Goblin Tales Cover

[jimhines]

I’ve been working on cover designs for Goblin Tales, my hopefully-soon-to-be-epublished collection of five goblin-related short stories.  The cover art is by Daniel Ernle.  He created this image for my German short fiction collection Der Goblin-Held, and I contacted him for permission to use it for Goblin Tales.

Some of the things I kept in mind

Comments

[jimhines]

I'm thinking of increasing the drop shadow. I think some of that got lost when I went to the higher-resolution image.

[barbarienne]

Don't use more drop shadow; slightly darken the background art behind the letters. More subtle and effective.

[rowyn]

I'd suggest outlining the letters or darkening the background behind them, yes. Drop shadows don't do as much for readability. Oddly, I found the yellow more readable than the blue.

I prefer the closeup of Jig, and sans the blurb (which is not going to be legible at thumbnail size.

Looks good!

[mtlawson]

I vote for blue. BTW, which novel was the PW quote about?

[jimhines]

The quote was for Goblin War, but I thought it fit pretty well for this.

[oreouk]

Looks cool!

I prefer the one on the right - if you're going for something that will be seen as a thumbnail then the advantage of the blurb is surely diminished and the impact of the art and font is more crucial.

[laurahcory1]

That was my thought as well; at thumbnail size, the blurb seems almost unreadable to me.

[jimhines]

The blurb is going to be pretty much illegible as a thumbnail. I'm just not sure if it's worth keeping it there for anyone who views the larger version (which will be included in the ebook file itself, too), or if that's a holdover from print that I don't really need to keep.

[rowyn]

Maybe you should do a poll and see if anyone ever buys things because of quotes from the cover blurbs? I've never paid any attention to them, even on print books.

[ladislaw]

The one on the left. The image is better framed by not having the goblin consume the entire space. (I hear goblins tend to do that when left to their own devices.)

[jimhines]

Oh, yeah. You definitely can't leave those guys unsupervised.

[feanna]

I like the blue, and the version with less zoom (on the left) it seems more open somehow, like in keeping with your description, there's room for the reader - and you can sort of imagine Jig going somewhere.
The inclusion of the blurb reminds me of actual (US)paper(back) book covers, so if you're going for that...

[jimhines]

What about going even further with showing Jig going somewhere, like so?

[skipperdee]

I really like this version. Not sure if that's outline or drop-shadow, but it looks good.

[margaret_y]

Hey, this one is quite good!