We have started playing with front cover ideas for Painted Black, available soon. We have three basic ideas we need to fine tune, based on the concepts below. While the publisher, New Libri, will have the last say as to which gets chosen, they do give serious consideration to my opinion, so I need everyone’s help.
Which of the following ideas would catch your eye at a book store, or on Amazon.com? Keep in mind the following brief synopsis:
A homeless man in a glass coffin, that’s all Jo Sullivan was looking for, some new material for her column in Winds of Change, a weekly rag willing to 
dust the dirt off the seamier side of Chicago. But after she nearly turns a graffiti artist into a hood ornament, the tip dropped by a fifteen year old prostitute starts to look more like a front page two inch headline .
When the young girl disappears, her friend Chris hints of a room filled with corpses like a display at a wax museum, and Jo and Chris team up to uncover the truth behind Sloan and Whiteside’s funeral home.
Here are the ideas to choose from.
Please comment below or email me at
deb@debra-r-borys.com.
Debra R. Borys 
I don’t know if you still need an opinion on this but I would go with the first one. AFTER you take out the miscellaneous items on the bottom. I’m assuming they’re important or symbols for the story, since similar items are found in the second one, but they look blatantly photoshopped in and it brings down the quality of your cover drastically. If I were a potential reader it would really bug me and I wouldn’t take the book quite as serious.
The third option has potential but there’s something about the way the two brick walls are blended together at the center that doesn’t quite sit right. I know it’s supposed to look like a building corner (I think) but the angles are off slightly.
I’m no expert at book covers, no, but I do dabble in photoshop and the arts and those are the things that I noticed. Hope it’s of some help 🙂
Well I tried replying using my phone but it doesn’t seem to have worked, so if tomorrow there are two replies, mea culpa.
It is definitely not too late and your comment is appreciated. My publisher assured me that because these are only concept images, I wasn’t to worry about the photoshoppiness of the added in images. There will be much tweaking and professionalizing of the final product. They are just trying to decide which cover would catch the eye and interest of a reader if seen on a shelf or web page.
I tend to favor the two you’ve chosen because they use photos I took myself in Seattle. What I’d really like is for my cover to look like my Gravatar, red door, graffiti face to the left, cobblestone alley in front of the wall. But I don’t remember where I got those images when I first glued them together (using Word and Paint, can you believe it–I don’t really photoshop myself) and we can’t use them if I can’t credit the original sources. At least that’s what I’m told.
Thanks once again for your input. So far the cover you’ve chosen had been the preferred images among my friends and readers.