Book Cover Blues

Received wisdom  among many authors on the internet is that  a new cover on a book can rejuvenate sales. Perhaps rejuvenate is the wrong word; they say a "better" cover will enable the book to sell better than a mediocre one. This applies  mainly to self-publishing authors like me, since those who have contracts with publishing houses will follow the dictates of the said houses. Authors tell stories of trying three or four covers until the "right" one catches and sales follow. Since I can decide for myself if I want to do a new cover, I thought I would try it.

My book Far After Gold has been out in the world a while, firstly as a paperback with Quaestor 2000 in 2009 and a fairly run of the mill cover taken from one of my photographs od Sandwood Bay in NW Scotland; when Quaestor ceased trading, I re-edited and published on Amazon Kindle in 2012, again with a cover I'd created.

It did fairly well for me, but with the recent drop in Kindle sales across the market (they say everyone is going back to "real" books!) I thought the time was right to experiment. It is hard to define exactly what sort of cover would describe the content of the book; pagan Viking male and Christian girl as slave - will they find happiness? so I centred on the girl's feeling of loneliness and desolation in being taken by marauding Vikings and sold as a slave in Dublin market and came up with the first cover: 

I wasn't entirely happy with it, and among the good comments came the criticisms, so I had a second attempt. Looking at them both side by side like this, I can feel a third attempt coming on!