Yet more cover art changes

Did I say I’m sprucing up my backlist? I feel sure you must have noticed that by now 🙂

This week I’ve been improving the books’ description pages on Amazon and flexing what I’ve learned about writing better blurbs.

But one of the other things I’ve learned since really getting into the self-publishing mindset is that when people want a book of one genre and they see a book with a cover that looks like it belongs to a different genre, they don’t go “oh, how unique and interesting!” They go, “That doesn’t look like the type of book I want. I’ll give it a pass.”

Which means that if your cover is too ‘unique and interesting’ you’re actually putting readers off. What you need is cover art that looks similar to all the other covers in your genre, so that readers are reassured that they are indeed buying something that they want.

It really grieved me to have to replace these two covers, because I was so pleased with them both when I first made them. And I still look at them with pleasure. They are nice book covers – for a Fantasy and for some kind of literary fiction about the surfer lifestyle.

But goddammit, I am trying to make a living here, so I’m going to take the hit and hammer that genre button for all I’m worth. Which means that these books now look like this:

On the plus side, sometimes you can spend days trawling through stock-photo sites looking for the perfect picture, but that picture of Kjartan, which genuinely looks like him fell into my hands in less than an hour. How often is it that you can go looking for a white-haired elf prince and actually find a good photo? Vanishingly rare. It must be an omen.

I think I’m going to keep a cover-art graveyard on this site. I surely can’t be the only one who finds the constant evolution of images interesting.

Also I think some of them might make good posters.