Recycling & Cover Confusion

I’ve been working on Dragons of Andromeda for around two weeks now and I’m up to 5k words. Today I made the decision to include a portion of a short story I started maybe two years ago but never finished. Basically, it was about an Imperial heavy cruiser and its crew. Since my “Crimson Kiss” story included an Imperial ship, I decided to splice the two together. As an added bonus, I changed the name of the executive officer (XO) of the warship to Maycare, instantly making him the nephew of Devlin Maycare from Arks of Andromeda. This also creates a link between this story arc and the one that Uncle Devlin will have in Dragons.

I posted the cover I did for Arks on a FB page for authors to get feedback. While several people liked the retro look, the person running the page (who’s very successful as an indie writer) strongly suggested I get a professional artist to do the cover so my book looks like the others out there. While I appreciated and understood her argument, namely that a professional cover would sell better, I was very torn because I really loved the one I made. So, after looking at a lot of artists and seeing how much they charge (a lot), I decided that I will still go with my own cover. I worry about how this will affect my sales, but I really don’t want my book to look like all the others. I guess I could always change it down the road, hopefully after I make some money.