[Warren Williams]

Taking another stab at my own cover design before calling in the pros. Still bad? Face or no face. Font? Talk to me.

 

[Indigo W]

I'm no expert by any stretch, but the face seems to copy-pasted to me. Maybe try without the face?

 

[Z. Rider]

I like the image, but the typography does look amateurish. Typography is hard.

(In case he doesn't get the image link fixed, you can view it here.)

 

[Lionel's Mom]

I could see it by right clicking and opening in a new tab but's it broken on the board. It does look amateurish, but I can't give you any advise since I could never in a million years design my own covers.
The face just floating there is not good, but even if you took it out, it's just so colorless. Maybe if the words were in color it might help.

 

[JV]

As others have said, the picture doesn't show up on the boards, but I was able to get to it.

The face looks like it was cut out and glued on to a black background. I'm assuming that's not what you were going for? I'm assuming you want it to look like she's emerging from the darkness? It just looks like a sort of square head floating over the darkness.

 

[Rin]

I think I'd like it better without the face.

 

[MonkeyScribe]

Call in the experts. That's pretty much always the answer.

 

[Ros_Jackson]

Taking another stab at my own cover design before calling in the pros. Still bad? Face or no face. Font? Talk to me.

Sorry to be harsh, but it does look amateurish to me, and it's in several different but subtle respects. The author font is too small to show well in thumbnail. I'm no expert on fonts, but those just don't look right. The overall image is too grey and low-contrast, and it won't catch many people's eyes. The face doesn't seem to belong to the rest of it. I could go on, but you get the idea.

It's a nice picture of the hole, so perhaps you could keep that and pay someone to work on fonts and overall composition. The pros can be cheap if you shop around.

 

[Patty Jansen]

Yes.

The hole takes up too much of the image and gives the text no room to breathe.
The text is too small and squished at the top and bottom.
The fonts are uninteresting
The entire image does not draw the eye through the lack of contrast and/or colour.
Not sure what's up with the face.
What's the genre? Looks like horror to me, but the title/subtitle suggests crime fiction. Genre needs to be reflected on the cover.

 

[cinisajoy]

Yuck on the face.