Experiment, and you will get results...

And so, I decided to go back to the old covers. Experimenting with book covers is definitely one way to know whether or not you've got a good one in the first place. And when I changed my covers the other day, Book I went from being #64 or so on the +Wattpad Science Fiction charts to being #288, and Book II went from being #140ish to being knocked off the charts completely.

And I can see why: compared to the originals, the new covers were just a little bit...messy. My goal is to produce covers that look like they could actually be a paperback that you'd pick up in the store. And those new ones just didn't.

So instead I went back to my original picture that makes up the original cover, scaled it, cropped it (using Gimp, of course) so that the aspect ratios actually look the same (in fact, up to that point I worked with the identical image for both covers), and then added a new font, made the titles sleeker, and tinted Book II.

Much better, and much less washed out and screwed up looking then they were before. Better? I think so.