Thoughts on Covers (Patreon)

(Note: Most of this is behind-the-scenes marketing stuff, with not much new as far as images go.)

After publishing ebooks on lulu.com for a while now, I've noticed that if the book has a cover that's focused on setting the mood instead of showing a bit of action, there seems to be a decent drop in sales. My best example would be the sales on three books that are the same price that came out within a couple of months of each other. All three were about the same number of pages, and they all cost $9.99. I didn't go back and count the number of each book sold, I'm just going by their sales rank on lulu.

First, in January of last year, was The Mismatch:

Which has done pretty well, with a sales rank of 51228. In March, I released New Year's Rumble:

Which sold close to as well, ranking at 54921. The same month I released Mean Girls' Melee:

That one's ranked 62407. That's possibly a 15% drop in sales where the only real difference between the three is the lack of action on the cover. So, I've decided to go through and redo the covers to show more action. 

I'd also been thinking about creating a standard cover style that I could use for all my books going forward. I wanted something  that wouldn't cover too much of the page, and that I could move around depending on where the focus on the image was. I ended up going with a modified version of the Marber Grid, a design made for Penguin's Crime books but ended up being used as the base for all their books in the 60s:

(Google "Marber Grid" if you want to go down a rabbit hole of design history and see how versatile the design was.)

You can see the new version of The Mismatch at the top. I'm going to start rolling out new covers first for Tested in Thailand, replacing the cover for book 1: 

with the new version:

and this will be the cover for the soon-to-be-released part 2:

And my original idea for part 2 of Carnival of Blood (which will be included in the PDF version,):

Will now be this:

With more to come.