The worst covers I've seen recently have come out of big publishing houses. Some of them look like they gave 5-year-olds a box of crayons, told the five year olds to chew the crayons, spit them out, and then someone card microwaved the results . W. T. F. Groupthink.
Indies I think have a different problem. They get into a Facebook group which is not a representative sample of their audience. In a Facebook group the first/loudest opinions are the ones that generally carry the most weight. They are full of people who think the grammar police have dominion over the Earth. There are a lot of people in these groups who are "fuck the norms and the tropes" types. Authors end up with something genre-neutral. I don't know whether I'm looking at SciFi, a thriller, or dark billionaire bromance.
Youtubers with their mouths open in their thumbnails get the "Don't recommend this channel" from me.
I'm trying to think of what I would consider good book covers, but it's kind of like asking "what was the beautiful woman wearing?" and you can't remember because you were thinking about what was *under* what she wore... Maybe the original Jurassic Park cover was memorable. Maybe. The new complete Chronicles of Narnia special edition looks stunning, but admittedly that's a bit special.
Your last cover was sexy but busy, and I'd really like to shake the person who decided to use layer modes on the "Morality Through a Screen" text, instead of keeping the text on top as a single solid color. The shadowing on that same text could have been a lot more subtle, too. But that's just like, my opinion, man.
I agree on The Lost Boys poster. Keep it simple, cool, bold... and easy to read. I'm sure people argue about this subject quite a bit.
I'd bet covers matter a lot more for physical books than ebooks/kindle. I wouldn't walk into a bookstore unless I knew they had something I wanted in stock.
“I'd bet covers matter a lot more for physical books than ebooks/kindle.” I’d say the opposite. Most purchases are done online so how a book cover looks in a very small thumbnail size is of paramount importance. Physical bookstore browsing is less relevant for indies in particular. Even if they’re on the shelf, is the cover facing out or just the spine? Hence why the biggest consideration is getting attention on a screen. A cell phone screen in particular
Bookstores are off the indie table, but book fairs and comic cons aren't. Both of them are good ways to build an audience and grow your email list. Also, shorter fiction, like a novella, is essentially an impulse buy. If someone goes to these events and is on the fence, a sub $10.00 novella usually guarantees a sale.
What sells generally tends to vary by audience and venue.
I buy a lot of books, but usually non-fiction. I'll admit that I hardly ever browse bookstores, online or off. But I probably buy at least one book month, which is a lot for a dude, apparently.
"Bold, saturated colors. High contrast. A visual that communicated exactly what it was in under a second—vampires, 80s aesthetic, dangerous fun."
-----
You must be seeing a different poster than I am. As someone whose career has dealt with DVD casewraps, Movie Posters, and Book Covers this image says nothing of what you describe here. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this one mumbles.
Bold colors - check. But the wrong colors. The 80's had cool blue backgrounds with neon pink accents. It said the night was both shadowy and colorful.
This says nothing about vampires - no blood splatter, no fangs, no glowing eyes from the shadows. None of the seductive menace and anarchy that the original movie graphics had. There is no "dangerous fun" here. There is an outstretched hand that echoes DOCTOR WHO more than the LOST BOYS.
"Become one of us" is too highbrow. How about going back to the original message:
"Sleep all day. Party all night. It's fun to be a vampire." - or - "You'll never grow old, and you'll never die. But you must feed!"
The only thing Lost here with this promo poster is the right message.
To be honest, I don't know how you get "vampires" from that first image. The unnatural colors, lack of light besides the rays, and the rising vapor from the hand give me fantasy and most likely horror, but nothing specific to vampires. "BECOME ONE OF US" is suggestive of "dangerous fun," as you said, but the only way to get vampires from this is by already knowing what "The Lost Boys" is. Which means, as it comes to vampires specifically, that is only marketing to your existing audience. Everyone else would just get the "fantasy horror offering dangerous fun."
(Can you tell I've been working on a review recently?)
Returning to your larger point, it is completely correct, and, speaking only for myself, I know it is correct and hate it is correct. I'm lousy at cover art because I'm not an artist, and when I do my best to make it, I'm not thinking about, "what catches the eye?" but "what catches the book?" Partly this might be a compensation for not being an artist, so I focus on what I know, which is the story, and, to a degree, I will state they are "good" covers for that reason, but I cannot state they are effective covers.
I guess a way to put it for me is I want cover art that will intrigue someone so they choose to read the story (effective art), but then when they've finished they can look back at it and see the story there in a way they hadn't originally (good art). Quickly looking through my movies, such art would be "12 Angry Men" (1957) with the knife, "The Apartment" (1960) with the key. That's not to suggest the other artwork in my collection is not good, but that is what I instinctively, and incompetently, try for.
I care about design, aesthetics, and appealing to an audience. I'm a child of the 80s, and so I must agree with those who said that the poster did *not* communicate 80s era movies, *or* vampires. I like posters from that era; they're so madcap and unabashedly embracing their premise. Remember "House"? The horror-comedy, not the Dr. Sherlock Holmes played by Hugh Laurie. Just look at that poster! No doubts about what you're getting.
Same with covers, back in the day you had your Michael Whelans with full-on art. Now you get symbols & graphics, or faces cut off so you only see eyes or lips, or half the front. I gather this allows for the downsizing of budgets, because you can get someone to just slap some stock art symbols over stock art scenery.
The movie poster in this scenario looks closer to the Hunger Games covers with their symbols, than it does to an 80s poster. The closest is the font used for "Become one of us." It's not Vallejo or Benguiat (the "Stranger Things" font), but it does remind me of the ITC Kabel font used on the covers of the VC Andrews novels back then.
As for the rest, I agree. One thing Karin Slaughter said in a seminar was that she understood she's competing with other entertainment choices, so she better make sure her readers feel like they're getting their money's worth. In that vein, my target audience likes video games, especially RPGs. As do I! This gives me a wider variety of "comps" to study for marketing and design, as well as pricing.
For instance, I'm not going to charge more than the cost of a DLC for an ebook. If you're not a gamer, just know a DLC is downloadable content, and it's often an expansion to the game that's at least good for another ~10-15 hours of additional play. Or, about the same amount of time it would take to read ~170k words of my book. I'll have to compete with those games, and I want to come out on the winning side.
I think it's an effective poster, but I didn't get vampires from it. Even as someone who grew up with the movie, I actually assumed it wasn't related. That aside, it's good. I don't love it, but I don't hate it. And I don't agree that movie trailers have gotten better. I almost always come away from them thinking I already know what is going to happen in the movie and feel no compulsion to see the full thing. I only really ever watch trailers when I go to the theater now because of this.
But we're talking book covers.
Here's the thing, I don't make my living on my fiction. I have nothing to lose whether I follow conventional wisdom or do something different. But because I'm gonna write what I like, I'm going to also go with cover art that I like. I haven't published a novel yet, but I have started doing these faux vintage paperback covers for my short stories with Ai, and I dig em. I don't have much of an audience, so I don't know if people like them or not.
But here's what I do know: If I walked into a book store and saw a newly published fantasy novel with something like a Frank Frazetta cover or a sci fi novel with a John Berkey style cover on the shelf or a horror novel with the kind of cover that graced thousands of books in that genre in the 70s, 80s and 90s, it would be an immediate draw. This is admittedly backward-looking, but the stuff I love the most is in the past. If someone were signaling to me that their book isn't for "the modern audience" but for someone like me, I'm down. So that's the strategy I'm going with.
This may be tangential, but one of the things I like least about the modern era is that so much depends on the science of marketing. Science, statistics, analytics, sales numbers--these are all great tools, but I think when they become the only considerations that drive artistic choices, you end up with SAMENESS. If you're trying to cut through the clutter, I'm not sure sameness is the result you want.
This is great, but I think the (probably before your time) movie tagging was even better, at least re the teen audience (ie me) it was going for: “party all night, sleep all day; it's fun to be a vampire” - especially since this was well before the various cinematic “good vampire” stuff took hold (tho Anne Rice was at her literary peak and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro also had a series depicting vampirism positively)(and yes, i know, these weren't “good” vampires but their lives were certainly appealing, if only they had gone full Lestat/Dexter and picked deserving victims)
“YouTubers (myself included) are not proud of ourselves as we pose for our thumbnail picture, mouth agape and eyes protruding from sockets.”
It’s funny, because I was reflecting last night that my one post with a photo of me as a child gets the most reads. I know this is about books, but it did make me think that most folks stop when they see a face and thought about incorporating my own mug more on Substack, even if it is more suitable for audio only podcasts.
The worst covers I've seen recently have come out of big publishing houses. Some of them look like they gave 5-year-olds a box of crayons, told the five year olds to chew the crayons, spit them out, and then someone card microwaved the results . W. T. F. Groupthink.
Indies I think have a different problem. They get into a Facebook group which is not a representative sample of their audience. In a Facebook group the first/loudest opinions are the ones that generally carry the most weight. They are full of people who think the grammar police have dominion over the Earth. There are a lot of people in these groups who are "fuck the norms and the tropes" types. Authors end up with something genre-neutral. I don't know whether I'm looking at SciFi, a thriller, or dark billionaire bromance.
Youtubers with their mouths open in their thumbnails get the "Don't recommend this channel" from me.
I'm trying to think of what I would consider good book covers, but it's kind of like asking "what was the beautiful woman wearing?" and you can't remember because you were thinking about what was *under* what she wore... Maybe the original Jurassic Park cover was memorable. Maybe. The new complete Chronicles of Narnia special edition looks stunning, but admittedly that's a bit special.
Your last cover was sexy but busy, and I'd really like to shake the person who decided to use layer modes on the "Morality Through a Screen" text, instead of keeping the text on top as a single solid color. The shadowing on that same text could have been a lot more subtle, too. But that's just like, my opinion, man.
I agree on The Lost Boys poster. Keep it simple, cool, bold... and easy to read. I'm sure people argue about this subject quite a bit.
I'd bet covers matter a lot more for physical books than ebooks/kindle. I wouldn't walk into a bookstore unless I knew they had something I wanted in stock.
“I'd bet covers matter a lot more for physical books than ebooks/kindle.” I’d say the opposite. Most purchases are done online so how a book cover looks in a very small thumbnail size is of paramount importance. Physical bookstore browsing is less relevant for indies in particular. Even if they’re on the shelf, is the cover facing out or just the spine? Hence why the biggest consideration is getting attention on a screen. A cell phone screen in particular
Bookstores are off the indie table, but book fairs and comic cons aren't. Both of them are good ways to build an audience and grow your email list. Also, shorter fiction, like a novella, is essentially an impulse buy. If someone goes to these events and is on the fence, a sub $10.00 novella usually guarantees a sale.
What sells generally tends to vary by audience and venue.
I buy a lot of books, but usually non-fiction. I'll admit that I hardly ever browse bookstores, online or off. But I probably buy at least one book month, which is a lot for a dude, apparently.
"audiences are not broken, but they do have infinite options… and finite time."
Time is the ultimate resource. Human time was the only true scarce resource.
I used to do posh fonts that were embossed, with textures. Really flash looking. Looked great. Until thumbnail! Now I keep titles plain.
"Bold, saturated colors. High contrast. A visual that communicated exactly what it was in under a second—vampires, 80s aesthetic, dangerous fun."
-----
You must be seeing a different poster than I am. As someone whose career has dealt with DVD casewraps, Movie Posters, and Book Covers this image says nothing of what you describe here. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this one mumbles.
Bold colors - check. But the wrong colors. The 80's had cool blue backgrounds with neon pink accents. It said the night was both shadowy and colorful.
This says nothing about vampires - no blood splatter, no fangs, no glowing eyes from the shadows. None of the seductive menace and anarchy that the original movie graphics had. There is no "dangerous fun" here. There is an outstretched hand that echoes DOCTOR WHO more than the LOST BOYS.
"Become one of us" is too highbrow. How about going back to the original message:
"Sleep all day. Party all night. It's fun to be a vampire." - or - "You'll never grow old, and you'll never die. But you must feed!"
The only thing Lost here with this promo poster is the right message.
To be honest, I don't know how you get "vampires" from that first image. The unnatural colors, lack of light besides the rays, and the rising vapor from the hand give me fantasy and most likely horror, but nothing specific to vampires. "BECOME ONE OF US" is suggestive of "dangerous fun," as you said, but the only way to get vampires from this is by already knowing what "The Lost Boys" is. Which means, as it comes to vampires specifically, that is only marketing to your existing audience. Everyone else would just get the "fantasy horror offering dangerous fun."
(Can you tell I've been working on a review recently?)
Returning to your larger point, it is completely correct, and, speaking only for myself, I know it is correct and hate it is correct. I'm lousy at cover art because I'm not an artist, and when I do my best to make it, I'm not thinking about, "what catches the eye?" but "what catches the book?" Partly this might be a compensation for not being an artist, so I focus on what I know, which is the story, and, to a degree, I will state they are "good" covers for that reason, but I cannot state they are effective covers.
I guess a way to put it for me is I want cover art that will intrigue someone so they choose to read the story (effective art), but then when they've finished they can look back at it and see the story there in a way they hadn't originally (good art). Quickly looking through my movies, such art would be "12 Angry Men" (1957) with the knife, "The Apartment" (1960) with the key. That's not to suggest the other artwork in my collection is not good, but that is what I instinctively, and incompetently, try for.
I care about design, aesthetics, and appealing to an audience. I'm a child of the 80s, and so I must agree with those who said that the poster did *not* communicate 80s era movies, *or* vampires. I like posters from that era; they're so madcap and unabashedly embracing their premise. Remember "House"? The horror-comedy, not the Dr. Sherlock Holmes played by Hugh Laurie. Just look at that poster! No doubts about what you're getting.
Same with covers, back in the day you had your Michael Whelans with full-on art. Now you get symbols & graphics, or faces cut off so you only see eyes or lips, or half the front. I gather this allows for the downsizing of budgets, because you can get someone to just slap some stock art symbols over stock art scenery.
The movie poster in this scenario looks closer to the Hunger Games covers with their symbols, than it does to an 80s poster. The closest is the font used for "Become one of us." It's not Vallejo or Benguiat (the "Stranger Things" font), but it does remind me of the ITC Kabel font used on the covers of the VC Andrews novels back then.
As for the rest, I agree. One thing Karin Slaughter said in a seminar was that she understood she's competing with other entertainment choices, so she better make sure her readers feel like they're getting their money's worth. In that vein, my target audience likes video games, especially RPGs. As do I! This gives me a wider variety of "comps" to study for marketing and design, as well as pricing.
For instance, I'm not going to charge more than the cost of a DLC for an ebook. If you're not a gamer, just know a DLC is downloadable content, and it's often an expansion to the game that's at least good for another ~10-15 hours of additional play. Or, about the same amount of time it would take to read ~170k words of my book. I'll have to compete with those games, and I want to come out on the winning side.
I think it's an effective poster, but I didn't get vampires from it. Even as someone who grew up with the movie, I actually assumed it wasn't related. That aside, it's good. I don't love it, but I don't hate it. And I don't agree that movie trailers have gotten better. I almost always come away from them thinking I already know what is going to happen in the movie and feel no compulsion to see the full thing. I only really ever watch trailers when I go to the theater now because of this.
But we're talking book covers.
Here's the thing, I don't make my living on my fiction. I have nothing to lose whether I follow conventional wisdom or do something different. But because I'm gonna write what I like, I'm going to also go with cover art that I like. I haven't published a novel yet, but I have started doing these faux vintage paperback covers for my short stories with Ai, and I dig em. I don't have much of an audience, so I don't know if people like them or not.
But here's what I do know: If I walked into a book store and saw a newly published fantasy novel with something like a Frank Frazetta cover or a sci fi novel with a John Berkey style cover on the shelf or a horror novel with the kind of cover that graced thousands of books in that genre in the 70s, 80s and 90s, it would be an immediate draw. This is admittedly backward-looking, but the stuff I love the most is in the past. If someone were signaling to me that their book isn't for "the modern audience" but for someone like me, I'm down. So that's the strategy I'm going with.
This may be tangential, but one of the things I like least about the modern era is that so much depends on the science of marketing. Science, statistics, analytics, sales numbers--these are all great tools, but I think when they become the only considerations that drive artistic choices, you end up with SAMENESS. If you're trying to cut through the clutter, I'm not sure sameness is the result you want.
Anyway, enjoyed the article, Kristin.
And you can make a decent cover with freebie software too.
This is great, but I think the (probably before your time) movie tagging was even better, at least re the teen audience (ie me) it was going for: “party all night, sleep all day; it's fun to be a vampire” - especially since this was well before the various cinematic “good vampire” stuff took hold (tho Anne Rice was at her literary peak and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro also had a series depicting vampirism positively)(and yes, i know, these weren't “good” vampires but their lives were certainly appealing, if only they had gone full Lestat/Dexter and picked deserving victims)
“YouTubers (myself included) are not proud of ourselves as we pose for our thumbnail picture, mouth agape and eyes protruding from sockets.”
It’s funny, because I was reflecting last night that my one post with a photo of me as a child gets the most reads. I know this is about books, but it did make me think that most folks stop when they see a face and thought about incorporating my own mug more on Substack, even if it is more suitable for audio only podcasts.