Book covers are complex things – they’re both a sales tool with clue to what’s inside, and an emotional piece of the book. Sometimes, for a favorite read, just looking at the cover makes me feel the pull of the story, the emotion that keeps me coming back to it. (Sometimes, of course, it makes me feel the irritation of “that still doesn’t fit and I don’t like it.”)
One of the tough decisions for authors when we re-release books is whether to change the cover, or not. Sometimes we have no choice. The cover art belongs to the previous publisher and we can’t get, or can’t afford, the rights to it. Other times, we have to decide…
When I rereleased The Rebuilding Year and Life, Some Assembly Required, I kept the covers. The Rebuilding cover was one I really liked, and it evoked warm fuzzies, and was familiar to a large number of my readers. I paid Samhain for the art quite happily.
For Sole Support, in the cover development I wasn’t allowed to put one of the MCs I wanted on the original Samhain cover – he wasn’t hot enough for the marketing department. (And maybe they were right, but he was a 47 year old nerdy MC. I thought the guy I picked was sweet…) Anyway, on the rerelease I paid for a new cover that I like a lot, with a quite different feel that I think fits the book better than the generic romance cover did.
Various things go into that rerelease decision, from reader-appeal to artwork costs to possibly the availability of the original artist for a potential ongoing series. Another consideration is how likely readers are to fail to recognize a book under a new cover, and to be unhappy to find they’ve purchased the same story twice. Blurbs are there to prevent that, but we all know that leap of the heart seeing something new-looking from a favorite author that sometimes has our finger one-clicking before we stop to check. Keeping an old cover prevents that.
I faced that question again this week when I finally put Like the Taste of Summer up on Amazon, the one place it wasn’t available. The cover for that was a free gift from a young friend, at a time when I knew nothing about covers (and when the artist had no knowledge of access to fonts.) And it evokes a sweetness of those early days in 2011 for me, when I’d just released a couple of books, was stunned that anyone was reading them, and this little story got a great reception I didn’t expect.
It’s not a polished cover. I could have changed it. But there’s something valuable to me about those memories. (And it’s a freebie story – or will be when AZ price-matches it. If you’re checking it out and have time and want to help, let them know by reporting a lower price – it’s free on Barnes & Noble or iBooks or Kobo.) Sure, I want to pull people in to read it, but I also value things about that cover beyond its ability to lure readers.
I’m so lucky. I have the luxury to put out freebies and to make decisions not driven entirely by the economics of sales. Other authors who are getting back rights and doing rereleases these days are making those choices from their own perspectives. And since no cover appeals to everyone, readers will be saying both “I wish they’d kept the old cover” and “Why didn’t they get a new cover?”
Sometimes the answer will be economic, or practical. Sometimes it’ll just be “That cover means something to me beyond selling the book.” For Like the Taste of Summer I’m enjoying the luxury of that nostalgia.
– Kaje Harper
August 2019
Thanks for sharing your insight about that particular topic with us. Very interesting!
[…]he wasn’t hot enough for the marketing department[…] That’s something that’s been bothering me for a while, interchangeable hot guys on book covers. I just don’t care anymore. There’s only so many hot people out there in the world, right? And usually they don’t even represent a lot of us readers (I know, I know, non-fiction books are often set in a kind of fantasy world, where people don’t have to meet the standards of the real world^^).
As for changing covers in general, I think it’s tricky. As you said, there might be a nostalgic reason why you’d want to keep a certain cover. There also might be reasons, why you would want to change it, e.g. to attract a new audience.
As for confusing your regular readers, I don’t really see it. If I follow an author I know their titles and as you said the blurb also helps. I can’t say I’ve bought the same book twice accidentally, just because it had a new cover. Anthology stories might be the exception. I bought single re-releases a few times, only to find out I’ve read the story already somewhere.
Yes, anthology solo releases can be confusing – I’ve bought those a couple of times. (Hopefully the anthology is listed in the blurb, but not always.)
It’s probably hard to deny that most romance readers want attractive cover guys. I have people complain about the “two old guys” on my Into Deep Waters cover, and say that they put off reading it for that. I will say, I do like interesting attractive guys on covers if their expressions and composition catch my eye.
But for me, a cover with two generic headless abs is becoming a turn-off, suggesting a tropey story, so it takes extra good reviews from friends to make me pick those up. I think the audience for M/M is a bit split between those who love the heat and romance tropes best, and those who are looking for the more different stories and characters. (And personally, I think a lot of readers move from the first group toward the second when they read the stories for a longer time.) Of course, one thing about the washboard abs covers is that they do indicate the genre clearly. Sometimes that’s useful.
The issue of course is that one person’s ‘attractive’ may not be another’s! I find a visual response is so immediate, so visceral, whereas the book inside the cover can be savoured, explored, ‘grown into’ over time. After all, I never look at a cover when I’m reading a book on kindle! I think the role of a cover is to draw attention and, like you say, establish the genre for marketing/selling purposes, and so I’ve sometimes accepted a cover that I may not personally love. But then it’s the book that holds our heart x.
It is so individual – some of the same covers are on Goodreads “best cover” and “worst cover” lists and I see the same in how people shelve books. So the cover that pulls me right in may not appeal to another reader. Sometimes a cover grows on me, and I do wonder if it’s a reflection of love for the story inside 🙂 I do like the fact that Amazon at least changed it so now when you open a new book it does show you the cover before jumping to Chapter 1- it used to be no one saw those covers full sized, which was a shame.
And of course that’s another factor – that the appeal of the cover has to hold in a small to thumbnail size which is what most people see as they shop for e-books. There are some lovely subtle covers that don’t look like much when compressed down to the smaller dimensions. So marketing factors do have to come into play.