can I get some feedback on my book cover design?

[J.L.O]

It was more to give you ideas. Good luck.

[deathinreverie]

@Xelyn_Craft

Moving the title up will block part of the original image, and reducing the author name makes it impossible to read in thumbnail size.

I guess it depends on how much you move it. See the white line just below the finger, that’s how much space you can move your title up by. But there is the drip, so, if you want to keep that, I suggest making it an overlay over the text, so it looks like the drip is part of the text, in a sense. As for the author name, it’s the same height, if not more, than your title. The title is what is most important in any view, not really the author name, but I guess that’s up to you to decide. While there are books where the author name is the main focus, and not the title, that’s a select case for few and established authors, and not a particularly popular style in scifi.

@Xelyn_Craft

I know the border is unnecessary but if I don’t include it, it makes the image feel empty and uncentered (even though it is, it’s just at an angle that tricks the eye).

I think the border is what cuts off everything right now. It’s just … there, and I don’t know how else to explain it better other than saying it’s very jarring on the whole.

@Xelyn_Craft

If I change the background image, I might be able to find something a little busier to cancel this effect, but I would still want it to be space imagery, so I don’t know how effective that would be. I also don’t want it to detract too much from the main focus/image, so busier might not be better.

The problem with your stock right now is that it doesn’t fit in with your main image. Contrast is good, but the extra star details for this particular one is something more tied in with stuff like romance and poetry. I don’t know whether these are what you’re aiming for, but the search results yielded stuff that would work a lot better.

@Xelyn_Craft

I don’t see how it looks less like a science fiction the way it is, so I can’t really determine how to fix that.

Well, I gess the best way for you to figure that out would be to check out sample covers in the same genre. Find stuff that have the same line as yours (ie object/text based) and work it out from there. Scifi in general does tend to have a distinct look though, again, it’s up to you how to execute that.

I read that you only use certain programs. I don’t know their limits, but easy to navigate sites that are a lot similar to Photoshop and can help you a lot more with this would Pixlr and Photopea. Gimp too, but that’s got a bit of a learning curve.

I forgot to mention something about the text. Colour schemes are important, and while there’s varying shades of blue, black and off-whites in your graphic, white itself isn’t there, so the white of the text is also jarring.

[Moonless-Nights]

@Xelyn_Craft

I actually did play around with the border like that a little while designing. Do you think it looks better?

I do, though I’m not sure if the way I did it would be the best way. You could maybe make the border solid black or keep only the horizontal lines. The point was to create some separation between the title and the author name so they both stand out a bit more.