Terrible Writing Advice // Wattpad Anime "critique"

20. Covers and Titles

Welcome back to the classroom, everyone. This time around I'll take a page our of Rel's book and be more straightforward and real with you. And I can already guess you're kinda narrowing your eyes on the topic for this part. Since these things are purely depended on writing skill, I'll drop the usual condescending comedic character for this part. 

Now then. If there's one paradox of sort a lot of people bring out in the comments is that, somehow, generic things seem to catch attention of readers while properly written stuff kinda goes under the radar. Weird right? Well, when it comes to most people who read on here, they go in the following order:

1. Story COVER

2. Story TITLE

3. Story SYNOPSIS

In other words put, the cover is the first thing a new reader sees in regards to your story. So this is where we'll start off today. The synopsis has already been covered in a previous part, so we'll focus on the first 2 aspects.

~COVERS~

Now, i get it too. Writing and graphical design are 2 types of skills that aren't dependent on each other and the quality of writing shouldn't be dictated by how good or how bad your book cover is, right? Normally, true. But with covers on here it's just like with the other media used for characters, powers and, as painful as it is, harem lists/bios. AKA, the average reader chooses what to start reading based on visuals alone. Only afterwards is he kept around by your skills to write or not. 

Almost 6 years into this website by this point, I can tell you straight away that 99% percent of fanfics have as cover either the Anime cover for that respective story, or one of if we're talking multiple seasons. OR a randomly picked and cropped out wallpaper/fanart of that show/its characters. 99%. As you'd expect often 50+ stories happen to have the same cover and then the story gets lost in a spiral of "Oh, I think  I've seen this story already. Skip.", even if said story was something completely different. And then comes the standard My story doesn't get engagement. Guess I'll give up. 

Let me know if that brought up any memories for some of you. 

The other 1% of covers are either extremely ambiguous phone wallpapers or wallpapers taken from some games/other series that the reader has basically no indication of what sort of story it is and has to go to the tile to figure it out. But the problem is that a title has less chances to entice a reader to pick op your story. And considering how most wattpad fanfics have as a title something very generic most of the time like The Black dragon emperor of Death or Son of [insert fictional name here], you can probably imagine how effective it is for engagement, right? Not even worth mentioning title like RWBY x reader or Highschool dxd x reader and leave it at just that, because for once it screams lack of effort and secondly, has for last year or so fallen into the niche of oh, these stories will probably suck. That's not always the case, as some people just can't think of good titles, and we'll get to that later. But my point is that you're not leaving that good of a first impression. 

The solution? Well, for those of us who can't draw to save their life, myself included, composition. But I don't mean the ones that take a picture of some characters, say Issei or Deku, remove the white background and then slap them like stickers on top of an iconic anime wallpaper like Aincrad from SAO, for example. Don't get me wrong, it's a way better effort than just the anime cover copy pasted, but the  different art styles of the characters on top of that background leaves a very blank taste. 

Canva is a good tool, even the free version that I use for composition, with even templates to serve as a starting point you can modify later on. It can be jerking at times, but it's pretty useful.  And my personal advice when making covers/composition, simplicity is your best friend, as it shields you from making a cover that's just too tacky and overbearing.