A Book By Any Other Cover

Ever bought a book by one of your favorite authors only to discover you’d already read it? Sometimes covers and even titles change over the years. Why?

Covers definitely go in cycles, and what readers find enthralling one year appears terribly dated a few years later. For example, here’s the lifecycle of the cover for The Unflappable Miss Fairchild, my first book.

It was originally published in 1998, when clinch covers were all the rage, even if the hero and heroine in this are ba

ring less skin than on some other covers.

Here’s the cover when it first came out as an ebook in 2007. Very traditional, using a period drawing as the basis.

Here’s the cover in 2012, when I hoped to have something that today’s reader could more easily relate to. Point of interest--the background is from Bath and is my own picture from the last time I visited.

And now I’m in the process of commissioning a cover artist to design something new, something fresh. Stay tuned!

Then again, covers and titles might change as the format changes. In publishing, having your book come out in hardcover is considered quite the honor. That’s one of the reasons I’m delighted to report that Instant Frontier Family is now available in hardcover, with a new cover. The other reasons I’m so pleased is that 1) it is a large print version which should be a benefit to some readers, and 2) it’s a special binding that makes it perfect for libraries. Feel free to mention it to yours. J

And do keep covered this summer.