My first response is to kick that guy in the stomach. My second is to puke.
RK@HM
8 months ago
By the look of things, your reaction was pretty much the intended one; so, um… congratulations to the designer, I guess? According to the summary (written in slightly fractured English) at Amazon, however, this is a fictional story about a chaste-living gal somewhere in Africa who doesn’t realize she’s lost her virginity until she and her new bridegroom discover it already to be missing on her wedding night; i.e. she literally didn’t know she’d been raped before then. One would think if the picture on the cover were an accurate portrayal of what happened to her, she’d have been well aware of it once she woke up.
This would be an interesting piece to discuss on Cover Critics: what should the cover designer have done with the cover instead of this?
I agree. I love the cover but the centre image feels out of place. Something visceral or that causes an emotional reaction instead would be good there. Something to symbolize surprise? Or sadness? Loss? Maybe all three?
Oh, it’s quite visceral and brings a very strong emotional reaction; just not the one the author’s trying to provoke in the story itself. Our reaction to this cover is to the rapist: “Ick! Dude, she’s in a coma!” Our reaction to the story is supposed to be to the victim: “Poor girl! She thought she was a virgin right up until the night she and her bridegroom discovered she wasn’t.”
Also, as a rule, cover images really ought to fill the entire cover as much as possible. While some covers do get away with putting landscape-orientation pictures in the middle and filling the dead space on the top and bottom with some kind of gradient or texturing and the title and byline, using a high-resolution portrait-oriented image to fill the entire cover is usually the more effective method for this kind of novel. Again, though, I’d like to see what our colleagues over on Cover Critics would recommend for this particular book.
Zsuzsa
8 months ago
However much ick it gives you, it isn’t nearly enough!
My first response is to kick that guy in the stomach. My second is to puke.
By the look of things, your reaction was pretty much the intended one; so, um… congratulations to the designer, I guess? According to the summary (written in slightly fractured English) at Amazon, however, this is a fictional story about a chaste-living gal somewhere in Africa who doesn’t realize she’s lost her virginity until she and her new bridegroom discover it already to be missing on her wedding night; i.e. she literally didn’t know she’d been raped before then. One would think if the picture on the cover were an accurate portrayal of what happened to her, she’d have been well aware of it once she woke up.
This would be an interesting piece to discuss on Cover Critics: what should the cover designer have done with the cover instead of this?
I agree. I love the cover but the centre image feels out of place. Something visceral or that causes an emotional reaction instead would be good there. Something to symbolize surprise? Or sadness? Loss? Maybe all three?
Oh, it’s quite visceral and brings a very strong emotional reaction; just not the one the author’s trying to provoke in the story itself. Our reaction to this cover is to the rapist: “Ick! Dude, she’s in a coma!” Our reaction to the story is supposed to be to the victim: “Poor girl! She thought she was a virgin right up until the night she and her bridegroom discovered she wasn’t.”
Also, as a rule, cover images really ought to fill the entire cover as much as possible. While some covers do get away with putting landscape-orientation pictures in the middle and filling the dead space on the top and bottom with some kind of gradient or texturing and the title and byline, using a high-resolution portrait-oriented image to fill the entire cover is usually the more effective method for this kind of novel. Again, though, I’d like to see what our colleagues over on Cover Critics would recommend for this particular book.
However much ick it gives you, it isn’t nearly enough!