Cover unreveal! In my spare time, I've been trying to DIY the cover, with very mixed results. These were made with Canva. Behold, the fruits of my labor!
I've actually made a lot more than just these eight covers, but it will do as examples of the design concepts I've been wrestling with. The covers have been resized to a height of 160 pixels which is the size they will be on Amazon's website when they show up on a search result or category page with other books.
As you can see, readability is a real challenge with such a small cover size.
I played around with different titles, too.
Here is an interesting cover. The cover art is actually very representative. Blonde, wearing a dress, heaven/angelic looking - it hits all the right spots and looks like Asteria!
Sadly, it fails as a cover. It looks like a spiritual non-fiction book about finding religion or something. But I still like it. :)
For the next cover, I went the other way and made it regardless of how much or how little the photo resembled the main character. Instead, I focused on the setting!
This one ticks a lot of boxes: urban setting, fantasy, dress is contemporary (not medieval or armor), and the magic special effect even looks like electricity, which is Asteria's speciality.
The problem with the cover is that it looks very serious. Too serious for my comedic urban fantasy story!
That was when I decided I wanted to focus on the lighthearted, fun part of the story and show that on the cover. This cover has bright, cheerful colors and simple design.
Unfortunately, it looks like a children's book now.
Lastly, I tried a bunch of stuff with the artwork I already commissioned. I like anime/manga, but I think the readers on Amazon prefer realistic style covers
This last one is plain and doesn't stand out. I do like the magic hand special effect and the warm colors.
I thought of a few titles I could use:
- I'm Overpowered but I'll Let the Hero Do His Thing While I Save the Last Boss
- Villain Rescue Scheme
- I'll Save the Villain!
- A Guide to Saving the Villain
- I'm Way Too Overpowered!
The search for the perfect cover continues!
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But my story doesn't feature snakes!
I'd say its about the audience you want to reach. I feel like this coincides more closely to the Japanese genre of Otome games and Isekai, so most likely the anime cover will attract the readers who will enjoy the story more.
For titles you could go full mangaka and combine 1 and 4 into something like:
A Guide to Saving the Villain: I'm Overpowered but I'll Let the Hero Do His Thing While I Save the Last Boss
Then you keep the otome spirit of the book in 1 whilst having a short hand and more practical title in 4. And somehow the name I came up with for my own novel was nowhere near as inspired.
Maybe I should have come up with a title for my story at 2am as well. I damn near write half of the chapters at such a time.
Titles are hard! good luck with yours.
@LinMeili I'm over 200 chapters in, a bit late to change it now.
@Darkwood Sorry, my bad!
@LinMeili np