If you’ve been paying attention to my social media presence in recent weeks, you’ll know that I’ve been in the midst of relaunching the Jill Andersen series. The impetus behind this relaunch was removing the books from Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s subscription service that allows readers to read books on their Kindle devices and apps without paying the price to buy the books.
In short, KU readers could read my work without paying $2.99 for each volume.
But, to put it mildly, my KU numbers were always either pathetic or nonexistent. Even the times when my actual sales were good, I would have pitiful KU numbers. So from a financial standpoint, I wasn’t gaining anything out of KU (particularly given that any book enrolled in KU has to be digitally exclusive to Amazon — meaning any Nook, Kobo or iBooks reader who wanted my books either had to use the Kindle app, buy the paperback, or go without).
Not to mention the scamming rampant within KU.
So in the interest of protecting my work and wanting to make it available to a wider range of potential readers, I thought this would be the perfect time to give the series a more uniform visual identity. The slate of covers I had for Bounty, Blood Ties, Behind the Badge, and even Behind the Mask were great — but there was nothing identifying them as installments in a series.
Fortunately, one of my biggest fans — author S.E. Anderson — also happens to do cover design work (you can see her premade covers on SelfPubBookCovers, and she’s also the cover designer of R.R. Virdi’s Grave Report novels and Dangerous Ways).
In short, she does really good work, and something told me she’d be excited to put her stamp on books she loves.
Boy, was she.
The new covers look fantastic, and I love that this series now has a look that’s uniform throughout — something that you can look at and think to yourself, Yep, that’s a Jill Andersen book. The design of the covers for Behind the Badge and Behind the Mask remained the same; she just changed the font to match the rest of the series.
But look at the cover to Bounty. There is now an official canon representation of what Jill looks like. The eyeplate, the black lipstick, the katana… all of her trademarks are there. And Blood Ties… I think that cover is some of Anderson’s finest work. I particularly love the dueling skylines (trivia: one of those is downtown Baltimore today, while the other is downtown Baltimore from 100 years ago). This cover perfectly embodies the series: it’s a little bit mystery, a little bit sci-fi conspiracy, a little bit of the shadowy unknown…
If this series finally takes off in the near future, I think these covers will be a big reason why. As much as we like to think “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the fa
ct is a lot of people — potential readers, especially — do.
So in the coming days and weeks, this series will be available not only on Kindle, but also on Kobo, Apple iBooks, Google Play and Nook. I’m in the process of updating the paperbacks as well, and I hope to have new editions of the physical books with me come Hampton Comicon on Oct. 21. Keep checking back; as each new edition goes live, I’ll be updating this site accordingly.
And if you haven’t given Jill a try yet, there’s no better time than now.
of my novels, and a slew of business cards, flyers, and bookmarks — both for my work and the work of some other self-published authors I enjoyed. From 9 a.m. until roughly 6 p.m., I sold far more books than I expected. I sold out of my allotment of Bounty (the first book), and I damn near sold out of Behind the Badge (the third book), too.
approached my table saying he was looking for novels he could pitch to movie studios. He took a business card. Another man later approached about potential TV series ideas. He also left my table with a business card. Will those go anywhere? I have no idea (I’m accounting for the possibility that they were both blowing smoke up my ass), but just having the conversation was cool enough.
J.D. Cunegan 