Should be titled: “The Fisherman’s Somebody-Call-SVU-Quick Bride.”
RK
8 years ago
The biggest culprit here is the title. Without it, the picture’s just a perfectly innocent shot of an eleven-year-old girl going for a swim. With it, you suddenly get the impression that she’s the titular bride and this is an up-to-date grim n’ gritty ripped-from-the-headlines story with an Elizabeth Smart setup. You’d never know this is actually a fantasy novel about shape-shifters, or that The Fisherman’s Bride is just the name of a seaside tavern where the girl’s family lives.
This makes me think of my favorite example of a cover from a professional publisher that left everyone on the internet who saw it saying “Somebody painted this, and somebody approved it for the cover. What were they thinking!?” The novel itself was actually a pretty run-of-the-mill romance; the title was not so bad, and the picture on the cover was not so bad. Together, however…
![cover[1]](https://lousybookcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/cover142.jpg)
Should be titled: “The Fisherman’s Somebody-Call-SVU-Quick Bride.”
The biggest culprit here is the title. Without it, the picture’s just a perfectly innocent shot of an eleven-year-old girl going for a swim. With it, you suddenly get the impression that she’s the titular bride and this is an up-to-date grim n’ gritty ripped-from-the-headlines story with an Elizabeth Smart setup. You’d never know this is actually a fantasy novel about shape-shifters, or that The Fisherman’s Bride is just the name of a seaside tavern where the girl’s family lives.
This makes me think of my favorite example of a cover from a professional publisher that left everyone on the internet who saw it saying “Somebody painted this, and somebody approved it for the cover. What were they thinking!?” The novel itself was actually a pretty run-of-the-mill romance; the title was not so bad, and the picture on the cover was not so bad. Together, however…
Well, see for yourself:
The picture: not so bad.
The picture + the title: bad.
Eep.
D:
I…
*walks away*
Is that a child bride? Is she trying to swim to safety?
Thankfully, no, as RK explains above.