When to redo a cover, and when to leave it alone

Redoing a cover costs something in both directions. Leave a bad cover up and it keeps losing you readers quietly, month after month. Replace a working cover and you discard every scrap of recognition it earned, plus a day of unglamorous file work across a dozen places.

So the question is not whether the new cover would be better. It is whether the old one is costing you something.

Reasons that justify a new cover

It is wrong for its genre, and the book is being passed over. The clearest case. Readers in your category cannot tell what kind of book it is, or they read it as the wrong kind. A cover that mis-states the genre is not a taste problem, it is a delivery failure, and advertising does not fix it. See Genre conventions: what your cover has to promise.

It was made before you knew what the book was. Common with first books. You designed the cover around chapter three, then the book became something else in revision. If it promises a quiet family drama and the book is a thriller, the reviews will tell you so.

The category's conventions have visibly moved. Illustrated romance replaced photographic couples in about two years; hand-lettered fantasy emblems spread the same way. If the top forty books on your shelf have re-tooled and yours is the one that looks like 2019, you are the odd one out although your cover never changed.

The book is being relaunched into a series. Book one was a standalone; now there are three, and it has to be brought into the series system — same type, same treatment — or the set reads as three unrelated books. This is the most reliable payoff of any refresh. See Series covers: the same shelf, three books along.

The title or subtitle changed. If the words changed, the cover changes with them. There is no decision to make here.

Reasons that are not reasons

You are bored of it. You have looked at your cover several thousand times. Your reader has looked at it for one second, once. Your boredom says nothing about whether it works.

Someone said something. One remark from a friend, or one review mentioning the cover, is a single data point from a person who is not your buyer. Five readers of your genre independently naming the same problem is data. One comment is weather.

Sales are slow for reasons the cover is not causing. Check first whether anyone is seeing it at all. Wrong categories, a thin blurb, no keywords and no mailing list are much more common causes of a quiet month, and a cover can only fail once a reader reaches it — Categories and keywords, without the folklore and How to write a blurb that sells the book are the cheaper fixes.

You think a new cover is a marketing plan. A refresh gives you something to post about for a week. It does not find readers, and if the original cover was fine, the second one performs about the same. Authors reach for a redesign because it is the part of the problem they know how to work on.

What a refresh costs beyond the design

The design is the small part. Changing a cover makes all of this stale on the same day:

Every listing image at every store you sell through.
Every mockup you made — flat, 3D, lifestyle, the ones in your header and your ads.
Your A+ content, which usually shows the cover two or three times.
Your website, social profiles, newsletter template and email footer.
Your press kit, any media assets you have given out, and printed material — bookmarks, postcards, banners, conference handouts.

Then the part you cannot rebuild: whatever recognition the old cover had. Everyone who saw the book before, saved it, or skimmed past it while deciding, has to learn it again. At three months old that recognition is worth little and the refresh is cheap. After two years and a following, it is not.

In the Cover Maker. Your book keeps its trim, spine and page count, so a new design re-exports to all four printers and every binding you use from the same file, and the ebook cover comes out at 1600 × 2560 in the same pass. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker

A refresh is not a second edition

These get confused, and the difference matters.

A cover refresh is the same book with new art. Same text inside, same ISBN, same listing, same reviews — you upload new cover files and the product page shows a new picture. Publishers do this constantly.

A second edition means the content substantially changed: new chapters, a major revision, updated material in a nonfiction book. That takes its own ISBN and its own listing, so it starts with no reviews and no sales history. Fixing typos or reformatting is not a new edition. Thresholds vary by registrar and by store, so check before you assign anything — Do you need your own ISBN?.

The sequence for a refresh

Finish the new art and test it at thumbnail size against your category before anything else moves.
Export new wrap files for every printer and binding you sell — the geometry differs at each one, so the paperback file is not the hardcover file.
Export the new ebook cover and upload it wherever the ebook sells.
Update every listing on the same day, so no store is showing last year's cover beside this year's.
Replace mockups, A+ images and site assets in the same session, while you still remember where they all are.

The interior is untouched, so the page count does not change and the spine width stays exactly what it was — unless you changed the content too, in which case this is a new edition and the spine has to be recalculated from the new page count.

Make yours

Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.

Start a book →

Next: Comp titles: reading the shelf you want to be on · More: Feedback, revisions, and knowing when a cover is done · The thumbnail test