The best thing about e-publishing

I'm in the process of finalizing my next short story, Chalice and Knives, but in the meantime I took another look at the cover for The Demons of Lashtë. Someone had pointed out that the title text overlaps part of the background, and is a little hard to read as a result.

Well, I took the cover art and revised it. And now I think it looks significantly better:

Here's what changed:

• I redid the gold drop shadow on the title to make it more consistent and a little denser.
• I redid the clouds effect above the city to make it more uniform, as well as a little darker and more evil-looking.
• I redid the red drop shadow on my name, to make it stand out more.
• I changed the aspect ratio to 1.6:1, which is the recommended ratio (recommended by Amazon, anyway, for purposes of displaying). Most books on Kindle do seem to use this ratio for their cover art.

The best thing about e-publishing? Once I had finalized the cover and rebuilt the file, I was able to update it on Amazon in about two minutes. Well, it'll take 12-48 hours for it to actually show up on Amazon, but my work is done: now all I have to do is wait, and the new, slightly prettier version will be available for all and sundry.

Unfortunately, I don't think Amazon automatically updates a purchased copy of the story with the new file, so if you've already purchased it, I don't know if there's any way to see the changes. But it does mean I'm not stuck with the first version of the art.