DreamReaper

[LadyofKaos]

So I took it in another direction.

 

[Mythopoet]

The main problem at this point, imo, is that the cover tells me nothing about the book. Your cover is your frontline marketing. It should indicate genre and subgenre if possible and the general mood/atmosphere of the book. Basically give the reader some idea of what kind of reading experience it contains inside. That is the most important function of the cover. It seems like too many indies ignore that aspect.

 

[LadyofKaos]

What I've seen of Indie covers is that they're way too busy. They try too hard to put it all out there. I want it simple, clean, & interesting.

For me, if a cover catches my eye, then I read the blurb to see what it's all about.

 

[Mythopoet]

There are are too many indies for their covers to be generalized. There are a ton of bad ones and a huge amount of good ones.

I don't want to offend you, but this cover just comes across to me as boring and amateur. It doesn't make good use of typography. There's nothing there that catches my eye and interests me. There's just a sword and swords are a dime a dozen in fantasy. At this point, the original cover was better. At least it had something to look at.

 

[Laurence]

I hate to say it, but I think your time would be better spent saving money to pay a professional or at least acquire premium materials and design guides. There are several basic design rules that must be adhered to when designing print work.

Firstly, your sword image. I imagine you've pulled that sword image from google images or another free source; if it's as pixelated as it is at that size then it simply will not translate to print. Print work is usually designed at 300 pixels per inch rather than 72, meaning that it prints much smaller than it appears on the screen. You can also usually be pretty certain that if you haven't paid for this sword image then you're breaking the law. Obviously it's unlikely that anyone would notice unless your book becomes extremely popular, but isn't that what you're aiming for?

I would also bet that you've designed this in digital RGB colour mode as is the default in Photoshop, when you should be working in CMYK to ensure your colours actually print the way you view them on screen (print work is limited to fewer colours than you have on screen.)

A general design rule is to keep a fixed padding around the edge of your design in which text cannot go; Dreamreaper should be the smaller so that the distance from the edges are the same as the distance that your name is from the edge.

I would advise you ask a print professional's opinion on how this would turn out. I imagine he/she would tell you that it would be extremely pixellated and your name would be impossible to read because of the fuzzy black stroke around it. This image would pass for a thumbnail on amazon after the tweaks I suggested, but not much else. Remember, there's a reason that most popular books use illustrations rather than images from the internet.

 

[LadyofKaos]

I hate to say it, but I think your time would be better spent saving money to pay a professional or at least acquire premium materials and design guides. There are several basic design rules that must be adhered to when designing print work.

Firstly, your sword image. I imagine you've pulled that sword image from google images or another free source; if it's as pixelated as it is at that size then it simply will not translate to print. Print work is usually designed at 300 pixels per inch rather than 72, meaning that it prints much smaller than it appears on the screen. You can also usually be pretty certain that if you haven't paid for this sword image then you're breaking the law. Obviously it's unlikely that anyone would notice unless your book becomes extremely popular, but isn't that what you're aiming for?

I would also bet that you've designed this in digital RGB colour mode as is the default in Photoshop, when you should be working in CMYK to ensure your colours actually print the way you view them on screen (print work is limited to fewer colours than you have on screen.)

A general design rule is to keep a fixed padding around the edge of your design in which text cannot go; Dreamreaper should be the smaller so that the distance from the edges are the same as the distance that your name is from the edge.

I would advise you ask a print professional's opinion on how this would turn out. I imagine he/she would tell you that it would be extremely pixellated and your name would be impossible to read because of the fuzzy black stroke around it. This image would pass for a thumbnail on amazon after the tweaks I suggested, but not much else. Remember, there's a reason that most popular books use illustrations rather than images from the internet.

Thank you, Laurence. The sword image is actually from the original book cover, which was designed by a budding graphic designer. I appreciate your advices and will heed them well. God knows if it will ever get published.

 

[Fyle]

I like it.

It is simple and moody.

I don't like those art masterpiece covers. I bet most covers are better than the novels.

A cover is partly there to give expectations of what to expect inside (I'll probably get a lotta disagreement here, but I read an Immerse or Die reposrt stating this in so many words, and it made a lot of sense). Probably there are a ton of indie books with covers better than Game of Thrones, cause it's not that good. But, I bet there aren't many better than the book.

 

[LadyofKaos]

Thank you, Fyle. I share your dislike of art masterpiece covers and, in some cases, you're right about the cover being better than the novel. I'm working hard to make sure mine doesn't fall into that category!