A couple of laudable improvements here, as well as a couple of… Well, let’s just focus on those improvements.
  |
  |
  |
  |
  |
  |
  |
  |
  |
  |
A couple of laudable improvements here, as well as a couple of… Well, let’s just focus on those improvements.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Again, I thought almost all of them were improvements, but “better” doesn’t mean “good” or even “acceptable.”
And to the author of Brunette: If your murder mystery is actually entertaining and suspenseful, I’ll know by virtue of being entertained and in suspense. Insisting that it’s those things on the cover just makes me think that the author doth protest too much.
Not only that, I kinda *expect* that a mystery novel offered for sale should be entertaining and suspenseful. Telling me on the cover “meets baseline expectations” is not much of a hook.
It also kinda reeks of desperation and review-fishing, i.e. “These are the descriptions I’d like you to give of my book in your review of it.” As I once pointed out concerning Gary L.M. Martin’s disappointment with all of his fellow scifi/fantasy writers, if you believe your book has certain qualities you’d like reviewers to emphasize in their reviews (such as being gleefully politically incorrect and therefore offensive and transgressive to Karens and SJWs and other politically correct busybodies as Martin kept claiming his books were in his summaries on their sales pages), you really shouldn’t have to tell anybody about them. If it actually has those qualities, the reviewers will state as much in their reviews on their own volition.
It reeks to me of “I don’t have a review quote, so I’ll just put this here and it kind of looks like a review quote.”
And what kind of murder mystery isn’t full of suspense? Is that a new category of Cozy–the Dozy?
About the only kind of murder mystery I can imagine possibly working without any suspense would be a bizarre genre parody which begins and ends with “I never figured out who the killer was” and recounts a story of a futile investigation in which the (mentally deficient) detective protagonist fails to notice a bunch of hilariously obvious clues that the victim’s butler is in fact the murderer. What would keep the reader interested, instead of wondering who the murderer is or whether the detective will catch him would be repeatedly thinking “Dude, it’s obviously the butler! He did it! How can you not see that!?”
Yes, like some of the sendup movies that they’ve done. That’s my new category of murder mystery–the Dozy. (Perhaps the Drowsy?). I’ll retain the use of that for reviews in which I’m under-captivated. LOL.
These are getting worse day by day! The first set, they were pretty much all improved (to some degree). This time round, it’s hard to tell which version is which.
Note to authors/artists: “different” doesn’t necessarily mean “improved”.
The old cover of “Brunette” gave me de javu of “The Ring” so the new is a bit better.