How easy was it to change my book cover?

Not as easy as you’d think. Let’s start with why I updated the cover for Vegan Marketing Success Stories.

1. It won a Vegan Choice Award.

While I wish I had also won a more traditional book award, I’m proud because a panel of people who judge at the Vegan Choice Awards reviewed and selected my book. When they told me it could sit alongside Earthling Ed’s This is Vegan Propaganda and M. C Ronen’s The Liberation Trilogy, I was pretty stoked. You have to pay to be recognized, but for most book awards, you have to pay to apply, and I hate that. Merit over making money any day!

2. I wanted to update my bio.

I no longer operate as “The Content Doctor.” I considered changing this in the book’s interior too, but doing that might have shifted my index entries, and trust me—you don’t want to update an index once it’s done. So I left the interior as is and asked my designer Joy to make a small update to my bio on the back of the book in addition to adding the award seal.

3. World Vegan Month Promo

The great thing about launching a vegan book in November is that it’s an excellent opportunity to promote it during World Vegan Month. Besides launching the new cover, I also wanted to make the ebook 50% off. Setting a promo price and dates on Lulu was pretty easy (I wanted to do this for my birthday month in April, but found out you need to set it two weeks in advance!). The downside is the promo doesn’t extend on other sites like Amazon, and most people I know buy their ebooks on Amazon.

Here’s the original and updated book cover, side by side:

Updating the book cover on Lulu

Loading the new cover file on Lulu was pretty straightforward. My gut aches at the author proof price, which is now $5 more than it was last year, but I can’t do anything about that.

I received my proof the day I planned to post a video on social media, so the timing was impeccable. However, the first thing I noticed when looking at the seal was there were tiny smudgy marks around it (we’re talking millimetres in size). This same pixellation also occurred with the title on the front cover and the spine of the book. All the other text did not have this result. Strange, right? I will emphasize this is something most readers won’t notice, but I did.

The first thing I did was look at the updated design file Joy gave me (which looked great). I contacted her to ask if anything could be done.

She told me to ask Vegan Choice Awards for the original award seal files (the ones they gave me were PNGs). When I forwarded them to her, she sent me a new (indistinguishable) file to load again.

Second proof was perfect, just like the original.

While it cost me extra money for the proofs, I’m still glad I updated my cover. You’ve gotta celebrate your accomplishments!

If you’re working with a traditional publisher…

You don’t get the luxury of changing your cover when you want to. It depends on the agreement you’ve signed and how long they hold your publishing rights. Sure, some publishers might update a cover, but typically it’s only if the book becomes a NYT bestseller and/or gets made into a movie. Awards don’t seem to be a big thing in the traditional publishing world. So I’m glad I didn’t invest hundreds of dollars in applying for book awards.

Would I update my cover again? Probably not. If I ever publish another edition of this book, it’s probably going to be completely different, so the interior and cover would both change. I would only suggest an author update their book cover if the original cover doesn’t look very good and/or something new has happened that warrants it.

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