Title: Fate

Author: Maya Mirza-Gill

Designer: Maya Mirza-Gill

Genre: Young adult

Graphics: This is the third book in a trilogy. The others have similar covers: a silhouetted figure and lightning. Perhaps the author/designer felt obligated to keep the style uniform, once the first volume was published. That’s understandable, but it would have been better to have turned to a professional for the later volumes. As it is, this one has the least intelligible image, which, unfortunately, is cut off at the top and bottom by large black swaths.

Typography: The title has a drop shadow to make it stand out, an indication that the wrong font was chosen—but at least the color is correct. There seems to be a single font used on the cover. It would be better for the title to be in one font—say, a serif font, as here—and the rest of the text to be in a sans serif font.

The biggest problem with the text is that it isn’t big enough. At thumbnail size everything except the title is illegible, and even that is too small.

The tagline, which hugs the bottom and is oddly divided, actually has nothing to do with this book. It’s praise of the first volume in the series. That kind of thing “works” only if the one giving the praise is famous, but that isn’t the case here.

Overall: Stand back from the monitor a bit and look at this cover. It’s hard to distinguish anything, other than the title word.

A cover is a book’s most important marketing tool, and this is truer for ebooks than for print books. An ebook cover needs to catch a buyer’s eye in seconds, or it won’t catch it at all. There is nothing catchy here, and, for Fate, that may have proved fatal.