I’ve just gotten…
I've just gotten permission from Cecilia to share the ebook cover of The Stars Change with you all. Oof! This took a while (mostly of Cecilia doing various drafts and me being picky and asking her to change things). In the future, I am going to only write books with one-word titles. Also, I am going to chop my name in half, or possibly quarter. It is really difficult making text readable at the small size book covers are often displayed on-screen. And while I adore Jack's gorgeous illustration for the cover, I just wasn't thinking about layout issues when I asked him for a cityscape, with a falling star (missile) above it. Jack hasn't been a cover designer, or perhaps he would have realized that we were setting ourselves up for difficulties. As it is, we had to crop a good bit of the illo off, on left and right, to make this feasible. But I think I'm going to try to use the full illo on the cover of the thank-you card backers get, at least, so that they can see it all. Hey, I need to design a thank-you card, and a bookmark, and print them. More for the to-do list, right. Okay, now I'm just babbling, but here, a cover! I love it. The book will be out in October, if all goes well, and yes, pre-orders are still available, esp. for the limited paperback and hardcover editions. I think it's pretty good. :-)
This cover is wonderful! Thanks for the preview.
I hope you can still tinker with it. Having “The” all on its own looks really bad – you can do it if the next line is also a word long, but you can’t do it with the next two words together, with them all at the same size and weight – “The” is too weak on its own. For your title, if keeping all three words together on one line is not an option, if you need to break it, it should be every word gets its own line:
The
Stars
Change
or keeping the “The” with the next word:
The Stars
Change
Look at jacket designs with three-word titles that start with “The”, to see what I mean — some ones off the top of my head (and on my shelves): The Little Stranger, The Round House, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Children’s Blizzard, The Glass Castle, The Poison Eaters, The Third Angel, The Four Agreements, The Blind Assassin, The Last Colony, The Book Thief, The Children’s Book. Across genres and styles, that rule of thumb holds.
I love your writing, and i know you care passionately about design (which is my day job), so I hope this helps!
At this point, it’s out of my hands; I’ll forward your comments to Cecilia, but it may be too late to make changes.