It's been book covers today ... as the post title says, new editions. These books were issued a long time ago, in publishing terms -- they go back five or six years, which is eons as publishers and writers understand the passage of time. Every so often, it's a good idea to change the covers on a work for the sake of freshness -- and it also gives a publisher or writer a chance to experiment.
What kind of covers sell books? That's a heck of a good question! Over the years we've tried many kinds, and it comes down to this bottom line: faces on the covers sell books better than anything else, and if you can't manage a face on the cover, figures are the next best bet. Unless the book is sexy as all get-out, in which case it had better be a figure shot!
The covers we originally used on these books were virtually "mainstream." They were good covers, but they were much more the kind of art you'd see on the shelf at the bookstore, and in fact when your object is selling ebooks over the Internet, you need to grab the reader's attention and hold it.
So I've wanted to rejacket a number of these books for some time now, and at last the job has worked its way to the top of the list. It was a lot of fun doing these, if I tell the truth. I did the Harbendane cover a few months ago, but I'm including it here (like a rerun) because it really is part of the project.
You'll also notice that the word DREAMCRAFT is shouting off these new covers! It might look a big and obnoxious, but it's there with good reason. We're using a distributor to get us into the big bookstores, and it seems there's some wild and wacky confusion in the software engines driving book distribution. Imagine this: we sweat blood on polishing and packaging books, and then they show up in the iBooks store, and in other key places, listed as being published by the distributor!! Little puffs of smoke come out of my ears when I see this because, in all honesty, the distributor is not much more than what's called an "accumulator" -- in other words, an engine that gathers up ebook from all parts of the marketplace ... from self publishers who have one book in which no attempt was made to even punctuate the semi-coherent blather, right up to the high end of the spectrum, the "small" publisher who has almost a thousand books on its current list. All are lumped together under the banner of the accumulator, and the tender reader (gods help him, or her) has to sort the wheat from the chaff. DreamCraft is somewhere in the middle, with a healthy list of very professional titles, so the new covers are carrying the badge of honor, and this should help the reader to short wheat from chaff at stores like iBooks, Sony, Kobo, Diesel and so forth.
Nice covers, too. I'll be rejacketing the NARC and Hellgate books as those series are finished ... speaking of which, Hellgate will be done this year. The process is getting exciting.
Jade, 13 April
