Sarah Hoyt offers some advice on cover design for independent publishing: Of Covers and Sales.
I’ve never been entirely happy with the cover for In the Shadow of Ares, mainly because it’s a landscape with no explicit connection to the events of the novel. This is mainly the result of wanting to get the thing out the door without further procrastination – I was worried that if we looked around for an artist and went through that whole process, it would involve another six months of fiddling and dawdling.
So, I did it myself.
It’s attractive, but the problem is that it tells you nothing about the book itself and perhaps gives the impression that it’s meant as a mainstream rather than young-adult book. When it comes time to publish Ghosts of Tharsis, if not before, we’ll have to redo the cover — there are only so many suitable pictures of Iceland-as-Mars in my photo archive, so if we can get some of our stories and sequels finished, we’ll quickly run out of those options anyway.