Nothing lasts forever, not even a planet. In the distant future, Equestria no longer exists, the land stripped of all its life and resources. As a final resort, the princesses who guarded their world put into motion the only plan that could save their people. Colony ships, each one led by a princess and sent to a different candidate planet, ensuring redundancy.
It was the best plan they had. But any plan needs to have room for adaptation. The planet of Eldyrea was not forgiving to Equestrians. To survive, those who landed had to accept a new change: the chimaera. They walk Eldyrea on two hooves, in the scales of dragons. They wear the manes of kirins and look through the sharp eyes of griffons. And for as long as they could remember, they were alone in the world.
When two young chimaeras, Nisus and August, find themselves face to face with the creatures of their legends, the secrets of how they grew from a seed of metal and magic will force them to question their identities as Eldyreans. United with their kind to face their new rivals, they will understand why they have been left alone under the light of a wild star.
I like the atmosphere, and how you conveyed each character's deal.
Nitpick: In canon, dragons have one-word names and kirin have two-word names.
10180716
I've just started posting chapters. I have a lot of chapters pre-written and edited, so I should be able to keep a steady schedule for a while.
10229964
Probably the first impression it makes.
I haven't read it yet but the synopsis and picture aren't selling me on it very well. They remind me of the many bad fanfics I've run into on Fanfiction.net over the years where the author completely failed to make a sufficient connection to the familiar elements of canon and basically wrote an original story without going to the trouble of cooking up original set pieces.
(People generally read fanfiction because it's a mix of what they already know and love with new things. In that picture and synopsis, I have no idea how this relates to MLP canon and, taken as an original story concept, the synopsis feels like it doesn't properly understand the difference between piquing curiosity and just being vague. As a result, it leaves me more feeling that "this story doesn't contain anything of interest to be hinted at".)
It also doesn't help that the "They walk Eldyrea on two hooves, in the scales of dragons. They wear the manes of kirins and look through the sharp eyes of griffons." sounds like the kind of thing that would be cooked up by someone who also created a red and black alicorn OC.
(Leading with that leaves the impression that a "cool description" implies something interesting to read about when, in truth, the "cooler" you make your character(s), the less interesting they are to read about because good writing is about about overcoming obstacles and. the more advantages you give a character, the harder it is to make their story interesting. Heroes are fun to read about because they "triumph", not because they "succeed"... and that feeling is produced by the reader feeling how much they had to struggle for that success.)
10237255
I think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to synopsis descriptions. I'm not the best at writing the descriptions for my stories, and I think it's because I want to reserve as much as I can for the actual story. The picture is my own drawing and is about the limits of what I can do with a mouse, so I get why it's unappealing.
However, I think you've gotten the wrong idea from the physical description. I placed it in the synopsis in order to make my readers aware of what my characters are since the original elements that I bring have not been visually represented before in the show. It is not for "coolness" as I am more than aware of how to write my stories without relying on the "wow" factor of a premise. I don't understand what you mean by "advantages" however. I leave nothing in the synopsis to suggest this is about overpowered or perfect characters.
Thanks for the input. Though I believe you have the entire story pegged wrong, that only serves to make your first point more valid. I need to rework the synopsis to the story.
10237469
It's not about how much detail you give, but what kind of detail. You want to hook the reader's interest, but leave them curious about what you left out. Your new synopsis does a much better job of that.
(In a character-focused story, you can reveal the entire plot in your synopsis and, length aside, it will still only make the readers more interested because they'll want to follow along as the characters react to those events.)
I actually don't mind the drawing style. I have a drawing tablet that I bought for a shelved project to code a non-boring hand-eye coordination trainer and I certainly can't draw that well.
The problem is that, in the ideal set by professional cover artists, a good cover is supposed to be both characteristic of what the story centres around and a teasing lure to look closer. (Look at, for example, Larry Niven's Ringworld, which has a picture of the ringworld on it... or Isaac Asimov's Nemesis, where you have a spacecraft in front of two worlds and a red star.)
Now, obviously, fanfiction covers aren't held to that strict standard, but there's still sort of an expectation that, if nothing else, they'll either depict a moment from the story or its backstory as in The Maretian or they'll attempt to sculpt some kind of sense of anticipation for the feeling the story evokes, as with the ones that use generic imagery like a half-shadowed planet from space for a sci-fi story or an illustration of a leather-bound book cover for something that reads like a fable or what have you. The whole point is to give the reader a taste of what lies inside to lure them in.
When I look at your cover, what I get from it is the equivalent of an OC taking a selfie and I think "If the most fascinating/characteristic moment of this story is a character that doesn't even have enough personality to be caught in a moment more distinctive than posing for a photo in a void absent other relevant details, this story's gonna be boring."
You save as much of that as possible for the body of the chapters. Describing your characters' species like that in the synopsis risks acting as a warning that "this author doesn't know how to prioritize information. The prose within is probably going to be dull and/or bloated."
Relying on the "wow" factor of the premise isn't necessarily a bad thing. The aforementioned Ringworld has this as its back-cover blurb and it's enough, on its own, to sell Ringworld as adventure sci-fi:
You listed off how they combined the advantages of various species (eg. griffon eyes, dragon scales, etc.). Throwing that in, not only in the synopsis, but so early, suggests that you believe that is an argument in favour of reading your story and, in a world where so many bad authors do think smashing together advantages into a single cardboard cut-out makes a more interesting character, that counts strongly against your story as people wander by.
That said, as I mentioned before, your new synopsis is much better and I definitely want to give it a try now. (I can't do it right away though. I'm just taking a momentary break from fixing a website that got broken by a PHP upgrade.)
There may be more room for optimization but, now, the details describing them are justified because they're driving home how different from their ancestors circumstances have forced the Elydrean descendants of Equestria to become.
10237659
I get that, but unfortunately, there are no depictions of these creatures I can use and I don't have a drawing pad so my workflow for art is slow. I chose this framing based on covers of some of my favourite books, the Age of Fire series and the Demon Cycle series. Both simply have the characters posing on the cover that the story focuses on, and for the same reason as putting the description early, I wanted to have an image for the reader to have in their head when thinking about the appearance of these creatures.
A personal favourite project of mine, but for now, I'm marking it for the hiatus shelf because I'm in a writing mood and I just gotta step away and try something else.