There’s a folder on my computer labelled, more or less, “Covers Do Not Use Seriously Don’t Even Look.” It contains the previous lives of every novel I’ve ever published. Some of them lasted minutes. One of them lasted three months on a live Amazon page until the readers staged a polite intervention. All of them deserve to remain exactly where they are, gathering digital dust, never to be spoken of again.
Today I’m letting the folder out for a morning stroll.
What follows is a tour through ten covers you’ve never seen (bar one, possibly), set against the ones you have. Some of them changed before release because I came to my senses. A couple of them changed because someone with better instincts than me said “no.” One of them changed because actual paying readers told me, with admirable patience, that my book looked like a non-fiction guide to mid-eighties guide to self-improvement.
If you’ve ever wondered what indie publishing actually looks like behind the curtain, this is it. There is no glamorous moment where a designer hands you the perfect cover and you weep softly into your coffee. There is a folder. The folder grows. Eventually, with luck, you publish the cover that the folder didn’t get to keep.
Why Covers Do So Much More Work Than Authors Want to Admit
Every author claims they don’t judge a book by its cover. Every author is lying. Covers are the single most decisive element of a book’s marketing, full stop. They tell a reader what genre the book belongs to, what tone to expect, whether the contents will be funny or grim, whether the writer takes the project seriously, and whether the publisher (or in my case, the indie author with a Canva subscription) has the first clue what they’re doing.
A reader scrolling Amazon gives a cover roughly two seconds. Two. In those two seconds, the cover has to do more work than the blurb, the reviews, the price, and the ‘Look Inside’ button combined. Get it wrong and the reader scrolls past. Get it right and they at least pause long enough to read your name.
Every cover below is a story about getting it wrong before getting it right. Or, in three cases, getting both the cover and the title wrong before getting both right.
Part One: The Covers I Replaced Before Anyone Saw Them
1. Who Sent Clement?
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The original Who Sent Clement looked like a 2002 budget thriller. A silhouette interrupts the title in a way no working designer would now allow, the orange palette feels permanently dated, and the handwritten author name at the bottom doesn’t match anything else on the cover. It’s the kind of design where every element appears to have been chosen on a different Tuesday, by a different person, neither of whom had spoken to each other.
The redesign is a different conversation. The face does the heavy lifting in a single image: halo, shades, moustache, geezer energy, the entire premise of the book delivered in two seconds. The deep blue and red palette has the kind of confidence the original couldn’t fake. The “From the best-selling author of The ’86 Fix” line earns its keep as cross-promotion, and the London skyline becomes atmospheric rather than decorative. Every element is rowing in the same direction. That’s what a cover should do.
2. The Last Stop Video Shop
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The published cover earns its place because the central image (a retro television showing the silhouette of a man and child holding hands) tells you what the book is and how it’s going to feel. Nostalgic. Personal. Slightly melancholy. The dark palette carries the weight, the spotlight typography on the title pulls your eye in, and the wooden shelf grounds it in the kind of front room where a video shop used to matter.
The abandoned cover doesn’t tell you any of that. The walking silhouette could belong to a self-help book about midlife crisis, a literary novel about a man in a coat, or a sequel to someone else’s contemporary fiction debut. The title typography is muddled. The yellow and brown palette feels arbitrary. There’s nothing on the cover saying “video shop,” which, when the title is The Last Stop Video Shop, is a fairly significant own goal.
3. Tuned Out
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The published cover trusts restraint to do the work. A subtle damask wallpaper print does the period-detail job without anyone needing to bang a drum about it, the red title bar sits cleanly in the upper third, and a properly photographed vintage radio anchors the bottom. The whole thing reads as British, period-appropriate, and quietly confident.
The abandoned version pulls in the wrong direction on every count. The yellow sunburst, the pink radio inside a red medallion, the diner-italics title: every element belongs in a milkshake bar in Ohio, not a front room in England. Toby Grant is a millennial convinced his parents had it easier. He is not a malt-shop waitress, no matter what the abandoned design wanted him to be.
4. Waiting in The Sky
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The published cover does the impossible job of selling “alien narrator on Earth” in two seconds without the reader needing the blurb. UFO beam descending on a London skyline. Yellow against deep blue. The title sitting inside the beam itself. It signals tone and genre simultaneously: light, quirky, character-driven, British. By the time you’ve read the author name you already know what kind of book you’re holding.
The abandoned cover commits to absolutely nothing. Watercolour starfield, white handwritten title, lorem ipsum still sitting in the review slot like a child waiting at the school gates. It could be a sci-fi novel, a YA fantasy, a self-help book about manifestation, or one of those Amazon meditation guides with a one-word title. The published version commits to a sensibility. The abandoned version commits to vagueness. Vagueness sells nothing.
5. Kenneth
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The published cover is a masterclass in confident composition. The jacket fills the cover. The V of the lapel becomes a frame for the tagline (“If you can’t trust fate, who can you trust?”), which arrives doing actual work. The scratchy distressed title sits low against the smooth brown, and the eye travels down the jacket to land on it. The yellow author name anchors the whole piece. Every choice has a reason.
The abandoned cover reads as a half-finished thought. Half the cover is dead black space, the title sits at the top doing nothing in particular, the jacket has been pushed off to the right margin like a guest at a wedding nobody wanted to invite, and the reviews stack awkwardly on the dark side. The orchid is the only design element that survived the cull, which tells you something about where the project started and where it needed to go.
6. A Page in Your Diary
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The original A Page in Your Diary cover broadcasts “self-published 2014” from across the room. A purple brick texture playing the role of a feature wall, an oversized yellow title fighting the background for attention, and (the giveaway of all giveaways) the placeholder review still squatting in the quote slot, never replaced, the universal sign that a cover never crossed the finish line. The whole thing reads as a draft somebody forgot to delete.
The redesign understands what the book is actually doing. Multicoloured smoke drifting across a darker palette, refined typography that earns its size rather than demanding it, and the kind of atmospheric, painterly finish that suggests something happens between the covers worth paying for. Same book, same words, same author. Different two-second pitch on the Amazon scroll. The replacement does in one image what the original spent the whole cover failing to do.
Part Two: The Cover I Changed AFTER Release
7. The ’86 Fix
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This one’s different from the rest, and arguably the most useful entry on the page if you’re another indie author reading along. The cover on the left ran as the actual cover for the first three months after release. Real readers bought it, opened it, and (mostly) liked the book inside. They also told me, in increasing numbers, that the cover looked like a non-fiction book.
They were right. The chunky stacked Western-style typography and the sunburst background read like a pop-history paperback about Reaganomics, or a self-help title for men recovering from divorce. The tiny space invader at the bottom is the only fiction signal and it’s drowning in red. The reviewer quote even has to step in and explicitly tell you it’s a sci-fi book, which is the kind of work a cover should be doing on its own. Without help.
The current cover fixes the problem in one move. The cassette tape immediately reads “1980s.” The handwritten title signals humour rather than gravitas. The “Bestselling Time Travel Novel” line removes any remaining ambiguity. Using the cassette label as the surface for the author name and review quote is the kind of design choice that quietly earns its keep. Sales doubled within a fortnight. The lesson buried in this entry is the one worth pulling out: a cover can look perfectly fine and still completely misrepresent what kind of book it is. Nothing about the original is badly designed. It just sold the wrong book to the wrong reader.
Part Three: When Even the Title Had to Go
The next three are different again. These are books where I changed not just the cover but the title itself, which is a much bigger swing because the title travels with the book forever. A bad cover can be replaced overnight. A bad title follows you onto every Amazon listing, every review, every catalogue, every Goodreads page, and every conversation a reader has about your book in a pub. Changing the title is the indie-author equivalent of moving house: technically possible, but you really, really don’t want to do it twice.
8. In Lieu of You (formerly Meet Me Never?)
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The published version sits in literary-fiction-adjacent territory: silhouette, warm palette, poetic title, leaves the genre door open. The abandoned version commits hard in the other direction with the full contemporary-romance branding. TikTok-era tagline (“Some relationships END before they BEGIN… LITERALLY”). VHS cassette with “Wedding Day” crossed out in pen. Bold blue and yellow palette. It’s a different positioning entirely, not just a different design.
I changed it back because Meet Me Never? sounded too much like a rom-com, and the book definitely isn’t one. A cover that over-promises is worse than a cover that under-sells, because the readers it pulls in are the wrong readers, and they leave the wrong reviews. In Lieu of You is a quieter, stranger book than the rejected version wanted to suggest. The published cover does the harder job of attracting the right reader rather than the most readers.
9. Terms May Apply (formerly Mister Wishyman)
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The published cover is a tight little concept doing two things at once. “Terms may apply” is the legal-fineprint phrase you read at the bottom of an advert, applied to a wish — the entire premise of the book in three words. The birthday cake with a single lit candle plays the wordplay back at you visually. The candle becoming the “i” in “apply” is the kind of typographic gag a designer would deservedly pat themselves on the back for. Yellow palette, lowercase title, every element rowing the same boat.
Mister Wishyman is the alternate timeline where the book ended up in the children’s section by mistake. The title sounds like a Roald Dahl reject. The cosmic-explosion background suggests fantasy-genie territory rather than darkly-comic adult fiction. “Wishyman” is the kind of word your nan invents when she can’t remember what something’s actually called. The placeholder review still sitting in the slot is the giveaway that nobody got far enough to take the design seriously. That title rebrand probably saved the book from being shelved next to Mr Tickle.
10. The Strange Appeal of Dougie Neil (formerly The Strange Fate of Ugly Doug)
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The title is doing nearly all the work in this swap, and the rebrand is even bigger than it first appears. “Ugly Doug” is the kind of title that commits you to a particular shelf before anyone’s opened the book. It signals broad slapstick comedy at best, mean-spirited at worst. Calling a character “ugly” in your own title is a tonal choice that immediately narrows your audience to readers who fancy a laugh at someone’s expense. “Strange Fate” compounds the problem because it makes Doug passive: things happen to him, presumably indignities. The cover itself isn’t bad. The dusk sky inside the silhouette has real atmosphere. The title undercuts the visual at every turn.
“The Strange Appeal of Dougie Neil” is a different proposition entirely. The diminutive “Dougie” warms the character up immediately, gives him a Britishness, makes him sound like someone you might know rather than someone you’re supposed to point at. “Strange Appeal” turns the question outwards: what is it about him that pulls people in? That’s a much more inviting hook than “what unfortunate thing is going to happen to him next?” The cover backs it up, with two silhouettes walking towards each other from opposite corners of the diagonal split, suggesting connection rather than calamity. Distressed contemporary typography signals literary fiction rather than comic-strip humour. The whole package took the book out of “comedy of cruelty” territory and dropped it cleanly into “warm, character-driven contemporary fiction.” Probably saved the book.
What Ten Years of Doing This Has Taught Me
Three things, mostly.
First, every cover is a promise to the reader. Get the promise wrong and the right readers walk past while the wrong readers turn up disappointed. The original ’86 Fix cover broke this rule honestly: it promised a non-fiction book and delivered a comic time-travel novel. Mister Wishyman would have done the same in the opposite direction.
Second, you cannot design a cover that pleases everyone. Don’t try. A cover that tries to appeal to every shelf in the bookshop ends up appealing to none of them. The published Tuned Out cover deliberately leans into period restraint and loses the readers who want bold contemporary graphics. That’s a trade I’d make ten times out of ten, because the readers it does attract are the readers who’ll actually like the book.
Third, your readers will tell you when you’ve got it wrong, if you’re paying attention. The ’86 Fix cover changed because the readers said it should. The replacement has been running for years, the sales prove the point, and I owe eternal thanks to whichever reader first said, gently, “are you sure this looks like a novel?” They saved my career. I don’t know who they are. They’re probably reading this.
Want to See What the Final Versions Look Like?
If any of the published covers above caught your eye and you’d like to read what’s actually behind them, the full catalogue is on the books page. You can decide for yourself whether the cover delivered on the promise. And if you spot any covers that look like they belong in the rejected folder, please be polite about it. The author has feelings.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do indie authors design so many cover versions?
Because covers do most of the marketing work, and indie authors don’t get the safety net of a publisher’s art department. Every cover