearing. A bit of colour, randomness, and depth to that black and it could look really good.
I must correct you though: The movie Avatar did famously use Papyrus font, much to the criticism of graphic designers and critics everywhere. Your wife is right, as is Nathan, Papyrus is a terrible choice in font for anything because of what people as a collective species have done to it. I have said this before and will again whenever I see it: There is absolutely nothing that cannot be made worse by using P apyrus font.
If your wife is a graphic designer you really have no excuse for the layout of this cover. Make her a nice dinner, tell her she was right, and ask her to fix this up. You have a perfectly serviceable cover hidden here under your stubborness.
Like I said before, she is having a terrible time with a family event that happened (her family). I am not going to trouble her with my book.
She will build beautiful covers for our new books and is 100% in charge of that. For me, I’ll stick with the writing.
Does Papyrus even have kerning values for character pairs?
In my computer typesetting experience in the 1970s for the VideoComp, the fonts had no kerning pairs. But for heads and titles, the formatting language had a backspace tag for “manual” kerning if needed.
If ’twere me today, I would modify Papyrus with proper kerning pair definitions and call it Platypus. No excuse in today’s font technology for not having reasonable kerning, especially for Papyrus “E”.
Papyrus looked interesting first time I saw it, then it was over used like a fad til it got tiresome. Plus the nonexistent kern pairs.
I actually agree with Tom that Ember here looks better than most 3D models I’ve seen on book covers. The problem here is that it’s still a 3D model. This kind of thing on book covers just doesn’t seem right to me, for some reason, and this cover really isn’t changing my mind on such matters.
Of course, the bigger problem is that this cover gives me no idea as to the book’s genre or contents. I can gather that it’s about a girl called Ember, but other than that…well, yeah.
The point isn’t that there’s anything “ugly” about the font or the computer-generated woman, or that these have anything to do with Avatar. The point is that just as the use of Papyrus font in Avatar (among so many other things) betrayed a certain laziness and lack of imagination in its designers, so too does this book cover reveal its designer to be awfully amateurish.
Sometimes, as demonstrated by the box office revenues for that crappy propaganda movie Avatar, Hollywood’s famous people can get away with being amateurish, lazy, and unimaginative. The rest of us can’t.
Don’t dismiss 3D art just because people who are not 3D artists misuse it. I bet none of you would mind if this guy’s pseudohumans were on your cover:
http://www.cgmeetup.net/forums/gallery/album/997-my-portfolio/
Although, I doubt any of us could afford him 🙁
Notice what makes his computer-generated humans better looking, however: their textures are 3D just like the real thing, their hair looks and is placed just like the real thing… For all practical purposes, they’re exactly like the real thing. For as much money as he’s probably charging, it would be more cost-effective just to hire and photograph some professional models for your cover.
For that matter, I could see a situation in which pseudo-humans on a cover would be good: specifically, if you were doing a video game novelization the way F.X. Nine did, or something related to video games. In that case, you’d want the people on your cover to look artificial, something like the characters in the game. It could also be a kind of stylized choice of art for storytelling, like the “machinmas” one sees on YouTube.
A cover with wholly artificial people and a simulated background on it could also be a clever foreshadowing if you wanted to tell a story in which the big twist at the end is the characters finding out they all live in some kind of virtual simulation. (No wonder they don’t look real: they’re not!) In every case, though, this has to be fairly obviously a deliberate choice, not just “I wanted some oddly dressed people with pointy ears for my fantasy novel’s cover, and was too cheap/lazy to go find some good-looking cosplayers at some nerdy convention to pose for me.”
I know you folks hate CGI people, but I am glad to see that you find mine better than the average. Most CGI people you see are… strange looking lol
I used to be a photographer years ago and posing 3D people is very similar, in many ways. I also either use extremely high quality textures and objects or make my own. I render on maximum settings using a special graphical system.
What do you mean by, “For as much money as he’s probably charging”? I have made very little off of my book, though it gets nothing but good reviews from the few who have bought it.
A real model would have been a trouble as the look of modern Europeans is not what it was in early Neolithic Europe. A model would have been costly and she would either have needed a harsh fake tan or some photoshopping. 🙁
I agree with you on video game sort of use for a CGI person cover, by the way. That would be neat.
No, I don’t presume you made much money from your book. I was talking specifically about the CGI person maker at Catie’s link: he’s amazing, but if you could afford that guy’s talents, it would still probably be cheaper and more cost-effective just to pose and photograph real people.
Wow, Catie. I had no idea.