New Cover Scheme

It’s time for a visual upgrade for All These Roadworks e-books!

Since I first started releasing e-books, I’ve been doing the covers with a uniform white box for the title, and numbering in the top-right corner. I was doing them that way for two reasons. The first was that I had no talent in graphics, and hadn’t yet discovered Canva, and this was an easy cover design to produce in Microsoft Word. The second was that series numbering had always appealed to me, and it’s satisfying to know that you have every book in a series.

However, since then I’ve gotten a LOT better at designing covers (although I’ll still admit that not every attempt is a gem). In addition, these are e-books, and it’s not like you can line them all up on a shelf and be satisfied by the complete numbering. Nor does the numbering really make sense – ATR Story Collection #9 (“Weird Science”) doesn’t follow on in any meaningful sense from ATR Story Collection #8 (“Cast A Slutty Spell”).

Reader feedback also tells me that about two thirds of readers strongly prefer my newer alternate cover designs, and my business sense tells me that those covers are going to sell better on third-party sites like Smashwords/Draft2Digital.

So starting this month, I’m going to slowly upgrade all the books in the ATR back catalogue to the newer cover designs. These new cover designs will feature the same cover art, but with a different title layout. They will appear as the first page of the PDF and EPUB editions, and be used to represent the books in the shop and on Smashwords. If you’ve already purchased these books from myself or from Smashwords, you’ll be able to download the new versions for free.

You can see examples of the old style versus new style covers at the bottom of this post.

If you are someone who really strongly prefers the old cover designs, enough that it matters to your purchasing decisions, you should get in touch with me and we’ll see what we can do. It’s not hugely desirable to offer two identical versions of the book for download with different covers, but it might be that I can work something out.

The books WILL still be numbered, and those numbers will appear in the download filenames on this site, and in the backmatter of each book, but the numbers will no longer appear on the front cover.