[quote=The Author Guy;1725]General question on Cover Art:
Do you prefer Scenes, Montages, Single figure (or multiple figure with not much background), Symbol/Abstract?
Some of this has been answered by some but particularly on the scene/montage/character(s) thing I am curious.
[/quote]
In my opinion it’s not about preference. Here’s my two cents on the topic (I’ve been giving it a bit of thought for a while now)
First, as was said earlier in the topic people judge a book by the cover. The cover itself can say a lot about the book. For example a professional looking cover gives the impression of a well-written book. There are tons of books on amazon which have some abstract twirly symbol for a cover image generally saying to the customers “this is an indie book, don’t expect much from it”. There are also tons of books with stock photos for a cover. When used unmodified the stock photo can easily confuse the customer into thinking they already viewed the book. Now, if the cover is done by a pro artist, it shows. The real question is “what does it show?” Here’s an example: I’ve seen a few covers with a female on the front. You’d think a book like that would have a female protagonist, you click on it to take a closer look, and you find out the book either has some female antagonist or a female side character.
People don’t just judge a book by its cover, people read the themes in the book by the cover. You know the book is comedic in nature if the art is cartooney, you know it’s about magic if there’s some mysterious-looking light on the cover, you know the book contains romantic themes when you see a male hugging a female on the cover. And if you like what you see, you take a closer look at the book. In case of Demons of Astlan series, you might want to go for a somewhat cartoonish art or showing characters performing things incongruent with what is usually expected from them (a ganja-smoking stoned demon is one such example), as this is a portal fantasy some magic fantasy land in the background would demonstrate that the action is happening in a different world. And, of course placing the main character in the foreground would show who the main character is (or you could place some secondary characters in the background to demonstrate who else the book is about). Since the main character is a human-turned-demon this could be shown with a partial transformation – e.g. a demon hand, a demon’s eye or a face half of which is demonic, while the other half is human (think Batman’s Two-Face or the way they did the posters for Face-Off).
And so there you are: a picture that’s worth a thousand words 🙂