Revamped Front Cover for Those Left Behind

This month I am unveiling the new front cover design for Astronomicon: Those Left Behind. It's long overdue, but finally ready.

One thing I've learned is that it’s not only vitally important for a book cover to be eye-catching. It’s also critical that it works well and remains clear when displayed at a huge variety of sizes. The previous cover for Astronomicon: Those Left Behind did not fulfil either of those aims properly.

The image itself was excellent, a huge, planetary scale detonation viewed from orbit, but the layout of the titles was just too small and cluttered to work at smaller sizes.

The new design, shown above, works right down to thumbnail size, has more visual impact and generally looks more polished. I hope you all like it.

You may notice that I have also tweaked the colour-scheme and texture of the font used for the titles. The font itself is too good to lose, but I have felt for a while now that the gold colour was simply too vibrant. It may have been eye-catching, but it was straying into tacky. Hopefully the new finish is a little more tasteful and has a more dramatic feel to it. Of course now I’m going to have to modify all my other book covers to match!

The Importance of Eye-Catching #Coverart

With the growing dominance of e-books it's tempting to thing that front covers no longer matter, but the importance of eye-catching artwork on the front of your novel is just as important as ever. Potential readers browsing through book related sites and online bookshops still need to have their attention drawn to your work and the most powerful way to do that is an impressive front cover image.

Better still, a good cover can become a marketing tool in its own right. I like to upload my best covers to art sites, picture sharing sites and now I've started entering book cover artwork competitions too. Here are my two favourite covers, which I've entered into the AuthorDB.com competition.

Vote for this cover here.
Find out more about Astronomicon: Those Left Behind here.

Vote for this cover here.
Find out more about Astronomicon: Icarus here.

Obviously to maximise the exposure gained from the competition, I really have to win it. That's a hard target considering some of the competition there. There's everything from the very poor to the truly excellent in the competition, but with the support of my readers, friends and family I believe my covers will make a good show, even if they don't win.

Which of my science fiction front covers above do you like best? Have you voted for it?