New cover for The Witch's Boy
One of the advantages (or disadvantages? I’m not sure,) of self-publishing is the ability to continue to mess with a book even once it’s been published. At any rate, The Witch’s Boy continues to sell, slowly but steadily, on Amazon and on Smashwords, and I continue to be happy with my decision to go for self-publishing rather than small press publishing there.
However, I read this article yesterday, which suggests ways to kickstart a bit of new life into a novel. The Witch’s Boy has any number of five star reviews, so that part is OK and I couldn’t do anything about it even if it wasn’t. The price is right already – I’m certainly not going any lower than this for an opus this size. So I thought I would try altering the cover and see if that made a difference.
I was glad to have the excuse, to be honest. While I love the Grimoire cover, it’s not what you would call eye-catching, and it is possibly a little grim. And the previous cover I’d made for it was made in days when I didn’t have much cover art experience. I now think it was a bit amateurish. I was sure I could do better.
So here’s the new cover:
Many thanks to Ruth Sims for the pull quote!
If you have the old version, and would prefer one with the new cover, I believe both Smashwords and Amazon allow you to download it again for no extra cost. Watch this space to find out if it makes things better or worse (or no different) in terms of sales 🙂
Thank for the link to the article, which was fascinating! I shall be interested to see whether changing the cover has an impact on your sales. I like it – it’s beautiful – although the only way I could read the pull quote was to click on it at Smashwords (clicking on it here takes one to Smashwords, of course). I just went to Goodreads to see the old cover – I think you’ve definitely made the right decision in changing it. Do you need to do something over there so that the new cover is the one which comes up first? And, indeed, comes up at all – I don’t see the new one there. And I think the new cover will probably look better in thumbnail, because the title will be legible (your name may be a bit too light-coloured).
There were some excellent points made in the comments to the article, too. Did you check the categorisation? Buried in one of the long answers in the comments is this gem:
“…a metadata manager at B&N gave us some good advice the other day: Many authors try to choose general categories for their books, under the mistaken assumption that they’ll reach more readers. For example, a paranormal romance author might mistakenly think that Romance: General is the best categorization, when in fact Romance: Paranormal is best because it gets them on both the paranormal shelf AND the general romance shelf. In other words, always select for the most specific and precise category as possible.”
Hi HJ 🙂 I’m glad you like it. I’m hoping that it will just update automatically on Goodreads, as I can’t see any ‘change cover image here’ button anywhere. It’s funny how selling on the internet has changed the way cover art is designed – so white covers have visibility problems, and all the text has to be large enough to read in a thumbnail. It’s taken me years to realise all this stuff, and I’m sure I’m still dangerously un-genre-savvy.
But yes, I’ve just changed the categorization over on Amazon, where I had it as Fantasy>historical, which wasn’t true at all! The first draft was historical fantasy, but by the time I’d finished editing it, it had become more Epic than that.
I do hope you see an improvement!
Thank you! No change yet, but I suppose it’s still early days, and it’s not back in the distribution chain yet.