Cover Reveal for At Her Mercy/At the World's Mercy (我为鱼肉)

[douqi]

Rosmei has revealed the covers for all planned eight volumes of Ning Yuan's court intrigue baihe novel At Her Mercy/At the World's Merch (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou). Per previous practice, they did not provide any further information about the novel in their cover reveal tweet, so once again I resigned myself to doing some free marketing and promotional work for a commercial entity. The cover designs are as follows:

Comments

[douqi]

I saw lots of people on Twitter admiring the cover, so this is probably going to be a minority opinion, but my main feeling is: it's... fine, I guess? I'm not a fan of the character art style, though I am relieved to be spared the quite cartoon-y character art I've seen in some adjacent areas of publishing. I'm also hoping the details on the scenery covers show up better on the physical books than in digital format.

(I am capable of liking covers! I like morefate's designs for Ning Yuan's Middle-Aged Love Patch, as well as their designs for Da Ying's xuanhuan titles)

[halfcactus]

They look good when they're posted all together like this and you can see the color palette, but here's my minority opinion: I find the text placements on the front covers (flush on the corners) very bemusing, composition-wise. Also I wish Rosmei would be better at title typography... I've seen worse from them but I'm frustrated at the wasted potential in this.

[douqi]

Yeah, that typography choice is... weird. Tbh, I feel like the English-language publishers of these c-novels in general have struggled quite a bit with title/cover typography.

[halfcactus]

I'm glad that you at least still have versions of the book with more satisfying design choices and that you can actually read!

One of my annoyances is that everyone is so collectively defensive about publishers that any cover dissatisfaction is instantly snuffed by people who purport to understand the industry. Like just a couple of weeks ago there was a hugely viral post that claimed that not having synopses was standard + smart marketing tactics. XD I'm actually fascinated that Rosmei seems to have latched on to the "title in all-caps + metallic effect" formula that 7S has been doing for its gufeng books and then... stopped there, which strikes me as bizarrely bare-minimum design research. /opinions I can never share publicly as someone who does dabble at graphic design but is not in the industry

[douqi]

Yeah, what is UP with people defending publishers' sub-optimal (to say the least) decisions as if they were being paid loads of money to do it?? I don't understand, even after having watched someone tie themselves in knots trying to argue that Rosmei couldn't possibly write summaries because... that would be copyright infringement, the last time the summaries discourse rolled round.

(pretty sure the reason Rosmei can't produce summaries at this point is because no one involved in the process has actually read this and the other baihe title; gossip suggests that they're not giving translators enough time to actually finish reading the books before starting work)

Re: graphic design — momijizukamori has also repeatedly lamented the 7seas/Rosmei approach to design and typesetting.