So first off, when I opened my book package and saw the cover for the first time, my initial reaction was "Oh look, a boring book." I would never in a million years pick this book up in the store. It doesn't look like the kind of book I like. And you know what? It is the kind of book I like. It's pretty important to give the right cues with your cover. This cover screams "suspense" maybe "thriller/mystery/suspense". Though it's a relatively gripping book, that's not the genre, and readers of that genre will pick it up and not get what they were looking for, while it is overlooked by it's real audience. Your audience needs to know that it's their book. I mean it's not a hard fast rule, but that's how marketing works. What kind of cover would I have given it? Hmmm...maybe something more along the lines of:
Just my opinion, but I think that would find me/the audience a bit more clearly. And they're prettier. Oh wait that's my next point.
I would like to stop seeing quick photo manipulations as covers. Running a photoshop filter over a stock photo or two is not art. I know it's not something that non artists/designers usually notice, just like most of you probably don't shudder every time you see a poster using Comic Sans as the font. But it makes me twitchy. The cover looks extremely low-budget to me. Which again makes me sad because I think Fearless deserves more. Especially as the publishers appear to pushing it decently. It baffles me honestly. I looked up the cover designer's portfolio (brandnavigation.com) and it seems to be a pretty decent design company with quite a few good covers under their belt. Fearless is not shown in their portfolio though, so perhaps that's telling.
Every time a poor photo manipulation gets made into a cover a chance for beautiful art is lost, and the illustration community loses another job. And maybe a kitten somewhere dies. Let's stop the tragedy!
