To cut a longish story short, I moved publishers for my back catalogue of paperbacks last year. Admittedly I also didn’t move them at all, because I used to publish them from CreateSpace (Amazons old paperback publishing arm) to KDP (Amazons replacement paperback publishing arm). The migration, internal to the corporate mega-entity this is named after the famous South American river, went without a hitch. Or so I thought up until a day or so ago when I was sorting of ‘A Spider in the Eye’ my latest novel that I have not mentioned for almost a whole post…

Then I unexpectedly came across a problem while making a minor change to the paperback edition of one of my previous novels. The minor change being the adding of ‘A Spider in the Eye’ to the ‘Also by the same author’ list in ‘Passing Place’. The problem was not even with the minute change in text, that went fine, but with the cover of ‘Passing Place’ because when the changes were being reviewed by KDSP’s quality control they noticed that the subtitle on the back cover of ‘Passing Place’ had a typo. (this was not news to me, it’s had the typo from day one, and yes I always meant to fix it, but as I always intended to change the cover when I wrote the sequel I had not gotten around to it. It was also a weird little typo that actually suited the book, strange as that might sound. Sometimes a typo is not a typo, it’s a weird conjunction of strangeness that actually feels right. Which may be why no one has ever commented upon it, which given peoples propensity to point out all typos is a miracle. But as I say, weird though it may seem, it was the right typo… I told you it was an odd one…

But in this case, it also meant the book now fails quality control at KDP… Perhaps Amazon isn’t connected to the weirdness in the right way, who knows.

This left me with a problem, I could not update ‘Passing Place‘ without fixing the cover and the cover had originally been built via CreateSpace ( now defunct) and so all KDP had was a migrated PDF file. So I could not update the cover in the normal way to remove the solitary cosmically misplaced yet somehow right letter ‘a’. Indeed all I could do was start from scratch… Which admittedly I have always intended to do as the cover (fond of it as I am) was never the ‘right’ cover for the novel. (see  Self-publishing: A Guidebook for the Tourist#4: Covers: a judgement call…) But now I was in cover limbo…

Luckily, as things tend to do I find, the universe already had a solution, because when I was designing a cover for ‘A Spider in the Eye’ having learned a lot of lessons since way back in 2016 when ‘Passing Place’ was published, I spent a lot of time messing with cover idea’s till I got to the one I finally used on the new novel (you knew the one out next Monday that I am not mentioning too much in this post). I also while doing so messed about with covers for my other books on a similar theme, and while I didn’t have a final design ready for Passing Place I did have a working design I was happy with, a full wrap layout I liked, and so I had somewhere to start when it came to fixing this weird little problem. Which is not to say it did not need work and there weren’t some moments of inspiration needed, but I at least had somewhere to start.

The inspiration came when I wanted to keep some elements of the original cover, which lead to me ditching the ‘Spider’ backdrop and replacing it with the piano from the original cover. Which fixed the biggest problem I had with the new cover that I hadn’t realised I had (it just had not felt right when I did the mock-up last year when I was messing with idea’s.) As soon as I reincorporated the piano suddenly everything fell neatly into place and an hour or so’s tweaking got it just how I wanted it. Hence Passing Place now has a new cover (or will once KDP sort themselves out which always takes a while), though the Kindle version of the new cover is now live. Some people may not like the new one, but I think it is a worthy successor and fits far more with the nature of the novel, in fact having been forced to do this, I am rather glad that I have. Even if the cosmic contrivance of a typo is no longer to be seen, there is a cosmic contrivance of a sort in how the new cover came about.

The new one is on the right, just in case you were wondering 🙂

For those who wish to know, I made the covers using the free tools at https://www.canva.com/ and some of the smaller art pieces came from https://www.kisspng.com/ who do a great range in royalty free clip art.

Anyway, that’s the story of why Passing Place has a new cover, and why I will have the joy of having to redo a who load of links and promotional stuff all over the place, on a week when I should have been focusing on A Spider in the Eye…

I never said the cosmos was fair, only that it was weird…

#edit Oh and as your reading this anyway I would be an utter idiot not to mention that my novella A Scar of Avarice is free right now wouldn’t I… Which is probably why I forgot to do so…