Book Cover Design Part 2 - updated

So, again, for this project I have re-designed Patricia Briggs's novel "Moon Called." The original will be found below. I did simplify my earlier sketch and feel that the final design is much better. Since the book is mainly about Mercy (who is a coyote shifter) I found an image of a coyote silhouette in front of a moon, which I changed the color of, and one of just a coyote. During this book, she finds herself between two alpha wolves so I found an image of two wolves; the left represents Samuel who leaves his father's pack to become a lone wolf while living with Mercy, the right represents Adam who is Mercy's next-door neighbor and is a bit aggressive towards Mercy in general and to Samuel who shows up in his territory. I carried the moon from the front cover to the back to break up the gray and black color scheme. I could only find one picture of the back of the book (which is $100 to buy in hardcover - I had considered buying the book to view the whole jacket but not at that price) and it was a very low resolution so I was unable to use the actual barcode. Instead I just used a sample barcode from online. I was also able to find the publishing house's logo with a black background and used that.

The font for the title and authors name is Papyrus which is somewhat similar to the current/popular cover's title font. The blurb on the back is just Times New Roman. With the title on the front and spine I did a drop shadow and chose the color by eyedropper from the front cover's moon. With both moons I did the iris blur effect to make it look more like it was in a dark sky instead of just being set on top of a black background. As for Gesalt Principles, the wolves on the back are in a common region while there is synchrony with the colors of the wolves and the coyote to represent similarities but also set apart. I also used the opposite of the proximity principle where I used the moon and the blurb on the back to separate the coyote from the wolves.

March 27 Update:
After showing and discussing the original I created (above) with a friend who has published three books, I decided to switch some things up based on her critiques. She felt that the *original* back cover was more visually appealing, that the author's name on both the front and spine should match the title on both, and she felt that the summary on the back was a bit hard to read with the moon behind it so I created a second version with her suggestions. I did switch the wolves with the coyote because they looked odd and feel that the coyote stands alone better on the bottom.

Original/current cover jacket:

This is not the very first or only cover for "Moon Called" but it is the most popular and currently used one. I found that it was created by Dan Dos Santos and an article about his work for this cover is here.