Cover Snark: Why Did you Change the Cover?

With some of the bigger series out there, they have several different cover versions of the covers. I always look forward to that, since it gives me so many more chances snark, after all. Particularly when a cover starts out relatively sensibly - and then new editions lose every bit of common sense. Yes the creeping sexiness will raise its ugly head - we’ve seen it before with series progression and now with different editions

Take Kelley Armstrong’s excellent Otherworld Series. Now, when I bought Bitten, this is the book I got

I actually like the cover, it’s pretty, it’s abstract and it attracted me to the book and, through it, the series. Now let’s look at some later editions of Bitten

Uh... This is Elena? Someone has stolen her clothes.



And speaking of Stolen - when I bought that book, I got this excellent cover

Excellent indication of the actual plot of the book. Then I look for other editions and I find...

A corset. Really? A corset? Elena in a corset? And don’t even get me started on her laid naked on - what is that? A beach? A desert? This book is set in the forests of Maine - so I have no idea what that’s supposed to be.

And the third book? Dime Store Magic - My cover:

And the re-release? Less about magic, more about Paige’s disembodied legs

Why did someone come back to this series and decide what it really needed was for these excellent heroines to be depicted without clothes? Why did someone take their already excellent and intriguing covers and decide that disembodied women were needed instead?

Of course, what is ironic is that some series go the other way - and, in the ultimate irony - it’s Anita Blake. See this is my cover of Narcissus in Chains and Obsidian Butterfly (which makes no sense)
 
And now?

This book gets the abstract treatment? Really, if ever a book needed to be sold in brown paper, it was this one.