For this next one, a reprise of Bryony, I wanted to use the same font, but a rather bolder graphic approach. I have no idea if it works at all visually, but I gotta confess, the thumbnail reads better than the actual cover. (Sure, that's just what I need to do, redo all my back catalog covers. In, y'know, MY COPIOUS SPARE TIME.)
Thoughts, as always, welcome. (I just don't know about the author name there--it really gouges the line of the rose. Maybe I should yank out one of the stems on the right and put it in there in black instead...)
Interesting! I really like the original cover, of course, but changing up covers does sometimes catch the eye of new readers, I hear.
The remake is lovely. Very much in the modern minimalist graphic and text vein. Eye-catching and nice, but yeah, I miss the clockwork bee. The old cover (while not optimized for thumbnails) had character and gave more a feel for what kind of story is beyond the cover. (If I didn't know that Kingfisher was you, this is a cover I would admire, but pass by. Clockwork bees are a better signifier of possible interest to me. But, ymmv!)
And I agree, these make a nice pair of botanically-themed boldly graphic covers!
There are no right choices! :)
That said, the graphic is really pretty and I could see inserting author name into one of the dark stems.
As for Byrony. Ditto with the other comments about making the title text fully horizontal or more angled. Personally, I'd yank both vines in the bottom right and replace them with the author's name in black in the same curved line it already has. Other than that, very pretty in a "this signals horror" way to my eye/visual lexicon.
However, I'm not sure they accurately convey the style/subject matter of the books. Seeing these, I would expect something a lot more modern than what you actually write. The stories would come as surprises.
One of the biggest challenges for me when making the mental headspace jump from artist to book cover designer was the realization that it didn't matter if I could paint a particular cover if the style wasn't signalling the right thing to readers. There's a style vocabulary that helps signal the contents of a book to readers, and it evolves every few years. That's the thing you have to sit down and figure out in bookstores... taking down a million books and saying 'this is a steampunk alt-history, and this is how the book covers for it and other steampunk alt-histories are similar, and that's how readers realize 'oh, hey, it's a steampunk alt-history.' That sort of thing.
Greenteeth looks great!
The font would look better if it was curving up like the petals behind it so the words flow round the flower. The weird slant does nothing for it.
The name would look better climbing up the black thorny vine at the bottom right.
I therefore thoroughly approve of T Kingfisher appearing somewhere in the design; the artist who creates it deserves that recognition but it's also fun for the person looking at it and for it. Mind you, one of the Hermes artists has one or more monkeys hidden in every design, which might not work very well with book covers...