Time For You to Have Your Say!

Fighting Fear Cover SampleWe are nearing publication of my next book and don’t want to make the mistakes I made with my first self-published book so we’re trying to take things a little slower, despite my natural desire to rush headlong into it again!

Unlike A Very Different School, which was the first book in my Fantastic Fieldtrips series, we have an illustrator, Tyler Price, who is working hard on illustrations for the interior of the book as well as working with us to create a great front cover.

We really want to get this right though, so, even though it may put the release date of the book back a little, I’d really, REALLY appreciate it if you’d help us out by giving some (constructive) criticism.

The series is about Professor Alexander and his class of school kids who go on fantastic fieldtrips back in time to learn lessons by watching how different events unfolded in history. It’s part fact, part fiction.

Fighting Fear teaches about how to learn to overcome fear by the time travelers watching David defeat Goliath and then going back in time to watch him growing up to see how he became brave enough to face a giant with nothing but a sling and a stone.

A sample of the current idea for the front cover is shown at the top of this post. Don’t worry about the fonts and letter sizes, I’ve just slapped those in quickly for the purposes of this exercise. What we’d love to know though, is the answers to any/all of the following questions:

  1. If you saw that book cover on the shelves or on Amazon, would you buy the book for your 6-10 year old child/grandchild/friend/relative?
  2. Does the cover need to include an image of the time machine/the time travelers?
  3. Does the cover, as it is, make you think this is just another David and Goliath book?
  4. Are the cover and name universally appealing to both boys and girls?
  5. What do you think of the title? Can you think of a better one?
  6. What, if anything do you think we should do differently to make it more appealing to people like you browsing looking for books?

Your input on any of those questions would be greatly appreciated!

Peter

About PeterP

I am a blogger, author, stay at home dad, speaker, web hosting trainer and geek (I was so excited to get an iPad that I actually made up a song and dance about it). I am English by birth, but currently live in California with my wife and our three children. I ran a web hosting business for nine years and found that many, if not most of my clients had never learned how to use any of the functions associated with hosting so I wrote a book to try and teach just those skills. I must admit to having fallen in love with WordPress (possibly a little TOO much) and I honestly find it hard to understand why anyone would use anything different to build a site! WordPress is wonderful! My passion is to help others achieve their goals with their websites/blogs. I believe that, with a little help, anyone can have an awesome site.

3 thoughts on “Time For You to Have Your Say!”

  1. Tanya says:

    Hi Peter

    I personally think that would only appeal to boys, partly because of the colours but also it is only boys on the cover (although that can’t be helped because of the story!).

    If a corner of the cover could show the time machine and some of the children looking on at the scene this would alter some of the colour and allow it to be lightened a little. This would also enable you to get a girl or two on the cover thus appealing more to the girlies.

    Joshua (age 10) says the giant needs to look more like a giant.

    Eloise (age 13) says perhaps the cover could be split in two with a zig zag style line, with the time machine and travellers in one half and David and Goliath in the other.

    Lastly, nit picking a little bit, but my first impression looking at David is that he’s going to a Kung-fu fight (apologies to you illustrator!!).

    Hope that’s useful.

    Tanya xx

  2. Bonnie says:

    If you saw that book cover on the shelves or on Amazon, would you buy the book for your 6-10 year old child/grandchild/friend/relative?

    Not without reading the description of the book, first (but that’s true of any book…I don’t judge it by the cover. My kid, on the other hand, definitely does).

    Does the cover need to include an image of the time machine/the time travelers?

    I think that would be helpful.

    Does the cover, as it is, make you think this is just another David and Goliath book?

    Yes.

    Are the cover and name universally appealing to both boys and girls?

    I see this and think “boy book”.

    What do you think of the title? Can you think of a better one?

    Sometimes it helps kids identify a series they enjoy reading when there’s something about the series in the title. For example: “Professor Alexander Adventures: Fighting Fear”

    What, if anything do you think we should do differently to make it more appealing to people like you browsing looking for books?

    A brief description of the book in a smaller font, beneath the title, can be helpful. For example, “Fighting Fear” (A fantastic field trip encounter with David & Goliath).

  3. Bonnie says:

    In addition to my response on question 5, after reading the bottom note on your current cover, perhaps you could call it: “Fantastic Fieldtrips: Fighting Fear”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
http://peterpollock.com/2013/10/time-say/
peterpollock.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-17
26386
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:FQEWNJVQZMJYQLP4FA6WF23LJGQPC3JE
<urn:uuid:22bb2958-a9dd-4616-877b-6fd6237247b3>
2018-04-20T12:09:40Z
209.188.86.248
text/html
sha1:VPAOBDZVKGHUB562JXZDP54FX76TJTVY
<urn:uuid:f06a68f1-f74c-4aa4-8f7c-53593cf7092e>
http://peterpollock.com/2013/10/time-say/
response
<urn:uuid:84931054-ea30-4c2e-ac4b-eafafd1a06c7>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-228-193-233.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-17
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf