Self-Publishing Confession: Why I Changed the Cover Art

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My new book THE NORTH has only been out now for just shy of two months but the sales haven’t been as strong as I’d hoped. (About 500 copies vs more than 1200 for my still selling very strongly MARSHALL CONRAD in the same time frame).

The few reviews I’ve received have all suggested that readers liked the story very much (although some aren’t crazy there are to be two more books), so I was scratching my head at the low sales.

Yep, zombie books are a crowded market and that’s definitely one of the main reasons impacting the sluggish sales of my novel, but I wasn’t convinced that was the only factor. I decided to spend some time looking at competing titles (and there are a HELL of a lot of them) and I realized the top selling ones or rather, the most consistent selling ones have far more interesting cover art than the cover for my book. And don’t get me wrong: the cover I had made up depicted the bleakness of the world I’d created extremely well buuuuut … it is dark and kind of flat in comparison with the other better selling books out there.

So I decided, to hell with it: I’m the publisher, I’m going to get a new cover done. While the stock image isn’t exactly a scene from the novel, the image is still kind of bleak. The bright yellow contrasts the black font very well and I think it’s eye-catching. I spent the last couple of days uploading the cover art on Kindle Direct Publishing, Smashwords and creating a print cover for Create Space. It’s all done now and I guess we’ll just have to see if the new cover has greater impact. It might, it might not. Who knows?

Lesson learned though: book covers need color even if your book is bleak as hell. Might work, might not. We shall see.