OK Ladies, I need help.

back cover beta

These are the elements I want to incorporate on the back cover of my poetry book. I am at a complete loss of creativity, and I have absolutely no idea how I want to organize it. I have to leave space for a barcode in one of the lower corners, though.

Any suggestions?

(front cover if you're interested.)

The typography clashes too much. You go from sans serif text on the front to a unique font heading the back. Then a serif font for the first block and italicized serif text for the excert. Too much going on. I would also consider justifying the first block.

I had more...

OK, reload the image Zul, I've made some major changes, removed the header, and swapped locations around. Keep in mind that there will be a bar code on the bottom right. What do you think of it now?

The first block of text on the back is too small compared to the top line.

Oh, and "Pitty" on your warning on the back? It's spelled "pity".

Um, I have no idea what you're talking about with the spelling. Crazy kids must see differently, too.

Stupid midget, changing problems I point out.

You're full of ****. You libelous son of a *****.

Well, personally, I'd do some vertical re-alignment. Like, move the "WARNING!" part down close to the bottom, move the quote box down a bit more from the top, and center the other text between the two. Also, it would probably be okay to put line breaks between the "why." and "Prepare" in the middle text, as well as smaller breaks between the three parts of warning label bit. Finally, there's an apostrophe missing from "won't" in the middle text. The reason I suggest it this way is that there's too much empty space at the bottom. If you realign things, it'll make it seem at least a little more... "full."

If I'm not making any sense and you'd like to see an example of what I'm trying to get across, I made up a changed version with those suggestions. Just let me know if you want to see it.

Buy the book: The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams.

Yeah, feel free to post it.

Okay. I didn't fix the missing apostrophe. Here you go.

Actually, reload. What do we think?

Oops. Er... I mean... Yeah. Never mind. That layout looks fine. You'd really have to try placing the barcode on any layout to see if you like it a certain way.

Yeah. Sorry, I must have skimmed over the part about the barcode in your first post. If you have yourself the approximate physical sizes of your book and the barcode, you could easily adjust any of the layouts to just give enough room for the barcode. You might not even need to change your original layout, because having anything, even a barcode, in the bottom to break up the blank space would make it look better.

Meh, so I messed up, thinking that there were four different styles of type. I wasn't looking at the front when I wrote my earlier comments, but there were still too many. It looks better, although the body of text on the back is too big. It looks like you've made the text bigger to compensate for not having much to say. Also, it comes off as sounding like you wrote it. When someone reads it, and thinks that you wrote it, it becomes an example of what you can expect to find and I don't think it would inspire too many people to buy the book.

I'll take that to heart and see if I can't come up with something better. Honestly, this kind of writing is really difficult for me. I've never been good at advertisements.

Warning!: A lot of the time, I'm just tired and talking out of my ***. So, take my advice with a grain of salt.

I was mainly just looking at it quickly before for any glaring layout problems, but I kind of agree with Zully. I don't think the amount of space the text takes up is a problem, so much as the font size. It would be okay to use that much estate if the font size were reasonable and there were more (decently written) content to fill that space. Even if you don't put more content on the back cover, I'd still at least shrink the font size on the middle blurb a bit, and then reconsider the layout slightly. The font seems a bit large as is.

If you wanted more to fill the back, you could always try some of the standard fillers like getting a few quotes (funny, serious, whatever) from friends/family/professors/random people, pretty simple. I mean, you don't want to fill the back with a bunch of quotes, it's just an idea. As for how it's written, I can hardly comment since I don't write very often. No offense meant, it does seem a little rushed and not very well fleshed out. It's also not really descriptive of what's inside the book, but it's a poetry book, so I'm not sure how descriptive you can be. I'm not someone who should judge the writing, though. It just seems kind of like an afterthought to me.

The use of initials instead of your full name seems kind of weird to me, but that's because I always think of initials as more of a "personal use" kind of thing.

Oh, I'll totally admit to all of that. I have absolutely NO idea what to put on the back of this book. I'm just puking stuff out. I tried to get a friend to write it for me, but he couldn't seem to hit on anything, either.

All of the "back of the book" resources I can find suggest taking something off of my own shelf. All of the books on my shelf have "about the author" blurbs written by famous people about famous people. Kind of doesn't work, here.

"Prepare to be Offended"

That's going to make me buy it all right. I sure would like to have a book that continuously pisses me off from front to back.

You might want to change that. I'm thinking "Prepare to be Challenged." Not only does that sound better but it doesn't sound so standoffish.

Hehehe. After I said "don't fill with quotes," I decided to look at some of the books on my shelf. All of the books I picked up had either a tiny, 3-sentence blurb about the premise of the story, or a bunch of quotes from various authors and newspapers.

JG, when I read "Prepare to be challenged," I started thinking :downs:, which then went to "Your views are about to be challenged", then "PREPARE FOR OBJECTIONABLE MATERIAL", and finally "OFFENSIVE MATERIAL INCOMING!" Yeah, I'm weird.

Yeah, so I'm absolutely unhappy with the whole back cover now. I have NO IDEA what I'm going to put on it.

Naked ladies. It'll get out your message of controversial topics.

So, is that a call for help, or are you just stating your thoughts? If you just want ideas, I'm sure all of us Massassians can start spewing out random crap. It's fun! Although, it gets a bit messy sometimes. And smelly.

Well, I need ideas for content on the back, a nice thick font for the front. I hate everything, the warning sticker, the paragraph, everything on the back but the quote. I don't want to discredit my writing with the stupid **** I had on there. Hmph.

How about a glowing lightbulb on the back? Dead center. Y'know, an enlightened person!

Haha, I've just been screwing around with the layout and look more. Don't ask me why, I'm just bored. I put a little border around the back considering you have one on the front, and wrote up a little idea blurb thing. Anyway, FUN!

I am a literary genius.

I don't know. The only thing I can suggest is to sit down and write out a bunch of different ideas for the back cover, either blurbs or a full layout and blurb if you haven't decided on the layout yet. Choose the one that seems like the best to you, or show the decent ideas to some friends and family and get their opinions. Take a few days to think about it. From what I've heard through other people, it's usually more work than it should be to come up with a decent cover idea. That's probably how you'll have to do it, unless you want to get someone else to write your back cover.

Here are my thoughts.

I'd only keep a few lines of the paragraph, actually, the rest I'd reconsider. The warning label isn't a bad idea, though done before, and you might want to change some wording or punctuation on it. I suggest only keeping the part about what it doesn't contain, so that you can make the font bigger, and since you get the point across about it being offensive in the prior areas.

Ringmaster's Lightbulb on the back looks awesome, and is what you need. Definitely put that on there.

you should make the warning read, "this book contains traces of: shut the hell up and go fornicate yourself."

Instead of the description, you should write one of your better poems, justified, on the back. The warning label is a little lame, I'm afraid. I'd put a professor's review or something in it's place, as well as in the place of the first paragraph.