I'm Remaking My Book Covers

I surrender. My covers, as lovely as they are, don't mesh with my genre's expectations. I researched Amazon's best selling women's fiction novels and my takeaway is, the covers are very simplistic; mainly watercolor drawings. The majority of them use bright shades of blues and greens. Orange is also a big one.

I don't know why this is the expectation. Frankly, an author could use any abstract painting for their cover and fit right in. Silly me; when I designed my covers, I tried to match their mood to the story. That's wrong. Something I saw on Reddit has stuck with me: Which is better, a beautiful cover or an ugly cover that matches the genre? "Ugly" is the correct answer. 

My covers weren't meant to be a gimmick, but I designed them for consistency. Almost all of them have a woman's face (with the proper expression ~ wistful, hopeful) to convey the story's theme. I thought of them as my "brand", although I can never claim to have a brand, since I seriously doubt any one person has bought more than one of my books.

My enthusiasm for redoing them was so lacking that I only searched Canva's pre-made templates. They're hardly helpful. Then again, I could close my eyes and pick one and as long as the right colors and geometric shapes are there, it would be usable. Mainly I was looking for professional-looking fonts. One of the reasons my covers stand out as amateur is that Canva's selection of fonts doesn't work for book covers. They're likely fine for creating invitations or social media posts, but none of them have the impact that screams, buy me! 

All my covers were too clean; too tidy. I leaned too much toward the artistic. The book's title was situated above the cover image, when in reality it needed to be scribbled across it (apparently). Here's an example of the fourth top best seller, which I'm sure is a great book:

See? No offense, but that's a butt-ugly cover. 

And here's one of mine:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, I actually like The Apple's cover and I haven't found anything decent to replace it with yet, but the truth is, it doesn't "match" the other books in my genre. No women's fiction reader will buy it.

I like most of my books' covers, but what I like doesn't matter. A women's fiction cover should be the opposite of attractive or it will slip by unnoticed. Expectations.

The one cover of mine that I struggled to create was for The Diner Girl. I replaced it multiple times and even commissioned a Fiverr designer to create one (which turned out to be the worst one of all). The image I finally went with isn't right, either. The woman comes across as too old and just awkward-looking:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's what I came up with (from a pre-made template) yesterday:

 

Do I like it? No. Does it fit? Sure.

Another:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New iteration:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It goes against my strongly-held preferences to change these covers to ones that are ugly and generic, but I'll upload a couple at first as a test. No, they won't result in sales, because my books are past their sell-by date, but everyone, I guess, wants to fit in, and as much of a rebel as I've tried to be, I want to fit in, too.

I scrolled through Canva's templates for hours yesterday and I still haven't found good replacements for most of my books' covers. But since "good" actually means bad, I'll come up with something. 

And if I find myself hating them too much, uploading a different cover is painless. Right now I've got nothing to lose.