The cover, of the meteor approaching the Chicxulub impact on Earth was my artwork. My apologies. I hope people like my writing better than my graphics.
Patrick O’Connor
Author of Sapiens Rex
(Which is indeed a group of beings with homo sapiens and t-rex characteristics combined!)
You do realize, Patrick/Joey, that nobody can see that meteor or space rock unless/until they zoom the cover–I mean a lot–right? And nobody can see what’s behind the…design…that you’ve put there. Nobody.
You’re obscuring everything–the genre, the idea, the interest…I don’t know how you expect people to find your book, I truly don’t. The point of a cover is to be clickbait–that’s it. Nothing else and honestly, you seem to be deliberately preventing your cover from doing its job.
Good point! I guess I got carried away with the cover illustration being ‘artsy” and it ended up ‘fartsy!’ I’ve been redesigning it today and will fix what’s ‘over the top’ so I don’t have any clutter on top of the approaching meteor/asteroid.
BTW, the new illustration (paperback cover already replaced) shows trailing vapors from the {slightly icy} meteor, that have been boiled-off and driven back by solar wind. I know it’s too far out to be burning off in earth’s atmosphere, really! But that adds a bit to the conclusion most folks would already draw that it’s headed for Earth-impact.
Thanks for the criticism; I needed somebody else’s viewpoint to see I’d done something silly!
the people who love to read the kind of story you’ve written will have to find it before they can read it, and your cover isn’t helping with that (which is the purpose of the cover). So…good luck with that!
Yeah. I forget when I’m looking at my screen that the thumbnail a viewer sees on a mobile phone is tiny and doesn’t show what I put all that work into, being ‘artsy.’ Oops!
And I’d love to second that suggestion. Fuggeddabout “artsy,” come on over to CC.com and let’s focus on something plebian, like “selling the book.” eh?
pro tip: check out the bestsellers of your genre–those are the books your target audience is consuming en masse. You want your book similar in tone/style to say, “Hey, this is the kind of story you love to read!”
Study the colour schemes, layouts, font styles, and image elements. Copy a best selling cover into your graphics program and make a palette from it. Look at it with the rule of thirds grid. Then do another one. How are they the same? How are they different?
If you have to do the cover yourself, it’s worth putting yourself through several hours of study..
It IS a better cover, but are you sure it’s the right cover for this story? It suggests this is an apocalyptic, end of the world story.
I’ve read your sales copy and it seems the gist of the story “for people who loved dinosaurs as a kid” is about intelligent alien-dinosaurs trying to exist in a future-earth society. A dino juxtaposed over a futuristic city setting? The problem with that, of course, is finding appropriate/affordable art work, but the art doesn’t have to faithfully reproduce exactly what your dinos look like or the society in which they find themselves, just has to sell the premise, yeah?
I’d also like to reiterate that covercritics.com is a sister site to this that allows you to post your work-in-progess covers and get constructive criticism from a number of professionals to help you refine your covers before publishing. It’s a free resource!
And me too, chiming in. I realize that you probably feel, not without reason, that depicting intelligent, sapient dinos or human-dino hybrids or mutants or whatever, might be out of budgetary reach, but you are hiding the one thing–the ONE THING–that your book has that is different. I mean, how many covers are out there, with earth on the cover and a meteor, whatever, hovering or hurtling nearby? Hundreds? Thousands?
How would anybody know that this book contains those Dino-Hybrids? You cannot expect people to come to your sales page, read the sales copy (the description), be intrigued enough to open the LITB, and then start reading and THEN SAY, “OMG, this book has sapient human-dino creatures!” They’ll never click into the sales page in the first place. That’s the point.
The human-dino hybrids, or whatever they are, ARE THE SELLING POINT. And you are simply not only not selling them, you’re outright hiding them.
You need to find an illustrator, or try something else. Try one of the AI image creators, see if you can luck out with one of those. Given some practice and effort, I’ve seen remarkable results from those. Not talking about the pseudo-human stuff; I mean the AI image generators.
Another option I’ve found to work well: Explore image portfolio sites like artstation.com, cgsociety.com, etc., and find a piece of existing art that would work well. Then message the artist and ask how much it would cost to license that artwork. Many artists will charge a lot less to license pre-existing portfolio pieces than to custom-make commissioned art.
I tried “t-rex conversing with a human in a futuristic city” in StableDiffusion Online and mostly got nightmare fuel. Dinos with three mouths, or two heads. Even this, the best of my results, has three arms, one leg, and a knee in its tail. I could just suck at AI prompts. I think it’s possibly a workable concept, tho.
Joey
1 year ago
I gave it another try. Same event from a different perspective. Any better?
Should I have included the subtitle or not?
No stock images were used in the making of this cover. Only Photoshop and MS Paint…
Okay, so….the highlight here is, it’s better. I am not being cruel when I say, that’s not hard, over the first one, which was…let’s say, oblique, eh? I do, though, really want to give you mad respect for your efforts here. Most don’t take these comments well, and exceedingly few take steps to fix their cover(s) so good on you. Well and truly.
The new layout–composition–is not great. I see why you structured the tag line the way you did–trees dark, easy to contrast text, but it’s asking too much eye movement from the prospective buyer. The weapon-holding Lizard, not so much as ain’t nobody gonna see that lizard’s paw, and ain’t nobody else gonna see that spear. That’s not working. (I do like the lizard, I mean, as a graphic, even if not for this book.)
You’re still hiding the story’s light under a bushel. SOMEHOW, someway, you need to create your MC or something like your MC. A Dino-brid (Dino-Human Hybrid) that is the star. Or something. This, right now, absent noticing the claw-holding-the-spear (and I guarantee you, it won’t be noticed, certainly not at thumbnail), all it implies is Forest-with-lizard. Not even “ancient forest with Lizard.”
Does your story have spacecraft? Space travel? FTP? Time-travel? Anything that goes with the Dinobrids? You need a Dino. Sorry, but you DO and he needs to be humanoid enough to convey the idea.
Back to the various and sundry spots that we all discussed, to see if you can find some art you can license. OR, again, try the AI places. I did an AI yesterday of an historical, 19th-century figure typing on a laptop for a book and it worked shockingly well. I’m SURE you can do it. It takes some time and practice, but it’s doable. There is Discord, Hotpot, and others. Some of the GPT-3 sites are also providing image servers, and you could try those. Talk to this guy: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XBekKR or https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xzEQEr or https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VLe9N . Now, maybe yuou don’t want a more-tooney-looking image and that’s fine, but those 3 took me 5 minutes to see. With a bit of elbow grease, you can probably find something suitable and maybe (!) affordable.
Here’s an idea: Do something that is a clear parody/takeoff of the iconic Jurassic Park logo, with a much more human-like skeleton (and a dinosaur head), holding a raygun or a smartphone or a McDonald’s bag or…
This has the advantage of getting across the main concept and the slightly humorous mood, while also being easily understood in thumbnail form.
OK, I guess the guy on the cover with the spear and its flaked obsidian point doesn’t work. I don’t grok how thumbnails look to the viewer worth a darn, do
So OK. This took a little work, but here’s George, one of the sapiens offspring, holding something other than a Clovis-style spear. That should be easier to see. And I decided to lose the subtitle. Bad idea!
One question. Most covers in the SF genre are darker, deep-space things with lots of black and blue in them. I’ve got George doing honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknown, because he has served honorably in the US Military after graduating from Georgetown (by George!) but it’s a bright, daytime, down-to-Earth image close to where George grew up at the National Zoo in DC.
Maybe it’s too far outside what SF Covers look like, but the nature of the guy in the uniform may say SF to the viewer anyway!
Any opinions? I don’t mind constructive criticism, even if it’s insulting! I grew up watching Don Rickles, after all…
Better, but the arrangement doesn’t look very intentional, and it needs more contrast to separate George from the background. And in the thumbnail, George looks more like a mudskipper than a sapient dinosaur.
Remember this: Your cover doesn’t need to illustrate an actual moment or scene from your novel. There’s no problem with it doing so, as long as that doesn’t interfere with its primary function: ATTRACTING THE INTEREST OF THE READERS WHO WOULD LIKE THE BOOK. That means that, from the thumbnail on up (since most readers are going to see it first in thumbnail size), it needs to be clear from color scheme, font, and/or clear imagery that “Hey, this is a book you’d like!” So they need to *instantly* see something that will call out to them — because if it takes a few seconds for them to discern what that cover is telling them, you’ve already lost them because there are other thumbnails to the left and the right competing for their interest.
Last edited 1 year ago by Nathan
Ian
1 year ago
I do like it when people on this site try make there own cover to improve the original one.
Joey
1 year ago
Nathan? A mudskipper is a kind of proto-amphibian halfway between a fish and a frog. If I ever write a book about Donald Trump, I may use one for a cover, but my guy is reptilian, even at thumbnail scale…
Good try at the Don Rickles aspect, though… Not sure how to make George stand out from the background more, but I’m thinking about it… Maybe tomorrow…
It’s just so gratifying to see an author comment gratefully and eagerly on here (compared to the other one we got this week, who assumed we were all perverted millennials or something).
I figure this is what all Magic Eye pictures end up looking like, so I do not waste my time squinting at them for ages.
don’t need to learn no stinkin’ Latin to name my book in Latin
Dominus Vobiscum.
Meteorum vobiscum.
Meteorum vobiscum, Indeed!
The cover, of the meteor approaching the Chicxulub impact on Earth was my artwork. My apologies. I hope people like my writing better than my graphics.
Patrick O’Connor
Author of Sapiens Rex
(Which is indeed a group of beings with homo sapiens and t-rex characteristics combined!)
You do realize, Patrick/Joey, that nobody can see that meteor or space rock unless/until they zoom the cover–I mean a lot–right? And nobody can see what’s behind the…design…that you’ve put there. Nobody.
You’re obscuring everything–the genre, the idea, the interest…I don’t know how you expect people to find your book, I truly don’t. The point of a cover is to be clickbait–that’s it. Nothing else and honestly, you seem to be deliberately preventing your cover from doing its job.
Good point! I guess I got carried away with the cover illustration being ‘artsy” and it ended up ‘fartsy!’ I’ve been redesigning it today and will fix what’s ‘over the top’ so I don’t have any clutter on top of the approaching meteor/asteroid.
BTW, the new illustration (paperback cover already replaced) shows trailing vapors from the {slightly icy} meteor, that have been boiled-off and driven back by solar wind. I know it’s too far out to be burning off in earth’s atmosphere, really! But that adds a bit to the conclusion most folks would already draw that it’s headed for Earth-impact.
Thanks for the criticism; I needed somebody else’s viewpoint to see I’d done something silly!
the people who love to read the kind of story you’ve written will have to find it before they can read it, and your cover isn’t helping with that (which is the purpose of the cover). So…good luck with that!
Yeah. I forget when I’m looking at my screen that the thumbnail a viewer sees on a mobile phone is tiny and doesn’t show what I put all that work into, being ‘artsy.’ Oops!
If you want to get some feedback before you press “publish” on the new version, see our sister site, CoverCritics.com.
And I’d love to second that suggestion. Fuggeddabout “artsy,” come on over to CC.com and let’s focus on something plebian, like “selling the book.” eh?
pro tip: check out the bestsellers of your genre–those are the books your target audience is consuming en masse. You want your book similar in tone/style to say, “Hey, this is the kind of story you love to read!”
Study the colour schemes, layouts, font styles, and image elements. Copy a best selling cover into your graphics program and make a palette from it. Look at it with the rule of thirds grid. Then do another one. How are they the same? How are they different?
If you have to do the cover yourself, it’s worth putting yourself through several hours of study..
Here’s a second try:
Much better, but rather than give you a list of tips to fine-tune this version, let me ask you:
Isn’t the fact that you have INTELLIGENT DINOSAURS the most engaging part of the novel’s concept? THAT’S what you need to lead with.
It IS a better cover, but are you sure it’s the right cover for this story? It suggests this is an apocalyptic, end of the world story.
I’ve read your sales copy and it seems the gist of the story “for people who loved dinosaurs as a kid” is about intelligent alien-dinosaurs trying to exist in a future-earth society. A dino juxtaposed over a futuristic city setting? The problem with that, of course, is finding appropriate/affordable art work, but the art doesn’t have to faithfully reproduce exactly what your dinos look like or the society in which they find themselves, just has to sell the premise, yeah?
I’d also like to reiterate that covercritics.com is a sister site to this that allows you to post your work-in-progess covers and get constructive criticism from a number of professionals to help you refine your covers before publishing. It’s a free resource!
And me too, chiming in. I realize that you probably feel, not without reason, that depicting intelligent, sapient dinos or human-dino hybrids or mutants or whatever, might be out of budgetary reach, but you are hiding the one thing–the ONE THING–that your book has that is different. I mean, how many covers are out there, with earth on the cover and a meteor, whatever, hovering or hurtling nearby? Hundreds? Thousands?
How would anybody know that this book contains those Dino-Hybrids? You cannot expect people to come to your sales page, read the sales copy (the description), be intrigued enough to open the LITB, and then start reading and THEN SAY, “OMG, this book has sapient human-dino creatures!” They’ll never click into the sales page in the first place. That’s the point.
The human-dino hybrids, or whatever they are, ARE THE SELLING POINT. And you are simply not only not selling them, you’re outright hiding them.
You need to find an illustrator, or try something else. Try one of the AI image creators, see if you can luck out with one of those. Given some practice and effort, I’ve seen remarkable results from those. Not talking about the pseudo-human stuff; I mean the AI image generators.
Another option I’ve found to work well: Explore image portfolio sites like artstation.com, cgsociety.com, etc., and find a piece of existing art that would work well. Then message the artist and ask how much it would cost to license that artwork. Many artists will charge a lot less to license pre-existing portfolio pieces than to custom-make commissioned art.
I tried “t-rex conversing with a human in a futuristic city” in StableDiffusion Online and mostly got nightmare fuel. Dinos with three mouths, or two heads. Even this, the best of my results, has three arms, one leg, and a knee in its tail. I could just suck at AI prompts. I think it’s possibly a workable concept, tho.
I gave it another try. Same event from a different perspective. Any better?
Should I have included the subtitle or not?
No stock images were used in the making of this cover. Only Photoshop and MS Paint…
Okay, so….the highlight here is, it’s better. I am not being cruel when I say, that’s not hard, over the first one, which was…let’s say, oblique, eh? I do, though, really want to give you mad respect for your efforts here. Most don’t take these comments well, and exceedingly few take steps to fix their cover(s) so good on you. Well and truly.
The new layout–composition–is not great. I see why you structured the tag line the way you did–trees dark, easy to contrast text, but it’s asking too much eye movement from the prospective buyer. The weapon-holding Lizard, not so much as ain’t nobody gonna see that lizard’s paw, and ain’t nobody else gonna see that spear. That’s not working. (I do like the lizard, I mean, as a graphic, even if not for this book.)
You’re still hiding the story’s light under a bushel. SOMEHOW, someway, you need to create your MC or something like your MC. A Dino-brid (Dino-Human Hybrid) that is the star. Or something. This, right now, absent noticing the claw-holding-the-spear (and I guarantee you, it won’t be noticed, certainly not at thumbnail), all it implies is Forest-with-lizard. Not even “ancient forest with Lizard.”
Does your story have spacecraft? Space travel? FTP? Time-travel? Anything that goes with the Dinobrids? You need a Dino. Sorry, but you DO and he needs to be humanoid enough to convey the idea.
Back to the various and sundry spots that we all discussed, to see if you can find some art you can license. OR, again, try the AI places. I did an AI yesterday of an historical, 19th-century figure typing on a laptop for a book and it worked shockingly well. I’m SURE you can do it. It takes some time and practice, but it’s doable. There is Discord, Hotpot, and others. Some of the GPT-3 sites are also providing image servers, and you could try those. Talk to this guy: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XBekKR or https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xzEQEr or https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VLe9N . Now, maybe yuou don’t want a more-tooney-looking image and that’s fine, but those 3 took me 5 minutes to see. With a bit of elbow grease, you can probably find something suitable and maybe (!) affordable.
Hope that helps.
Or this dude: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1nbBkL
Here’s an idea: Do something that is a clear parody/takeoff of the iconic Jurassic Park logo, with a much more human-like skeleton (and a dinosaur head), holding a raygun or a smartphone or a McDonald’s bag or…
This has the advantage of getting across the main concept and the slightly humorous mood, while also being easily understood in thumbnail form.
Oooooh, I like that!
Just to help: https://www.1001fonts.com/jurassic-park-fonts.html
OK, I guess the guy on the cover with the spear and its flaked obsidian point doesn’t work. I don’t grok how thumbnails look to the viewer worth a darn, do
So OK. This took a little work, but here’s George, one of the sapiens offspring, holding something other than a Clovis-style spear. That should be easier to see. And I decided to lose the subtitle. Bad idea!
One question. Most covers in the SF genre are darker, deep-space things with lots of black and blue in them. I’ve got George doing honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknown, because he has served honorably in the US Military after graduating from Georgetown (by George!) but it’s a bright, daytime, down-to-Earth image close to where George grew up at the National Zoo in DC.
Maybe it’s too far outside what SF Covers look like, but the nature of the guy in the uniform may say SF to the viewer anyway!
Any opinions? I don’t mind constructive criticism, even if it’s insulting! I grew up watching Don Rickles, after all…
Better, but the arrangement doesn’t look very intentional, and it needs more contrast to separate George from the background. And in the thumbnail, George looks more like a mudskipper than a sapient dinosaur.
Remember this: Your cover doesn’t need to illustrate an actual moment or scene from your novel. There’s no problem with it doing so, as long as that doesn’t interfere with its primary function: ATTRACTING THE INTEREST OF THE READERS WHO WOULD LIKE THE BOOK. That means that, from the thumbnail on up (since most readers are going to see it first in thumbnail size), it needs to be clear from color scheme, font, and/or clear imagery that “Hey, this is a book you’d like!” So they need to *instantly* see something that will call out to them — because if it takes a few seconds for them to discern what that cover is telling them, you’ve already lost them because there are other thumbnails to the left and the right competing for their interest.
I do like it when people on this site try make there own cover to improve the original one.
Nathan? A mudskipper is a kind of proto-amphibian halfway between a fish and a frog. If I ever write a book about Donald Trump, I may use one for a cover, but my guy is reptilian, even at thumbnail scale…
Good try at the Don Rickles aspect, though… Not sure how to make George stand out from the background more, but I’m thinking about it… Maybe tomorrow…
Methinks you are missing the point, if you want to argue about whether a mudskipper looks more like George, or not.
ETA: this really should migrate to CC.com. FWIW.
When did snarky Lousy Book Covers turn into helpful Cover Critics?
Who’s running this show anyway?
Blame Nathan. He’s getting soft in his old age. 🙂
It’s just so gratifying to see an author comment gratefully and eagerly on here (compared to the other one we got this week, who assumed we were all perverted millennials or something).
Dude–I actually agree with you. It’s a nice change.
I don’t appreciate being called a millennial.
Troo dat, but wrong guy. This isn’t the millennial guy. It was that other dude.