Aspiring authors, get this through your head. Cover art serves one purpose, and one purpose only, to get potential customers interested long enough to pick up the book to read the back cover blurb. In the internet age that means the thumb nail image needs to be interesting enough to click on. That’s what covers are for.
Larry Correia
Aspiring Authors
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This was a perfect companion to the previous Best Covers post, because my immediate reaction to the composite photo was how difficult it was to read the titles. Might have been ok if I had even liked the covers in their larger size, but I didn’t. None of them offered much in terms of hinting the theme or genre, nor were they something you could see pleasing the eye as they lay, say, on the top of a to-read pile if I still had those piles instead of the top list in my Kindle library.
Youv’e taken the words right out of my mouth! They almost all looked pretty terrible to me.
The cover for second of the two titles that PG specifically references in his previous post is at least legible, and both title and – though a bit oddly – the image suggest that it is a Western, which indeed seems to be the genre being claimed for the book. However, the book description and a study of the reviews, especially some of the (suprisingly insightful) one star ones, indicate that the reader is being conned and that this is actually a feminist fantasy, and not likely to appeal to readers expecting a book that actually deals in the Western genre’s tropes.
Of course, those Western tropes are often set in a fantasy land rather than the historical west, but this fantasy has strong ties to history which limit the degree to which one can depart from recorded history (just as the fantasy Regency-Romance-Land maps to the real social history of England).