u/Rinainthemoon

Of all of Ilona Andrews's series (aside from Maggie), I think Hidden Legacy has been the luckiest with its foreign covers. Even the worst offenders I highlighted in a previous post were not the worst out there. I think the Polish ones still might be my favourite, but when I was trying to compile a post for the best covers I quickly realized there are a lot of good HL covers. So many that I have to talk about them in more than one post because of image attachment limits. So here are my highlights for the first Hidden Legacy trilogy and if I have an equally chill weekend next week I will post part 2 then.

Cover 1 - Turkish cover - This cover is kind of incredible? It's definitely very actiony for a romance series but the colours grab me right away and it conveys both the action and magic elements immediately. The colours also match the fire theme in the series names and the Adam Pierce plot. This cover was created by the excellent and prolific Trukish cover designer Aslıhan Kopuz, but we will never know what books 2 and 3 would have looked like because the publisher never ended up translating the rest of the series.

Covers 2-4 - Hebrew covers - These covers are from the same publisher who did a great job with the Innkeeper and Edge series. As stated in the captions I never thought I would like covers with human models this much??? These covers were designed by lemonade studios the same company that did those, and I really enjoy playing spot the reference with these because the designer was clearly a fan!

Cover 5 - Portuguese cover - This cover is not book accurate in the least and gives some crazy apocalypse vibes but boy do I find the decisions they made here fascinating (especially with Nevada's outfit). I included this because I think I would actually pick this one up and it definitely projects an 'action' vibe that would intrigue me. Goth/Punk Nevada is a weird choice but it feels like this designer and the Turkish designer had similar inspiration. This is another translation that ended after book 1.

Covers 6-8 - Japanese covers - These covers are gorgeous and minimalist. It seems like they noticed the flower theme in book 1 or the other international covers and ran with it and did so very effectively. These covers are a redesign meant to replace earlier versions that did not look nearly as great. I'll have to show the older ones in another post sometime because they are interesting in their own way. (Catalina's trilogy even got interesting manga/anime style covers originally but thats a whole other story).

Covers 9-11 - German covers - Of all of the German covers of all of IA's books, I think these covers definitely rank among my favourites. They also use a real cover model but I genuinely love the striking white background and water in ink appearance of the digital art. Like most of IA's german covers from Egmont Lyx these covers are the work of Stefan Hilden design.

Covers 12-14 - Bulgarian covers - No offence to any Bulgarian fans, but I'll be honest, I underestimated your game! These are definitely a very modern style of cover but there was obvious thought put into the composition, elements and how these covers look together. The choice to have Nevada solo on the book 1 cover, standing next to Rogan on the books 2 cover and the two of them holding eachother on the book 3 cover is a great detail! Sadly I don't know who designed these, but they are really cool. Also, based on how many results I got when I looked these up, Bulgarian readers love them too!

Covers 15-17 - Spanish covers - Hmmmm. These look familiar! But I will say something about them works differently with the Spanish text compared to the English text on the new paperbacks. I almost like them more. I wanted to give these a nod because they were designed by Damonza, the same cover design studio as the beloved French Kate Daniels covers and I find it interesting that these may have influenced or been influenced by the Japanese covers I included here earlier. I believe these covers were originally intended to be used both for the English redesign and the pending Spanish translation so it's interesting to compare how they play in both languages.

Covers 18-20 - Dutch covers - Ilona Andrews has not had much luck with Dutch translations until now (see this bad cover post to see the unfortunate 2010 era covers for the Edge series), but these are brand new and very in keeping with modern cover trends. I will admit that I have an unfortunate weakness for these 2020s style object covers, even when the objects on said cover don't really pertain to the story itself. But on another level I'm glad Ilona Andrews is getting this treatment because I think Hidden Legacy has a lot of crossover appeal with the current romantasy boom that made this cover style popular and if anything this will mean more Dutch members of the Horde. These covers are striking and intriguing and I venture to say I would pick them up if I was fluent in Dutch because I'm a sucker.
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One thing you will notice overall is that many of these covers have come out in the last 5 years or so, due to - I assume - how well Hidden Legacy blends with the current fantasy romance trend in worldwide publishing. A few countries translated this series when it was coming out, but it seems this series has gained way more international interest recently. Some publishers like the Japanese publisher and the English one have actively chosen to modernize the covers for this series to capitalize on that fact - even though the original covers aren't that old in both cases.

What are your thoughts and which ones are your favourites? Honestly I find it really hard to decide on my favourites here because there are so many solid choices.

So over a month ago I made a post about some of the bad covers The Edge and Hidden Legacy Series have had, and one cover appreciation post I have been looking forward to doing since then is The Edge because it is especially interesting to me how different countries have chosen to market it. This series has some legitimately beautiful covers that also mostly fail to present an accurate picture of the story.

When the Edge first came out in the mid 2010s the authors included this funny aside on their webpage for the series. "I now present the unclassifiable ON THE EDGE. It’s like Twinkies. Everybody likes it, nobody is 100% sure what it is." The Edge is part urban fantasy, and part sword and sorcery, but also delves into mystery, body horror and spy thriller plotlines. Yet, in some places, it's as one poster put it - kinda like Bridgerton with swords

As you will see shortly, most countries chose either Bridgerton or full-on fantasy vibes (except for the Hebrew publisher), which has resulted in some gorgeous covers - which tend to be a touch misleading - but at least they're pretty? (I guess?)

Covers 1-4 - Hebrew covers - This is most recent translation and my favourite set of covers because they somehow manage to convey what this story is. They have managed to accurately depict the twinkie. The attention to detail on each cover and fact that they went to the effort of rendering the main leads of each book in actual settings from the story says it all. One cover even has a wyvern! Most covers for this series have never done a great job of showing what each character looks like, but it feels like the design department for this translation obviously cared (maybe even more than the English publisher)!

Covers 5-8 - Chinese Covers - These covers are really pretty (oooh pretty dresses!), but not great at conveying the swords, sorcery, or the urban fantasy. If I saw these, I'm not sure I'd be prepared for Grandpa Cletus, the horrific villains, or a trip to Walmart. But pretty is pretty, so I included them. I did get a bit of a laugh about Audrey being in a dress on her cover, because she spent maybe a chapter and a half in a dress in the actual book. For Charlotte it makes a bit more sense, but no one in this series tends to spend much of their time overall in dresses, so this was certainly a choice.

Covers 9-11 - Thai covers - These covers are not the best, but there is something entrancing about them that really conveys the idea of a "different world". This translation was also only sold as a paperback so the image quality for these covers is bad. One of the most quoted phrases from Ilona Andrews is a line in Fate's Edge “If the sky could dream, it would dream of dragons," and the cover for that book feels like that quote in spirit. I kind of love these? But the only problem is that they also don't convey the urban (or more accurately) rural fantasy elements of this series. Still these ones are very unique compared to a lot of covers I've seen.

Covers 12 - German covers - I included these on the worst post because I felt so odd. Like the Chinese and Thai covers these covers are beautiful and ethereal, but also almost too sparkly for this series. I can't deny that they look nice, but they look like they belong to a 2010s faerie romance instead of an urban fantasy series. It just goes to show that 3 different countries independently looked at the Twinkie problem and said 'let's just make it pretty and romantic'.

What are your thoughts on these covers? I know the Edge series is one of IA's least popular series, but I think it has had some of the most fascinating cover choices (especially when you consider how some other translations shown on the unfortunate cover post went with a much darker vibe and how hard this series is to classify).

Long-time fans of Ilona Andrews know that TKWNKM has been in development for quite a while, and that before the release of this series, the authors were worried that this story wouldn't be a success (it seems a bit silly now, but I can't blame any creative for feeling this way!). And since this series has been a big hyperfixation of mine I got really curious about how you could even gauge sales numbers for a new book without having access to publisher metrics. Here is my attempt to analyze this and use TKWNKM as a test case since I had the time to watch the whole release cycle unfold (and too much goddamn time on my hands).

Metric #1: Goodreads Reviews and the Mark Lawrence Review Metric
Way back in 2015, in a blog post, fantasy writer Mark Lawrence discussed an interesting correlation he noticed between the amount of reviews each of his books got on Goodreads and the official amount of units sold.

In 2015, he observed that every Goodreads review his books received correlated with approximately 3.64 books sold. In 2017 and 2021, he updated this and incorporated data from other traditionally published fantasy authors who published around the same time. Since Goodreads had accumulated significantly more users and ebooks became a more common format he now estimated that the true metric was the number of Goodreads reviews times 7.7. One caveat is that he stated this is best applied to English books which have been out for at least a year (not 1 month like TKWNKM), best applies to fantasy books, and might change drastically as review and book consumption habits change. For example, he observed this mostly before TikTok and social media virality was a big thing. But I thought it would be cool to estimate this anyway!

I checked the amount of Goodreads reviews TKWNKM had last week and this morning and applied both versions of the metric.

April 23, 2026 - 8,533 ratings

• 8,533 x 3.64 = 31,060 units sold (both physical and ebook)
• 8,533 x 7.7 = 65,704 units sold  (both physical and ebook)

May 1, 2026 - 10,736 ratings (+ 2,203 ratings since last week) rate of 275-315 new Goodreads ratings per day

• 10,736 x 3.6 = 39,079 units sold (all formats)
• 10,736 x 7.7 = 82,667 units sold (all formats)

So these sales numbers are really awesome for a new series! But its worth noting that since this is release month these numbers are probably higher than normal. This book will probably get fewer reviews over time and see spikes when sequels are released. Also, if you check Goodreads now, I can guarantee you the numbers will have changed in the time it took to write out this post because a lot of people are adding reviews right now! TKWNKM is trending right now among fantasy romance bloggers and yesterday Goodreads included it in a reel about trending new reads. This book is gaining a lot of word of mouth as I write this.

Metric #2 - StoryGraph

I was also interested to see whether TKWNKM is gaining traction on other popular review sites like Storygraph, and to my delight, it looks like plenty of readers have been reviewing it and picking it up over the last week as well.

• April 25 1,688 reviews
• April 29 1,936 reviews
• May 1st 2,015 reviews

Metric #3 - NYT List
The most traditional metric for a book's performance is bestseller lists. But it's not always obvious what that means numbers-wise. TKWNKM made it to #10 on NYT's Hardcover fiction list and #9 on the combined print/fiction list. It hasn't gotten back on top ten of this list since, but the NYT list only tends to show books that are selling tons EVERY week instead of selling steadily but under the threshold to make it on the list. But how many books do you need to get on it? The NYT list also only shows weekly sales in the United States, so these sales don't overlap with the UK and International sales numbers**.**

It's a bit tricky to tell, but one source I found states that you need the following amount of sales to make it onto the bottom of each list.

• Fiction/Non-fiction Hardcover: 5,000–10,000 US PHYSICAL copies in one week to make it onto the list.
• Combined ebook/hardcover: 10,000–20,000 copies in one week (due to lower prices and higher competition).

We know the TKWNKM achieved both of these within its first week, but presumably sold a bit less afterwards. Both of these are really impressive for any book! Some authors can only dream of selling 5,000-10,000 hardcopies of a book in a single week and cracking the NYT list, especially in the current market where the latest Colleen Hoover or Booktok hit is on the list for over 20 weeks.

METRIC #4: Sunday Times List (UK)

We also know that TKWNKM landed at #2 in the UK in its first week [archive link]! The Sunday Times is awesome because they actually tell you how many print copies were sold, in this case 3,070 units were sold in the first week, and this is a fully verified number unlike the NYT which involves a lot of guesstimating.

• 3,070 books sold in the first week (#2 on the list)

METRIC #5: Libraries on WorldCat

WorldCat is a database that aggregates book data from thousands of libraries worldwide and lets you see which libraries hold copies of a given book. Critically though it only lets you see which libraries have it and not how many copies each library has.

According to WorldCat, as of today, 543 libraries have at least one copy. I know some bigger library systems have as many as a dozen hard copies and the ebook, but on WorldCat, this is only shown as 1 library. But some of these libraries might be a tiny county library with one hardcopy. 47 libraries specifically have the audiobook.

Due to having special access to more detail from this database due to my profession, I can see that 525 of 543 have at least 1 hardcopy. 18 libraries only have the ebook and 27 library systems have both physical and ebook copies (the ebook numbers are likely a bit off because ebook cataloguing on Worldcat is kinda iffy).

Assuming each different library has at least 2 physical or ebook copies (and this is actually a pretty significant assumption) = Libraries alone probably have AT LEAST 1050 hardcopies of TKWNKM in circulation

METRIC #6: Amazon/Kindle Ratings (Includes multiple formats)

Another great way to guesstimate how many people have bought a book is Amazon since it is the world's largest book retailer. However, not all ratings or reviews on Amazon are actually guaranteed purchases, and like Goodreads and StoryGraph some of the same people will have reviewed it here as on other sites. We also have no idea which format the review is from (physical, kindle or audio).

That said though I looked up how many reviews TKWNKM got over the past week and how many reviews and ratings its gaining in English speaking countries. Amazon is weird because sometimes it shares reviews from Canada, the US, and UK and international sites across its regional sites so a Canadian buyer will see UK reviews etc. I also checked Amazon Australia but found the review and rating numbers on there were identical to the UK because the UK versions are being sold there.

But either way I discovered that TKWNKM is currently gaining over 1,000 ratings a week (which is insane!) and already has hundreds of reviews

Canada - April 23, 2026 - 2,634 
USA - April 23, 2026 - 2,862 
UK - April 23, 2026 -  2,653 

Canada - May 1, 2026 - 3,743 (+1,108 ratings in 1 week)
USA - May 1, 2026 - 3,976 (+1,114 ratings in 1 week)
UK - April 23, 2026 -  3,768 (+1,114 ratings in 1 week)

Overview:

If we add up all the solid numbers.

Verified Physical Sales in 1st Week:
3,070 (Sunday Times) + 5,000 to 10,000 (NYT hardcover) = 8,070 - 13,070 (physical copies 1st Week ALONE)
3,070 (Sunday Times) + 10,000 to 20,000 (NYT Combined) = 13,070 - 23,070 (ebook & physical)

These numbers might already reflect library numbers, but to be generous we can add the library copies on top:

3,070 (Sunday Times) + 5,000 to 10,000 (NYT hardcover) + 1050 (print library copies) = 9,120 - 14,120
3,070 (Sunday Times) + 10,000 to 20,000 (NYT Combined) + 1095 (print/ebook library copies) = 14,165 - 24,165

Guesstimated Overall Sales Using the Mark Lawrence Metric

• 39,079 - 82,667 units sold (all formats)

Conclusions:
The TL;DR to all this is that TKWNKM is doing GREAT in it's first month by any metric and most importantly it is giving plenty of readers so much joy.

Despite IA's fears this series is marketable and is bringing in new readers. I would even venture to say this is their most successful series debut for a book that is not already part of a beloved series (Blood Heir and some other books in their other series also did amazing numbers, but those already had fans waiting for a sequel). When I looked back on the Wayback machine for how many reviews the first Hidden Legacy book had in October 2015 - one whole year after its release in 2014 - it had 10,941 ratings, which TKWNKM is likely going to exceed within its first 1.5 months. Some of this has to do with the much larger user population of Goodreads in 2026, but it also seems this book is slated to be a bigger deal overall.

So are Ilona Andrews rich and set for life now?

No. They are not, LOL. Tor has paid them the advance for the full series, and they probably haven't sold out their advance yet, even with these great numbers. It's also worth noting that the first print run of TKWNKM has a massive print run of 350K physical copies and based on the most generous verified numbers, they have sold 2.57-4% of that print run. If I am using the Mark Lawrence Metric guesstimates and assuming that EVERYONE bought a physical copy they have sold a truly crazy 11.16-23.6% of their first print run. Keep in mind that selling even 5 percent of a print run in the first month is considered very impressive, and 23% is unrealistic blockbuster numbers for print sales that only viral hits achieve. Most of the sales are probably audio and ebook sales.

BUT - This is all really, really good for Ilona Andrews (and us). These are the kinds of numbers any author or publisher would be very proud of. Tor is likely very happy with this book and the minute it hit NYT and Sunday Times, Tor was probably already onboard for sequels. The massive 350K initial print run is a long-term goal that the publisher hopes to sell out over a long time and they probably expect more copies to sell over the next few years as more readers find it with each new installment.

This was a fun post to write since I'm a certified sucker for stats, spreadsheets etc. - maybe if I'm in a good place next year, I will try to do a 1 year update. I'm on a break from work so my hyperactive brain apparently needed this, LOL.

Also - anyone who read this whole post on a Friday deserves an award, lol.

So I've already shared some unfortunate KD covers and highlighted the cool (but flawed) digitally drawn Polish covers, but I wanted to call out some of the other interesting covers of years past that never got mentioned previously, but still stand out from the crowd. When KD was published and distributed internationally, the trend in fantasy publishing had mostly shifted from hand-drawn art to the polarizing human cover model ones. Most international versions of the KD novels just recycled the existing English covers, changed the colour grading and slapped translated text over it. This trend is shifting in the 2020s and I'm seeing a lot more covers that are hand-drawn or digitally painted, perhaps because people now appreciate the value of fantasy art more.

But way back in the early 2010s, some foreign publishers were already commissioning custom art for their translations of the KD series and these (flawed but interesting) covers were the result. The tone of this post is pretty humourous (because some of these covers are certainly not perfect, LOL), but let it be known that I respect both of these artists immensely despite the flaws!

Starting on a positive note, we have the stunning 2021 Russian covers by Irina Aleksandrovna Kosulina (Косулина Ирина Александровна) that depict Atlanta in all its post-apocalyptic glory. I managed to find a full cover spread of both and included it so we can all enjoy the pretty art. These are super cool, but I will say some of the human proportions on the first cover hit a tiny bit of the uncanny valley for me (for some reason.) Either way, these are awesome for the stunning background art alone.

Then we have the flawed early French covers from the late 2000s drawn by Sam-Oeun Yin. There are some obvious flaws with these ones, but I'm also oddly attached to them because of how they make an effort to depict some actual scenes from the books. The first one seems to have inherited the inexplicably red-haired version of Kate, but it also depicts the iconic "Here Kitty Kitty" scene 😂. I like the style of the second as well, but Curran's face kinda reminds me of medieval cat paintings. The third is kind of epic, and the artist even went to the extent of trying to depict Curran in his partial shift form with an appropriately ugly face (as well as our boy Derek!). But on the other hand, the result is kind of funny in its own way (someone referred to this cover as the 'leprosy cover' on one of my previous cover posts and I can't get that description out of my head).

I'm curious where everyone else lands on these covers!