I found a back cover that has some interesting elements. Like you discovered Joshua, a lot of them are very boring, just center-aligned text.

Here's the back cover of "The Spell Sword" by MZB. Not quite in-genre (it's more planetary romance than S&S)

Here are the challenges I see to emulating this design:

I'm not sure what art I can use, or if I like that element of it.

The callout text is a different colour, which is echoed on the front – I've used one colour on the front. If I'm using my dark background, colours don't have much contrast. I'm ok with not doing that though.

The blue star and strip are ugly, but I think they add interest to the design. I'm not sure what I'd replace them with.

Ha ha! Yeah, I'm not sure what happened to the dude's feet. It's cropped from the front cover, where his feet are covered in magical blue swirly shit, so I guess they just didn't bother to make him new ones for the back.

Basically what I like on that design is the pull text, and something about how the block of text is broken up by the image.

I'm feeling cranky about the front cover again now. I keep looking at covers like this, and being all "wahh wahhhh".

The way the text and the lines and the font and the image all work together to say "fuck yes!" is making me all jealous. Even though it's the worst kind of derivative pablum, I still kinda want to read it again.

I just don't have enough white space in the image to make that work though. I've tried making it up, and it looks ok, but the image just looks like it's floating in the middle of nowhere.

Any way I can get some more of what's cool about that Thongor cover with the image I've got?