Lost Solace - Cover Options

For a while I've been saying "Wow!" about my cover designer's work on the Lost Solace cover. (Lost Solace will be my next release.) I had seen Matt Hill's work on other books and was really impressed, so the chance to work with him has been great. We've been trying out different things, but as you can imagine, when you are close to a project you dither about every ellipsis spacing, every variant of title placement ... but sometimes it's handy to step back and let other people give their first impressions of different options. So that's what we'll do, with a temporary blog post aimed at getting some feedback on which variants people prefer.

Let me just point out that these are draft designs, not finished, so they are not meant to be perfect! But even for drafts I have been impressed with their quality.

I've numbered the images - you'll need to click on them to see the larger versions.

You can respond in the comments below, but here are some questions to consider.

1. Which title treatment ("Lost Solace") do you prefer?
2. Which tagline treatment ("They're called the Lost Ships" etc) do you prefer?
3. Which version of the main character, Opal, do you prefer? (Differing levels of close up.)
4. Do you prefer the all blue designs, or like some orange (as in 2)?
5. Anything else? (E.g. the design for 1 was originally going to have a spaceship in the background.)

I also welcome any comments on the blurb for the back of the book:

Sometimes spaceships disappear with everyone on board – the Lost Ships. But sometimes they come back, strangely altered, derelict, and rumoured to be full of horrors.

Opal is on a mission. She’s been seeking something her whole life. Something she is willing to die for. And she thinks it might be on a Lost Ship.

Opal has stolen Clarissa, an experimental AI-controlled spaceship, from the military. Together they have tracked down a Lost Ship, in a lonely nebula far from colonised space.

The Lost Ship is falling into the gravity well of a neutron star, and will soon be truly lost … forever. Legends say the ships harbour death, but there’s no time for indecision.

Opal gears up to board it. She’s just one woman, entering an alien and lethal environment. But perhaps with the aid of Clarissa’s intelligence – and an armoured spacesuit – Opal may stand a chance.

Can she face her demons and survive?

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