Welcome Wednesday – Changes
Welcome to this week’s edition of Welcome Wednesdays!
Let’s talk about changes today. Not changes you make in the process of rewriting and editing, but changes you’ve made AFTER you’ve initially published a book. Have you gone back and revised one of your books later? Changed the cover? Republished it with a new publisher (or self-published after getting the rights back from a publisher)? Tell us about one of your books that has changed in some way after it was first published…
I’ll begin…
The original covers for my Dream Series books were hand-painted by an artist, Ami Low. She did a fantastic job, but it turned out that what I’d asked her to produce was wrong for the market and the audience I was trying to reach, and I had to change them – much thanks to Emma Michaels, who designed all the new covers.
So here are three images. The first is my initial MS Paint “sketch” (a generous description, I think) that I gave to Ami to show her what I wanted. The second is what Ami produced. And the third is the redesigned cover by Emma…
Now it’s your turn! Be sure to leave a link so we can learn more about you and your books!
by 
6 Replies to “Welcome Wednesday – Changes”
Free to KU members
Makes a great holiday gift
http://amzn.com/1503101797
My recent release, A Taming Season, originally came out from a small publisher. Although I was thrilled with the editing, I wasn’t allowed to see the cover until AFTER release–and in my mind, it was NOT AT ALL what I wanted for this, a first book of a series. They had also insisted I change the title to Memories of You.
When I searched Amazon for “Memories of You,” there were at least twenty books by that name before mine came up. Something had to be done.
I bought back my rights, and now the book, under its original title, is available (and on sale this week!) from Amazon.
Book Trailer
A Taming Season
In my first anthology, my heroine changed from an uptight reporter to an ex-girlfriend of the cowboy hero who dresses as strong women from the movies. Lucy, Cleopatra or Marilyn Monroe Pansy hide from her demons. It took a bit of rewriting *grin* but I love how Pansy Lark turned out.
http://amzn.to/2aluqY4
I have one change I would like to make to an already published book. I write Regency. I referred to a character as a widget instead of a wigeon! 😀 I haven’t yet decided if it’s worth the effort of editing for that one mistake… Other than that it’s my favorite book yet 🙂
The Duke Conspiracy – http://amzn.to/18YsbHK
I have done a lot of fiddling with the cover of Liberty. I loved the first one, which looked superb on the screen. However, it did not look so great in print. Many iterations later, I think it’s not too bad now.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GJKH9YO
I also had to change the mailing list signup link because I moved from Mailchimp to Mailerlite.
My cover for Aisuru was originally one I made and one I loved. It was “beautiful” and looked amazing in print. It featured a sakura tree (an important element/motif of the story), with the scenery around it black and white, and only the tree in color to represent the main character, Sakura’s, world shifting with the arrival of our hero Kazuki. Similar to the trick done with The Wizard of Oz.
It took me weeks to perfect. You can still see it on my now out of print hardback and my first edition paperbacks. I still have a few copies, so I have them deep discounted on my direct sales site and on Amazon.
I stubbornly held on to it for months before finally accepting that while it looked great in person, it didn’t translate well online, didn’t convey genre, and is one reason sales were so abysmal. So I finally decided to redo it. It took a few tries, but finally landed on the current cover which is more in keeping with the genre and still looks beautiful online and in person! You can also see it on Amazon now: http://amzn.to/2etfAQx
When I launched the new cover, I also reformatted the interior of the print with the many things I’d learned while working on book too. The first looked nice, but now i ts just got that extra professional polish to me 🙂 Oh, I also did go back and group my first two books into a series a few months ago, since they are in a shared world 🙂
Beyond that, I really don’t change much other than fixing any typos that slipped past the proofreading and occasionally updating the back matter a bit or reformatting. I pretty much figure once I commit to releasing it, its don’t. No story or major text changes.