Hello, readers! I’m Brooke, the fiction marketing assistant at Bethany House, and I am posting on the blog this week while my colleague Amy Green is on vacation. 

Let’s talk for a moment about the year 1979. The price of a gallon of gas was still under a dollar and big hair styles were trending, but at Bethany House, one of our favorite 1979 things is Love Comes Softly. That’s right, the first edition of the well-loved prairie romance by Janette Oke was published by Bethany House 40 years ago! In celebration, we released a new paperback edition in August of this year, as well as a new hardcover (a special collector’s edition) that released a few weeks ago in early September. With these new editions, I’ve been thinking with nostalgia of the various cover designs of Love Comes Softly that I saw growing up.

Travel through time with me and take a gander at the Love Comes Softly cover designs through the years. I asked Paul Higdon, our art director, about the changes to the most recent cover – see what he has to say below.

New in 2019:

I asked Paul Higdon, art director for Bethany House, about the new cover design and why he and the designers chose this new direction.

“When you think of the prairie, the quintessential feel is the sun beating down on the prairie so that’s why we tended to go with yellow for the warm feel, and why we still went with warm colors,” Paul said. “Into the early 2010s, we had what we call the ‘big head’ trend, where the character’s head takes up most of the cover. This has trended away, and the new trend is a full-figure depiction of the main character. It looks more realistic, and that way you can still capture the setting to pull the reader in. It’s more modern.”

I hope you all enjoy the new cover design (and the story inside the covers) as much as I do!