I’m building covers for the self-published version of my M/M erotic romance space opera MORO’S PRICE. Bear in mind, I’m still finessing the art placement and text on both covers.
Cover #1 links in some themes from the story (faceted diamond, star-field, male fighter in silhouette), but I still think it looks a little too obviously self-pub. Not an insult toward self-pub stuff in general, just that for so long, self-pub M/M romance has had a tendency toward rather awful covers following specific naked-male imagery. I can make this one work with more effort. It’s not too obviously ‘naked-guy’, and it opens up theme continuity toward other books in this loose series. I like the idea of figure silhouettes refracted through different gemstone cut images.
But I don’t *love* it. Maybe for Cover #2, if I remove out the busy star-field (a reference to earlier editions from small-press publishers), and put it on this red-to-black ground instead?
That could work. It’s less visually noisy, and keeps most of the themes I want.
Then again, I could step away from erotic romance cover tropes entirely:
Cover #3 completely avoids romance cover tropes, and has a more science-fictional scene: a planet tilting toward dawn, a Sun Devourer angling its tentacles down through upper atmosphere, and a starship blazing upward and away.
I like this cover as much as #2, even though this one has no genre markers to attract M/M erotic romance readers. It keeps the red-to-black gradient ramp I’m using for most of the Lonhra Sequence self-pub covers, like the next installment of Tel’s story ‘Soulbinder’, and the standalone ‘Needle and Sword’.
Given that a lot of earlier M/M romance readers didn’t particularly like ‘Moro’ in its previous small-press versions, and that I’m trying to attract SFF readers who are sympathetic to romance, I might just stick with Cover #2 or #3.
But I have more to do on both, while considering how to build thematically-linked covers for the ‘Moro’ sequels and the standalones ‘Leopard of Saba’ and ‘Second Sunrise’.
I’m not even remotely ready to figure out marketing, especially since I cringe at spamming books across social media.