Hi Ewers,

I thought you might want to hear from someone who designs book covers for a living, so I'm putting my two cents in.

1. Might I suggest a more conventional aspect ratio for your cover? Your cover is square, which is more like an audiobook cover than a standard book cover. If you're going to be self-publishing this to Kindle, I would recommend a 6 x 8 aspect ratio to better fit the Kindle screen.

2. Your objective is achieved somewhat — a person might say, "Is that a picture of a woman floating in space?" Actually, a person might be more likely to say, "What the...?" because they likely won't be as specific about what they're seeing; it's a little hard to tell what's going on in the image at first glance. If that's your objective, then it's mission accomplished.

That said, I don't think that's what your objective should be. I think a woman floating in space would be mystery enough for the viewer to wonder what the story is about, so the image should be much clearer than the filtered version. A casual browser of books won't be curious enough to wonder what the image is to give the cover more than half a second before moving on.

3. Whatever it is you do to the image for the cover design, never, never let the title and author name be swallowed up in the art like that. The text needs to be readable, not lost and hard to decipher. Here's a good test of whether your book cover works — grab a bunch of cover images from other books, and put your cover image in among them. How does your cover hold up compared to the others? Does it stand out? Does your eye immediately go to it in a positive way or to another book?

That's my two cents. Hope it helps. :)