What a Difference a Cover Makes

I've had Beneath Montana's Sky, the prequel novella to Mail-Order Brides of the West and The Montana Sky Series available for sale on pre-order since April. The book is available on June 30th.

Here was my cover:

Perfectly fine. What I didn't realize was that this wasn't the final version. When I recently went to upload the book to Nook (anticipating that I might need a couple of days for the book to go live) I found the cover was too big. So I requested a smaller version from my cover artist. She sent me this:

I loaded the cover on Nook. (I was at a conference at the time and was sleep deprived.) To my surprise, the book was live in three hours. The next day, while on the phone with Caroline Fyffe discussing our Mail-Order Brides of the West series, she mentioned that I had two different covers. Not knowing what she was talking about, I had to go look and each. Sure enough, the covers were different.

When I uploaded cover #2 on Amazon, my sales increased and the book went from having a sales rank in the 3000s to the current rank of #1500 overall in the Kindle store and #15 on the top 100 Western Romance list.

I love the new cover, although I'll probably have her make my name and New York Times Bestselling Author more visible.