[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Chris_Morey

Well your grammar has me thoroughly impressed. I sure hope your story has something to do with DBZ!? That would be like totally rad...

Gnet BuddahKai. The kid/troll/whatever Goku is linked it in his post. It's...it's worth a read. It's SOMETHING...I think.

Speaking of which, Hey Goku, when are you coming out with the next installment? You did that "tralor" like, a week ago.

Originally Posted by Chris_Morey

Are you arguing that the Afterall cover is good because it has a matching color scheme? My robotic senses will not allow me to detect how that cover is anything other than a five minute garbage Photoshop job.

Have you ever worked with photoshop? I guarantee that took far longer than five minutes. The line-work alone is pretty deliberate (also hand-drawn). I've already pointed out a number of things that make "Afterall" a good poster (Notice how the first thing you see is the title, and then the line work draws your eye around the image, bringing you to the rest of the information, and then back to the title?) But hey, if you're still not getting it let me give you some other examples.

You're doing the small press thing (Which is ballsey considering print is dying pretty rapidly and publishing companies and retailers alike are closing shop across the country). You're doing the small-press thing, but you still have to compete with the big-boys, so lets compare your cover art to some bestsellers. Let's compare your Bicep-angel vs Electro-jesus to:



Stephen King.

Personally,I'm not a fan of King. But hey, no other horror writer has really become as widely read as he is, so he must be doing something right. One of those things is this cover: It's a classic. Do you have Pennywise jumping around while shooting balloons out of a refrigerator over-head of the child-orgy he (strangely) wrote into the book?

No, you have a grate, a claw, a paper boat, and "IT".

This cover attracts my attention, it makes me curious and it fills me with a sense of foreboding. Simple, Elegant, Powerful. This shit BODES dude. It BODES.

Let's try again:


Twilight. Twilight is garbage, and Stephanie Meyer can't write for shit. Still once again: WILDLY POPULAR. One of the main reasons? This cover. I mean seriously, this is an insanely good one. Your eye is instantly drawn to that apple, then up the slender, muted arms you see the title. It's small, almost underwhelming, but the font is unique and interesting, the elongated "L" giving it balance. The red apple on white skin and a black cover hints at latent eroticism, but also innocence with a hint of predation. The image choice and color scheme tie it in both with the story of Eve, and surprisingly enough, little red riding hood. The negative space created by the arms basically makes a "V" and with the apple at the center, this is pretty much a vagina, the apple either indicating virginity, or a loss of virginity. Want to know which? Read the book. There's really no wonder that so many tweens and soccer-moms latched on to Meyer, not with this iconic cover giving them the vapors before they've read even a single word.

Okay, enough with the shitty authors, let's do one I like:


A stormy sky stretching out over an open road and terminating in a friggin bolt of lightning that seems to split the whole cover in half. FUCK YEAH. I really can't have enough praise for Neil Gaiman, the man's a genius, his prose, his dialogue, his concepts and storylines, everything, perfect. Like this cover. They didn't give us All of the Old Gods squaring off with the new Gods while Mr. Wednesday looks on from the clouds. They didn't give us Shadow on the World's Tree, or a random shot of that weird-assed Search Engine.

No, they gave us a storm and a road, and a bolt of lightning. Your eye is drawn across his name, Down the bolt, Down the road and straight to the tile, "American Gods". Fucking. Amazing.

Do you see why your covers are a problem? When you have stuff like this to compete with, and you're giving us this:



Or the Gaki? Or the afore-mentioned episode of "Crossing Over"?

They don't even compare. Your (or your Artist's) idea of cover art seems to be akin to my Dad's idea of Chili: "The more shit you throw in, the better it is". Guess what? My Dad's Chili SUCKS. If you want your books to sell, you NEED good, Dynamic, iconic covers, which do more than catch the eye, with their sheer weirdness and gratuitous amounts of fail. They need to evoke a sense of mystery, they need to be pleasing to the eye, and they need to be easy to look at. They need to put the emphasis where it's important: On the title of the book, and the contents within and they need to be complete works of art, not simply text slapped over a drawing.

Do better.