The Evolution of a Book Cover

And why there are so many cover options

Pushing the Limits

A student/teacher romance

Back in 2015, this was the original cover for Morgan & Aspen’s story. It was the one revealed a few months before release and the one that I published in September 2015. I absolutely loved it! A sexy, mysterious woman on the front who was clearly pushing the limits and a passionate couple on the back.

However, Amazon did them dirty and put them in what authors call “The Dungeon.” It’s when they flag your book as erotica or too explicit to be viewed on Amazon organically. The book wasn’t searchable and wasn’t on showing up on my Amazon author page. The only way readers could buy it was if they had the direct link I sent them in my newsletter or they found it on my Facebook page. Needless to say, that was going to be impossible to sell.

Within the first week, I decided to change out the cover to see if that’d make the book at least searchable on Amazon. Luckily, it did, but I was still sad to have to change covers. However, readers seemed to really love the new one just as much, especially since I was able to put the original front image on the back and basically flipped the two images around. In all honesty, it was probably the better decision as it appealed to more readers. It also looks very pretty in paperback!

So even though I really liked this new cover, I have this thing called shiny object syndrome where I see a new pre-made cover and decide I want it. I also liked testing covers and seeing if one did better than the other or appealed to a different audience. Which brings us to cover #3. Honestly, I really liked this one too. It was very different than the first two in terms of having more neutral tones and coloring but still a romantic and passionate couple on both sides.

And then just like before, I saw another pre-made cover and decided it’d be fun to try something completely new. I wasn’t publishing under this name at the time, so it was easy to test and see if it resulted in more sales or page reads. It was also just fun to see if anyone noticed as I did the bare minimum in promoting it.

This cover is definitely the most different of the bunch. And wouldn’t you know, another pre-made I saw and thought, let’s try it! It gives a more forbidden, workplace vibe, which although this isn’t a workplace romance, it could technically be considered blurring the lines as one. Morgan’s her art professor and they’re often at the university…where he works and she attends his art class. I wasn’t sure how this one would do in comparison to the others, but I’m happy to say it had no affect on sales. Readers seemed to like this one just as much as the others.

With the rise of “discreet” or non-people covers, I decided to try one for Pushing the Limits but as an alternate cover, not for the eBook. This too was a pre-made cover but I absolutely loved it so much, I had to have it and see how it’d look for Morgan & Aspen’s story!

So having five cover options might be extreme to some and yeah it probably is, but I like having the options and being able to switch out the eBook to test things here and there. But luckily for readers, all five are available in paperback so they can pick the one they love the most!

Find the Pushing the Limits eBook and paperbacks here

The eBook is available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited