Re: bookcovers.com
It's extremely difficult to judge them without knowing something about what they charge. To quote Ingvar Kamprad, a design without a price tag is meaningless. They're not top-of-the-line commercial designers, but they look professional enough, and the work I'm seeing on their site is superior to most of the covers I see from PODs and vanity presses.
I'm made a little nervous by their statement that "Because of the competitive nature of our most famous client's projects, only a very small sample of designs appears on this website." There are few things more public than the cover of a book, unless they're doing proprietary designs for privately printed and distributed books. It's possible. It just sounds a little odd to me. I could be wrong.
Onward.
Various observations:
The examples on their front page are better than the ones on their portfolio page. That's not unreasonable.
At least one person on their staff is good with PhotoShop.
If you use them, don't let them be your only proofreaders.
Their type is decent, if uninspired. Same goes for their layouts. They've got a few clunky-looking examples there, most of which have their subheads and other subordinate copy set in too large a type size. However, those may reflect the client's input -- either because the client wanted it that way, or because the client gave them excessively sparse cover copy to work with.
The Joe Vitale cover design is butt-ugly, but I'll bet it was Vitale's idea. It doesn't look anything like the rest of the firm's work.
I'd say the most striking thing I'm seeing is that they're doing their best to work around some very small budgets. The only two cover images that look like they were created specifically for the book they're on are the flaming box thingy on Destroy Your Debt, and the author portrait on the cover of Career Coaching. Everything else is stock art -- adaptable, generic images that are sold by the gigabyte.
Bookcovers.com have done what they can with the available material. Look at the Salinas rodeo book. They've isolated the image of the horse and rider, and digitally smushed the original background of that photo into an abstract color field that focuses all the attention on the one dramatic image. That's getting a lot of whoosh out of one photo.
There are two titles on the portfolio page I find admirable, and two I halfway admire. The first half is Stop Setting Goals, which IMO needs to lose the orange stripe at the top. Kill that, and it's an unexceptionable piece of modernist graphic design that wouldn't look bad next to a Lucky Strikes box.
The other halfer is Fusion Branding, a cover that's got next to nothing going for it. There's no interesting cover image, the palette is limited, and there's very little text to play with beyond the title and the author's name. But it's nice, balanced type (okay, the FU in FUSION could have been kerned a little tighter), well arranged on the page. These guys have been handed some pretty perfunctory lemons, and they've made a decent glass of lemonade out of them.
A Career Devotional isn't as resource-poor as Fusion Branding, but there's little enough to work with there: the title, two lines of sales copy, the author's name, and a stock art photo of the sun breaking through some clouds. Again, it's nice, clean type, sensitively arranged on the page. They've positioned the art so that the bright horizontal bar of sunlight both emphasizes the sales copy and makes it easier to read. And do you see how they've framed the whole thing with a little border in which the background image has been made slightly lighter? That's a very nice touch. Pulls the whole thing together.
The other cover I give full points is Running on Plenty at Work, which looks so completely commercial and professional that my eyes keep sliding off it. It takes some effort for me to register it as "design" rather than "book" -- which of course is what's supposed to happen. The title type is worth a mention. I like that near-zero leading. I also like the way they've lifted the little blue car out of the clip art, reduced it in size, and made it part of the title type design. It has a jaunty look, and it keeps them from having to stretch out "Running on" to in ways that would be unattractive, hard to read, or disruptive of the overall design.
So, what do I think? I still think it depends on their prices. I'm getting a "cheap and ingenious" vibe. If their prices are low enough, these guys are a find. Which is a significant datum, because there are designers out there you wouldn't want to take at any price. On the other hand, if their prices are unreasonably high, their work isn't so unique that you couldn't get comparable service elsewhere.
Of course, if your publisher referred you to them, that changes everything. Let us know immediately if that's the case. Otherwise, do some shopping around. There are websites that cater to both the freelancer community and the people who hire freelancers. Find them. Check out the prices. Make your own decisions.
I have five last bits of advice:
First, they can't design your cover until they know how many pages there are in your book. They can do a preliminary design, but not a final one.
Second, make sure they design an attractive spine. If your book gets into bookstores, it may get shelved face-out, but there's a good chance it's going to get shelved spine-out. That's a reality of life. Make every square centimeter of that little stripe of paper count.
Third, browsing readers really want to know what kind of a book this is. Tell them. If you feel like you don't know how to do that, turn off your author mind and consult your reader mind. Also, go to a bookstore and look at how other books do it. You're allowed. Always remember to steal from the best.
Fourth, if you're working with Bookcovers.com from a distance, do everything you can to get a high-resolution version to check. If you're looking at a low-res image, your brain will fill in the details as they should be, not as they necessarily are. If you don't have a lot of experience judging image quality, turn the cover upside down and look at it that way. You'll stop seeing it as art and words, and see the repro quality instead.
Fifth, don't let yourself be taken for a ride -- there's no real ceiling on the amount you can pay for a cover -- but don't skimp in ways that affect the final result. Good covers can cost a bit, but the most expensive thing in publishing is a book that doesn't sell.