Old Dog, New Tricks: Yet Another Cover for Rachel

We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcasts to bring you this update on the state of Finding Rachel Davenport – the paperback. It has a new cover:

She's new, she's purple, she's...naked?

It also has a new price: $6.99 (or £6.33 or €7.42). This is not a limited-time offer or anything like that, it’s just that, when I uploaded the new cover, I noticed the paperback was priced at $9.99 and that was a mistake—I had always meant to price it lower. (This could explain the enthusiasm customers displayed in avoiding buying the paperback—practically as soon as I set it to $6.99, someone bought a copy.)

Pricing aside, this new cover is not to be confused with the cover for the e-book…

Don't confuse the price, either: this is only £1.61 including VAT

…or the erstwhile cover for the paperback…

…or the fact that the e-book started life with a different cover altogether.

So, why the confusion and indecision over the cover, and why am I seeking to make it even worse? I’m not; I’m trying to clear things up.

Finding Rachel Davenport began life as an e-book published by Prospera Press’ Opis Imprint with what I thought was a dynamite cover:

 The readers, however, seemed to disagree, so the publishers, who seem to know what they are doing, asked if I would consider changing the cover. I did. I like the new cover and, although readers aren’t exactly snapping e-copies off of the virtual shelves, the book is e-selling fairly consistently.

The publishers also allowed me to publish the paperback version myself, which came in handy for sending hard-copies to reviewers, as well as friends and family. (What, you didn’t get your free copy? It must have got lost in the mail; the good news is, you can now buy a copy at the reduced price of $6.99.)

Anyway, producing the paperback copy was a snap, but the cover was a bit out of my purview. So I spent a few hours with Photoshop and came up with this:

Not bad for someone who doesn't know what they are doing.

I considered this an adequate and (let’s face it) fairly lame cover, but one that would suffice as a stop-gap measure. Then I stumbled across One on One – 101 True Encounters by Craig Brown in the local book store:

Doesn't seem quite as lame now, does it?

 This book was published by Fourth Estate books, a reputable publisher (Annie Proulx, anyone?) that, I assume, has a stable of professional cover artists at its disposal (or at least a brother-in-law who took Commercial Illustration 101 at the local community college), and the cover they came up with looked an awful lot like my lame done-in-an-afternoon effort.

This, of course, meant I could pat myself on the back for a job well done and go about my business, but eventually I realized I had to bring in a pro. So I hired JD Designs and she came up with the new paperback cover, which I think is a bit cheeky, over-the-top, flashy, and captures the tone of the book pretty well.

(Quick aside: I thought the silhouette looked too much like a naked woman, so I asked the designer to add the cape. Now  the silhouette looks like a naked woman wearing a cape. Still, it's a result.) 

So to recap:

LT: The PAPERBACK, published by Lindenwald Press   RT: The EBOOK, published by Prospera Publishing 

This situation should hold steady until my contract with Prospera runs out, at which point I put the new, purple cover on both editions. I will, of course, write another post at that time, under the guise of keeping you up-to-date, but which will really be a thinly disguised reminder that I have a book (several, in fact) out there and ...

Hang on, someone’s at the door.

How is that for serendipity? The postie just arrived with my shipment of Finding Rachel Davenport sporting her spiffy, new cover. (No, I did not make that up—the post came just as I was typing that paragraph.)

Pretty snazzy, eh? Now go buy a copy.