Judging Books By Covers

It’s been just over a year since my second short story collection came out, and it did pretty well for itself. It made the shortlist for Best Collection in the Aurealis Awards, and had some pretty strong sales for one of my ebooks in a year when my attention was mostly on other things.

At the same time, it’s lagged behind my first collection in a lot of milestones. Most notably, getting a print edition together, and attempting to refine the messaging and branding.

Last week I started to change that: taking a bunch of newly acquired skills from some dedicated research into making better book covers, plus a workflow that is better suited to going from ebook cover to print, I made the revamped cover you can see above (and, if you want, contrast against the old cover to the right).

They’re small changes, but just repositioning things and strengthening font choices has a big impact in setting reader expectations about genre and content. The original cover left the image to tell the story of what’s coming; the new version says it with the whole cover.

More importantly, it was easy to import the design into a print book cover, rather than redesigning everything from the ground up as I did previously. This drastically cuts down the design hours needed to get a book up-and-running, and makes the time invested in learning-to-do-things-better considerably more valuable.

All of which means Print Editions are now available via the ‘zon, while the ebook editions are still available from pretty much everywhere.