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ARBUTUS CREEK: Community What happens when crime comes to an island town?
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This customer received 49 book cover designs from 16 designers. They chose this book cover design from negrorichi as the winning design.
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C$240
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49 designs
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Book Cover Design Brief
I have a vision of the cover on my 6" x 9", amazon ready, book cover front as a picture of the town and mountains in black and white, perhaps the mountains in color, below it the ocean (blood red?), then the same town flipped like in a mirror to white to black to suggest the underlying crime in the town. On the back, to highlight the discovery and climax (#1 of 2 in this story) I included attachment of The Well Shed in the forest. It's creepy as creepy gets! Author info and book blub, and bar code here. So, top half of front cover is normal beautiful shot (black and white) of a coastal town, a strip of blood-red ocean, then bottom half mirrored in black to reflect the crime underbelly of the town. The Well Shed is the back cover for readers to figure out once they've read the novel.
Updates
The following is what I consider when I use Amazon tools to build a book cover (I realize this is basic) All of this is only if it works, not meant to corral your creativity—not my intention. I will trust your taste but I’m leaning toward the “soft underbelly of a normal coastal town” theme.
Book Theme:
the emotional core of this story is the desperate fight for the soul of a community.
the corrosive nature of long-buried secrets.
the blurred line between justice and revenge.
FRONT-B&W Top image ocean, town, mountains
Bottom-same image revers B&W (if it works)
Divider: strip of oceans between top and bottom in red and hopefully with some movement of the tide implied
tone, title: ARBUTUS CREEK:
sub-title: COMMUNITY
“A novel by Alfred Cool”
Somewhere on the cover the line: What happens when crime comes to a small-town?” I may change this
Spine same color scheme as cover: Title & subtitle, Author name publisher “Indie” at the moment
Back: split in half top/bottom
TOP: greys and the image of the wellhouse
Edges blended (and textured as rough paper if possible) around back of book and onto spine
Split line of red, as per the front
Author blurb below is: (can be shortened)
Alfred Cool is a Canadian novelist whose crime fiction is steeped in the tides, timber, and tight-knit loyalties of the B.C. coast. Cool writes about ordinary people forced to choose between community and survival when power turns ruthless. Before studying English at Simon Fraser University, he worked as a coast logger; later he built a career as a computer technologist and taught both privately and at the college level. Those experiences—boardrooms and boomtowns, classrooms and logging roads—give his stories their textured sense of place and the moral ambiguity that defines small-town noir. He has published seven novels and won first place (2013) and third place (2012) in the Canadian Authors Association’s CanWrite! national short story contest, with publications in The Danforth Review, The Otter, and several Canadian anthologies. This is his first of a four-book crime series set in a coastal town where long-buried secrets surface with the tide.
Your credits
Publisher
Website for book
Bar code
Added Wednesday, 20 August 2025
Target Market(s)
This story is for adult readers who enjoy dark, gritty crime thrillers with a strong sense of place. Fans of character-driven narratives with morally complex protagonists, like those written by Dennis Lehane or Tana French, would connect deeply with the intricate web of corruption and secrets in a small town pushed to its breaking point. It will especially appeal to those who appreciate stories where the setting itself becomes a character.
Industry/Entity Type
crime thriller-mystery novels (fiction)
Font styles to use
Other font styles liked:
- I plan the interior to be Garamond
Look and feel
Each slider illustrates characteristics of the customer's brand and the style your logo design should communicate.
Elegant
Bold
Playful
Serious
Traditional
Modern
Personable
Professional
Feminine
Masculine
Colorful
Conservative
Economical
Upmarket
Requirements
Must have
- A sense of duality on the over, or more precisely, crime underlying the natural beauty of the town
Nice to have
- It would be nice if the ocean strip appeared as a river with movement implied
