Same book, different cover: Is It Halloween Yet?
When you’re a writer and not an artist, (as I am), and you never, ever use AI (that’s me), and you haven’t got a bottomless pit of money to invest in book covers (me again), you have to do what you can to get the best cover possible for your books.
Is It Halloween Yet? is one of my oldest books (written and self-published in 2015) and during that time it’s been wrapped in four different covers.
The first is clearly homemade – you can even see the felt tip pen overlap lines in the illustration. It features the traditional Halloween colours – pumpkin orange, witch’s cloak black and er… purple – I’m not quite sure what links purple to Halloween – maybe it’s because it’s dark and wintry?
This cover was the face of Is It Halloween Yet from 2015 to 2023. During this time, sales were steady but not spectacular – a running theme with many Jon Lymon books. Inside, the book just featured rhyming words laid out like poetry. I was waiting for the time when I could afford to hire a professional illustrator and give this book the illustrated finish it deserved. I even drew up a shortlist of artists with styles I liked. But alack, the money never materialised.
In 2023, I decided sod it, while I couldn’t afford a full-on illustration job, I could afford to get a cover professionally illustrated. The result was this:
Apart for the witch’s cauldron black, this has no traditional Halloweeny colours. But it brings another dimension to the book that appeals to younger readers. Sales saw a slight boost in the Halloweens of 2023 and 2024 as a result – I guess people do judge a book by its cover.
As AI ate into my copywriting business, in 2025 I found myself with less money in my business but more time on my hands. I threw caution to the wind and decided to illustrate the book myself. Bad idea, many might say, and it’s clear I’m no pro. But I spent a couple of weeks creating illustrations to go with the rhyming words. Keeping the 2023 cover, I decided that the new illustrated version needed a new cover more in keeping with the ‘style’ of the illustrations within. And so, version 3 came to be:
On the back of having two versions of the book, Halloween 2025 saw the most successful sales of Is It Halloween Yet, but most were down to the 2023 cover to which I added my illustrations for the paperback version. It proved impossible to do this for the Kindle digital version due to format issues.
For me, the 2025 cover was clear, but not very Halloweeny, which may have been the reason why sales of digital and paperback books bearing this cover were so slack.
And now we reach the present day, and version 4 of the cover:
It’s fair to say the start of the 2026 Halloween sales season has been somewhat slack for both the 2023 and 2026 covers, but who knows what the rest of October holds...
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