I spent today trying to get homework done and not work on writing my novel but I decided to take a few minutes and try to design a cover for fun. I used Canva templates to make a couple options. Their not EXACTLY what I wanted but they were free.
Both have solid imagery let down by poor typography (as is common with canva) I’d suggest looking at covers in your genre and seeing what they do in regard to font, size, and placement author name is far too small on both and placement of both name and title on the page doesn’t feel right
I'm thrown off by the title. Bluegrass immediately brings music to my mind. That association with the images is incongruous, to say the least.
Imagery makes the story seem like a thriller. First font makes it seem like a drama, and the second font makes it seem like some kind of bubblegum comedy. plus... and maybe this is just me.... but the title and imagery are disjointed. the first cover features very prominently a Russian-style cathedral. the second cover has a Roman temple? and the title is "Bluegrass Lake" it would be important to know where the setting is of your novel and kind of capture that in the cover. Does it take place near a lake in Russia? a lake in Italy? if it takes place in the US, what other structures could you use to replace the Roman columns or Russian cathedral? (and those fish and the crab arent something found in lakes)
Its a story set in Kentucky which is called the bluegrass state. The main location of the story is a place called Bluegrass Lake. Its all I have come up with so far. I agree the images aren't right I'll have to come up with something better.
I figured being from Kentucky you weren't missing the implications of "bluegrass." Greek columns and St. Basil's don't exactly shriek, "Kaintuck!" Aren't you required to include a few race horses and Mammoth Cave in everything you produce? In Wyoming, cowboys and the Tetons are de rigueur.
Do you know what the genre is yet? Signaling consumers might be the most important job of a cover in the first place. Disclaimer, my missus routinely tells me I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to visual stuff. It took me a long time to figure out what bugged me about the first cover's image: perspective. It's the trees, which are farther away, still being much larger in scale than the massive Russian building. Quite the clash, unless it's intended that the building is some kind of miniature. For the second one, it's again perspective. The bubbles are too large, unless the intent is that those are standard small bubbles merely in the foreground, but with their z-axis illumination matching that of the Roman architecture my mind places them adjacent to it. Those are massive freaking bubbles, but bubbles don't really get that big underwater (Edit: unless there's some massive turbulence), so my eyes tell me it's a miniature structure. Typeface/font needs some thorough study. I need to do that study too, so I can't explain why but it's just not up to par here. There's nothing wrong with having fun. For myself, I think of a cover as something I have to 'earn' after writing the book, because it is satisfying in a lot of ways.
Its going to be young adult/fantasy. I'm kind of using the Percy Jackson series and Harry Potter as my main influences as well the hunger games. Those are my favorite fiction books. Not that mine will be anywhere near as good as those but they are serving as my inspiration.
I think it could work if the genre were different. for example, this is a horror story that I read as a child (age range 9-11) (the first cover is the hardback...when I read it back in the early 2000s, it looked like that. the second one is the reprinted cover) Your covers puts me in mind of this author's books, and she writes primarily children's horror and ghost stories. These fantasy covers take a different approach with the illustrations.
The genre and age also determines the cover's focus. If you look at Middle Grade and YA covers... the MC is almost always on the cover somewhere. Even in the horror books above... the reprint has the 2 MC's silhouetted in the window. Its even more prevalent in fantasy books. If you pull up an album of Middle Grade and YA covers, you will find the MC is on the cover more often than not in some form (YA is steering away from that, but Middle Grade still holds strong to that aesthetic)
