Unless there are successful indies writing general commercial fiction that I'm not aware of?
Eating lunch, I took a scroll through Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/penguinrandomhouse/
Those covers are not much better than placeholders. They look cheap and home made. Ugh. :shrug
Those covers are not much better than placeholders. They look cheap and home made. Ugh. :shrug
I refer to this as the "Indie Tax", in that self-publishers are expected (okay, urged) to produce amaaaaaaazing covers, but have you seen the cover for "You Know You Want This"? I can, and have, done better with PowerPoint. But they're not paying me the big bucks.
I refer to this as the "Indie Tax", in that self-publishers are expected (okay, urged) to produce amaaaaaaazing covers, but have you seen the cover for "You Know You Want This"? I can, and have, done better with PowerPoint. But they're not paying me the big bucks.
The YKYWT cover might not be typically beautiful, but it is eye catching, clever, and descriptive.
The YKYWT cover might not be typically beautiful, but it is eye catching, clever, and descriptive.
And how's it grab you at 70 x 115 px?
The YKYWT cover might not be typically beautiful, but it is eye catching, clever, and descriptive.
And how's it grab you at 70 x 115 px?
(https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51SJh5trw1L._SX342_.jpg)
Pretty much unreadable. The author's last name is kind of lost.
I do like the covers of Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Bangkok Wakes To Rain, even thought I have zero interest in Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Marlon James seriously rubs me the wrong way) and have no idea what Bangkok Wakes To Rain even is about. The bird on pastel background look of Ginger Bread and Mostly Dead Things does nothing for me (and unless Helen Oyemi has radically changed what she writes, it doesn't fit her fiction). Ditto for the hightech vagina of You Know You Want This, another book I have zero interest in. I tried reading "Cat Person", when it went viral and didn't get why I should care about those people and their bad date.
However, all of these books are geared towards the mainstream casual reader market, even the genre ones. Case in point, the constant positioning of Black Leopard, Red Wolf as the African Game of Thrones, even though there have been several African fantasy and science fiction works in recent years, some of them very successful. But those books were still marketed at the SFF readership rather than at a general readership. N.K. Jemisin had to win three Hugos in a row to get a fracture of the mainstream push Marlon James is getting.
I have one book that has a typographic cover. It's a humorous romance between two anti-war activists set in the early 1980s. The traditional romance cover approach wouldn't have worked (never mind that there is no traditional cover approach for early 1980s counterculture romance), so I went with a typographic cover emulating the look of counterculture flyers, posters and zines from the 1980s (spending way too much time looking at original examples) and came up with this (http://corabuhlert.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/M%C3%BCsli.jpg). It doesn't sell very well, but then it's simply not a to market book in any way. However, Kobo liked the cover enough that they featured the book in one of their promos of their own accord.
Maybe it's just me, but neither of those two covers are particularly appealing. Plus, for all the talk of making titles stand out in thumbnail, the art tends to bury those titles in the thumbnail. And, on the one, what's with the O in "WOLF" wrapping around the eye? The teeth and tongue wrapped around letters makes sense, but the O wrapping behind an eye? Ugh.