I have a marketing research question.

If you didn't know who I was and saw this book cover, what kind of book would you think it was? Would it be something you'd consider reading? Would you say the graphic is professional or amateur?

I'm not looking for praise. I have a valid reason for asking these questions.

I don't have the image saved on my phone and it won’t let me copy paste the link, so go to my next Plurk to see it

I have to say that while I would consider reading it, the graphic could be improved. It very much gives that "self-published" vibe that turns some folk off. I hope that helps.

Your image, for reference to others. I don't know you or of you (sorry) and I would take it to be a steampunk style mystery adventure. It does look amateur YA. The blurb could use different formatting and possibly tightening.

The cover is very amateurish, sorry. The illustration isn’t that bad, but the typography drags it down. I do like the frame, though.

Thank you for the honest feedback. I will definitely look into upgrading the cover and see if I can improve the blurb. It is self-published and steampunk. The reason this thread occurred was because of one of the many FB writer/reader/book promo groups I'm on rejected a post with the link to the book because the graphic didn't meet their definition of

professional. Any suggestions on a better font? (Oh, and it's almost but not quite YA. While the bonus chapter for this book is mildly risqué, the one which will be included in the third book is straight up pornographic, so more New Adult than Young Adult.)

I found a few things:

The Steampunk Vector Design Kit

This appealed to me immediately, but will need a commercial-use license. I don't know how much it would be for your use:

Hemera II DEMO Font | Designed by Konstantine Studio

The Regular and Italic are fine, but Bold looks almost glitched, the way the serifs run together:
Steamwreck Font Family (4 styles) by Pixel Sagas

I like this one generally, but I'm not sure it's the most readable:
Octant by Catharsis Fonts

Clean and nicely legible:
Guttenberg MF Font | dafont.com
All-caps, very vintage:
Show Boat Font | dafont.com
Very stylish, but I think not free?
Font Family Page

This one's an eroded font, so I'm only including it for interest's sake:
James Han Font | dafont.com

Octopus - Vintage Style Font

True Black typeface

Very flexible and complete, and subsequently more expensive:

FHA Tuscan Roman

"Starship" has been turning up frequently in my search results:

5 Fonts Bundle 1

Expensive! But classy.

Black Spot Vintage Decorative Font

Similar to "True Black" but lighter weight:

Classic Heritage typeface

This looks like it is muchly toyetic:

Steam Punk Text Styles + Bonus

Narrow is good:

Robot Modern Label Typeface

Thanks Tanarian , I'll check these out at home, probably this weekend. 11 hour days this week.

Yikes.

I’d suggest combining a display font for the title with a very classic, traditional “safe” font for the subtitle and author name, like Goudy or Baskerville or a San serif like Futura. Don’t be afraid to mix up the font sizes to show what the reader should look at first.

That's par for the course in my department. It's going to change next year with a plant wide schedule change.

Tehanu : Do you like any of the ones I found?

I liked the Hemera, Octopus, Black Spot and Classic Heritage, which were clean, readable and well-designed.True Black was pretty good too.