So a couple of weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from Derek Murphy over at CreativIndie Covers. He’s a cover designer who periodically does cover makeovers for indie writers, as a way to bring in business and build his own reputation. He wanted to do an experiment to see if he could double my sales in a month by making over the cover for Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I).
Well, I’ll be the first to admit that the original cover isn’t all that great. The book was a bit of an experiment, to see if writing in a more serial format would be more effective than writing and releasing full-length novels. I’d spent a fair amount of money to get Bringing Stella Home and Desert Stars up, and sales were too low at that time to justify another huge publishing project. In order to cut costs, I did the covers myself, using public domain images from NASA and Hubble. They aren’t super great, but they do say “space!” which is better than a gray box with a question mark.
If anything, I’m surprised that the series has done as well as it has with the current covers. Each book in the series sells in the double or triple digits monthly, and Outworlder has been in the top 20 on Amazon’s Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera and Kindle eBooks > Romance > Science Fiction subcategories for over a year. The consistency with which these books have been selling has really surprised me, so anything to push these books to the next level and put them in front of new readers will hopefully yield some awesome results.
So Derek and I went back and forth for a while, and this is what we came up with:
Pretty sweet, huh? 😀
I am extremely excited about this cover, and I’d love to see what he can do with the other ones. First, though, we’re going to put this one up for the month of December to see if it has a noticeable impact on overall sales. I’ve got data from last December as well as the last few months to compare it to, so we’ll see how it does. And if there is an appreciable increase, I’ll probably go ahead and have him redo all the other covers as well.
Since this is still just an experiment, though, the covers for the print editions will remain the same as the old ones. I don’t anticipate keeping them forever, though, especially if this experiment works out. Even so, I’m still going to release them as I’d planned, so if you want the print versions, you can get them.
And who knows? If these books take off, or I become a well-known author in the future, the original print versions of the Star Wanderers books may be worth something someday. Maybe. Who knows?
So far, it appears to be working. The new cover went live on Amazon last night, and Outworlder has dropped about 700 rankings to #1,705. That’s without any sort of advertising or promotion, except for the also-bots of course. Last year around this time I participated in a fairly big group promo, so I’ll try to get this book listed in a couple of places to make up for that. Or maybe we can extend the experiment through January, in the interest of keeping a really cool cover getting more accurate data? We’ll see.
Man, it’s so much fun to be a self-published indie writer! 😀
I love the cover! (Love the series too!) But I have to wonder… since Noemi is so “plain” in the story, why is she so pretty on the cover?
Oh man, you would not believe how hard it is to find pictures of plain looking women looking straight at the camera like that. 😛 In the end, I decided to go with the one who had the right eyes, hair, and looked to be about Noemi’s age. It turned out well, even if the cover makes her out to be a shade prettier than she is in the book (then again, women tend to be harder on themselves than they need to be when it comes to looks, so it’s possible that some of Noemi’s plainness is how she thinks of herself more than how she really is).