To be fair, I happen to know (I’m a member of the same Web site as the author) that this book is aimed at an audience of hardcore history buffs who might not care so much about the cover.
The cover isn’t so much bad (see the cover with the planes above it), as it is just extremely boring. It’s like the cover page of a high schooler’s book report – functional, but bland.
On the other hand, a TON of military non-fiction books have covers that aren’t that much different. The standard practice for such texts is typically TITLE (above) STOCK PHOTO (above) SUBTITLE (above) AUTHOR. Switch title and author if you’re someone famous, like Stephen Ambrose, but otherwise it’s pretty much how they’re done…except they’re done by professional cover designers.
Even within the confines of minimalism, it’s possible to make the cover better. The font doesn’t look military; the white space covers too much of the cover, which combines with the sky in the photo to leave a lot of the cover unused, and the white space blends right off the graphic (see above) — a consideration especially for ebooks and other books that will be sold online.
Waiting for the rebirth of the cover…
The whale is inside of the carrier being reborn?
To be fair, I happen to know (I’m a member of the same Web site as the author) that this book is aimed at an audience of hardcore history buffs who might not care so much about the cover.
The cover isn’t so much bad (see the cover with the planes above it), as it is just extremely boring. It’s like the cover page of a high schooler’s book report – functional, but bland.
On the other hand, a TON of military non-fiction books have covers that aren’t that much different. The standard practice for such texts is typically TITLE (above) STOCK PHOTO (above) SUBTITLE (above) AUTHOR. Switch title and author if you’re someone famous, like Stephen Ambrose, but otherwise it’s pretty much how they’re done…except they’re done by professional cover designers.
Even within the confines of minimalism, it’s possible to make the cover better. The font doesn’t look military; the white space covers too much of the cover, which combines with the sky in the photo to leave a lot of the cover unused, and the white space blends right off the graphic (see above) — a consideration especially for ebooks and other books that will be sold online.
Here’s the five-minute version of a new cover with the same photo. Not the best cover ever, but still.
Looks 1,000 times better (but not 1,001 times, that’d be crazy).
Not even joking, you might want to consider contacting the author and just emailing that to ’em. Pay it forward an’ all.