Wednesday 4 December 2013

Kindle Covers

They say you can change your book cover on any Kindle title, and I'm wondering about doing it. Sometimes a cover seems good and right for the book, but a year later it seems drab and dreary - definitely not exciting.
So how easy is it to change that cover? I'm looking into it.

When brand new books are published with different covers in different parts of the world, you have to wonder why. The answer has to be that different populations respond to different images, and since the professionals who commission the covers know what they are doing, it would be silly not to take note of how they operate. The cover I did for Victorian Beauty has not caught anyone's imagination. If I changed it, would I change both the cover and the title?

I chose the original title because I was writing about a heroine who was not deemed beautiful after the accident she suffered at the hands of a brutal husband. But it has suddenly dawned on me that no one but me knows that until they have read the book. The irony doesn't work. Why has it taken this long to realise such an obvious fact? (Because authors are too close to their work to see the thing objectively. I can hear you all saying it!)

Melanie and ... Lord Jarrow's Secret might be more intriguing as a title. Certainly it gives a better flavour of the story. And since the title isn't selling terribly well, I have nothing to lose by trying a new cover and a new title if I want to bother fiddling about with it. I could make it a feature of the book in that every so often, the cover changes. If I keep an eye on numbers, I might gain a clue as to how the cover affects sales - if at all!



 When I get this photograph to the right size and shape, it may become the new cover. At least I have no copyright worries, as it is a photograph I took myself. Are the colours more inviting? I think so, yes. Does it need the addition of a figure or does the cover stand well enough without one? Is it the title change that works better than the change of cover? Difficult decisions I need to mull over.

If you have any views, do comment and let me know what you think!

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