YA fantasy ebook cover

Dusk is Coming

James Hockley

I'm the author! I write young adult fantasy books, and I'm just getting started on a self-publishing journey. I've released a couple of books (check them out on Amazon), but it hasn't really got going yet.

This is a "teaser" short story - reward for people who sign up to my email list. It's about a fairy-tale which warns of shadows stealing children, and the time that this fairy-tale comes true for a young family in the wilderness.

Young adults (16 to 25); maybe a slight bias towards female readers. Ebook available for download, so no location restrictions.

Update day 2: I like darker colours in general from what i’ve seen, but some sort of accent colour would be cool. I think a yellow accent works well on blue backdrop, but it would be great if we could incorporate a red accent - might work slightly better on a more teal backdrop.

Happy to be proven wrong though!

Day 2 update: I have some thoughts on colours (see above). Emphasis on the shadow please, and abstract probably works a bit better than a direct personification. This is a pretense for an “epic” story, so any characters on the cover shouldn’t be too prominent. I said wilderness below (which would be great I we can get it to work), but a creepy forest also seens to work quite well for the tone of the book.

Original:
I have a palette for my "brand" based on research into my genre. I include my palette as an attachment below. It would be good if you could consider this.
I also attach some "bundles" of book covers in my genre for inspiration, collected into "colour" groups. I suspect a darker hue would work better here given the "shadowy" theme.
I think it's important to incorporate shadow into the cover, and a sense of the wilderness (think wide dry plains with mountain backdrops), but I don't want to dictate too much.
If you'd like to read the story for inspiration then please get in touch. It's only 8k words - though it is undergoing an edit!