Hello, I would greatly appreciate your feedback on the design I've made for my new paranormal fantasy novel - 'Smirch' - which is about to be published. PREMISE: Adam is a typical family man. And that is really frustrating - because he's always felt that there is something special about him. What Adam doesn't know is that at the end of the summer of 2025, a colorful mole will arrive from outer space, attach itself to the back of his right cheek, and recruit him, along with his family and the underaged daughter of his neighbors, for a mission that will determine the fate of humanity. What the mole doesn't know is that something very, very wrong happened on Earth several hundreds of millions of years ago - something that never happened anywhere else in the universe and was never ever supposed to happen. Ever. The consequences of what occurred still affect all humans today and may put the plans of the mole at risk. As Adam and the mole set out to discover who is responsible for deflecting the course of our evolution, they uncover an ancient recipe for couscous - could it be the key to solving this mystery? Front Cover: Back Cover:
The cover brings to mind some of the iconography of the catholic church. Which doesn't seem to fit with your description of the story.
The book actually suggests an alternative interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah's Ark, using concepts from the Theory of Evolution, the nature of consciousness, astronomy, and psychology. Besides, I tried (I hope I succeeded) to make the quest to locate the 'evolution criminal', with the 400-million-year-old clues that Adam and the smirch discover along the way, similar to 'The Da Vinci Code' in style. That also led me to correlate between my book and Michelangelo's 'Creation of Adam'. What do you think?
your opening yourself to the possiblity of bad reviews because the cover implies religion. That could cause some very religious types to buy based on the cover, then give a bad review because it wasn't what they expected. just a caution to consider.
The pictures are much too large—I had to download and shrink it down several times to be able to see more than a corner of it. As for critique, I don't know nearly as much about cover design as many people around here, but I can say a few things. Question—you say you designed the cover. Is it just a very rough sketch? I don't see any real design. The title and author's name seem to just be dropped into an existing open space in the artwork, rather than the art being designed to fit around the words. Plus the words are in extremely basic computer fonts.
Here's a page of rough thumbnail designs done for some kind of cover, not sure for what (probably a school assignment): Note the drawings are very simple, in black and white to work out balance and contrast etc, and so they can be done very quickly. You don't want to put in a lot of time with shading and rendering at the design stage. The whole idea is to try different placements for the words and to design an image to fit around or under them (or whatever) so it all looks really good together. This is called thumbnailing, because generally the images are about the size of your thumbnail (actually more like 2 x 3 inches, so about a dozen will fit on a piece of copier paper). At a small size like that, in black and white, it's much easier to see the design and to work with the elements of it. Look into thumbnailing for graphic design to learn more. Should be able to find some really good videos and web pages about it. You could (should if you want to learn this stuff) also look up articles about the principles and elements of design. Once you've found what looks like a good design, you can then do somewhat larger color comps (compositional sketches) to work out rough color ideas. All of this is before an actual piece of artwork is attempted. Color Comps @ Artstation Note the same design image was used for each one. Now only the colors are being tested to find an appropriate color scheme. Well, and the designer decided to fade out the central building in the last image, I assume to make more room for a title, or just to make it drop back visually in space, and/or not fight against the foreground figure for the viewer's eye. I have no idea what the weird images across the bottom of the page are for, I'm just talking about the four across the top of the page.
The cover would not make me think it's paranormal fantasy. It looks more like a religious reflection or memoir—something non-fiction. I would look at those genre covers on Amazon/Kobo/Indigo to see what to aim for. And remember that if you're selling online most people will see your cover somewhere around postage stamp size when trawling prospective reads.
