I've been pouncing on any and all news about Brandon Sanderson's upcoming The Way of Kings, and hounding his blog and twitter incessantly for the latest. The release of the cover art yesterday is huge news for me; my heart jumped when I saw an image in his latest blog post. Mind, just the fact that there was an image there elicted my bodily response—it didn't even register with me what the image was before I involuntarily got excited.
I then settled down and actually looked at the cover. After all that anticipation, I was dismayed my first thought was a big meh. I don't think it's all that great, despite wanting it to be. For one thing, I didn't really know what I was looking at when I first saw the art. The way the text covers up parts of the image—not a lot, but enough—makes it hard for me to parse at first glance. For example, the sword seems to emit a blue beam of light, but the big "Way" of the title covers up precisely the tip of the sword to make this unclear. I also thought the flag pole was another weapon until I realized there is a flag under there. I read the tor.com post about The Way of King's cover creation process and the full painting by Michael Whelan is
just absolutely amazing. Cropping the original art into the narrow space of a cover, and making the title fit with it, unfortunately really took their toll.
I do like the content of the cover a lot more than its presentation. I still don't really know what's going on in the scene depicted on the cover—a sunset duel in inclement weather?—but whatever it is, I'm intrigued and want to know what happens. I would definitely pick this book off the shelf if I stumbled upon it and hadn't known about it already or religiously stalked its progress for months...
So now, if only books somehow existed in HD widescreen format that could effectively show off scenic art for their covers... Something like the re-released eBook cover for Lord of Chaos, which is amazingly cool and side-scrolling (Always a plus!). They should replace physical book covers with OLEDs :p 
