I wondered which friend of yours it was that I commented on, and now I know. Interesting that she is an author.

It's wonderful to see friends helping friends out... But I admit that I hate seeing it in a professional field- Especially where art is involved.

Authors and artists can be both particularly picky and not picky enough.

I glanced at the previous cover-design before checking this one and just had a few things to suggest.

I know little about book covers and illustrations, but I do know plenty about negative space and wasted space. Unfortunatly, this seems to have a great deal too much of the latter.

If a client were to come to me and say "Dave, Do you like this layout for my novel?" I'd say "Don't use it."

There isn't enough here to grab the readers' eye. The plus to the previous design was that it was large enough and forcused enough on one object that you got that feeling that the book was drawing you in.

And "Granted"? Hell of a title; I'd want my clients to be drawn in. There's simply too much empty space with the wood in the background to make that pull happen.

You want to create gravity, you need that dynamic lure! And if your friend is half the author that she is a mother, she'll want that, too!

So! Let's go over the plus sides of this cover, versus the previous try:

1.) The type-set. My God, look at that. The line is glowing, it's sparkling, coming off the page like a fire! Yes. Yes. Yes!

Normally, I would never suggest someone put a strike through a title, but this works; and works well!

2.) I'm sorry, but I just have to say it. The idea of a book for a book-cover is cliche. But! With that in mind, if you can pull it off, this will work nicely! (I just hope that the book actually has something to do with a book!)

The old one had the following advantage over this one; the only one.

The setting. There was no wasted space. I didn't like the lined paper on that one, or the dull gray coloured font that you used, but the lack of Eye Grabbing Nothingness was a huge bonus.

You should consider a third option, a nice mix between the two. I'm sure you would be very happy with it.

All in all? Good work. Make sure you keep track of your negative space.

Yup, she's my friend. I admit, I really don't know much about writing, covers for books or being an author. The most I do on the topic is read novels and look at the pretty covers(I'm really not a good writer)

I appreciate the honesty but I was asked to do this for her, the way it was told to me is she needed a book cover and she didn't have much money to commission someone else to do it. So I offered to do it free of charge.

It's actually really hard to come across stock photo's you can use commercially, I didn't have much at all to work with (I know it's a stupid excuse but really, it's the truth)

1)Actually, she asked for that and I tried my best. Thank you.

2)Yes, it is pretty cliche, but the story does revolve around a book and I thought it would be proper that the book be on the cover.

With the space issue, I needed to make the cover larger (My friend needed it in a larger size to publish). It's very, very hard to enlarge the size of something when useing stock (If you enlarge it to far, you get a mess of pixels) so I had to give somewhere, which made more negative space.

Thanks a lot but she was really happy with this design, I would do a third option in a heartbeat but this one is already in use.

(By the way, the story is great I'm sure she would send you a link where it's being sold at)

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