The Cover Changing Curse

I'm pretty sure one of my earliest readerly woes was when the Artemis Fowl series changed covers. I had just finished the third book when I went to the bookstore and found that the fourth book was there, but looked entirely different. I spent hours searching on the internet to try and find copies of the remaining books in the covers I loved, but they were all painfully expensive and disappearing off the face of the earth by the second. And so I had to settle for a cover change.

I think what made this incident worse for me was that I really hated the new covers (I've ranted about my disliking of people on covers here). That CGI face just really creeped me out, and was nothing like what I imagined Artemis to look like. If I had seen the CGI covers first, I think I might've been less inclined to read the books because they tell very little about what this series is actually about. Nothing about them says young criminal rich kid who tries to con fairies out of their money. 

I get that cover changes happen, and I started reading Artemis Fowl when these covers had been out for quite some time. But that doesn't change the fact that they did change before the final book was released, and that it crushed my perfectionist soul.

The first covers aren't rediculously stunning or anything, but they're a beauty in contrast to the new ones.

I'm glad I haven't faced the cover changing curse too often. I normally see it happen when a series has ended. But I have seen it happen with another series that I have yet to read.

The Diviners has been on my TBR for a while and it sounds like a series I would love. But I've been holding off starting it so far because I can't find the series in the UK, and there seems to be a 2-3 year gap between each book in the series being published. But what my irrational perfectionism finds most offputting is that there have been 2 major cover changes already. The third book hasn't even been published yet! I feel like if I buy the first book there will be another 1000 different covers before the series ends, and my bookshelf can't handle that mismatch.

I actually don't mind any of these covers, but the first is my favourite and stands out the most to me

I assume most cover changes are done for marketing reasons and so I don't judge the descisions made by publishers to change book covers. But as a reader it does feel a little stressful, especially when the covers are drastically different, or worse so if they just don't look nice. Sometimes if a series is popular enough and gets a cover change, there'll be a situation like with The Bone Season where you can find a special edition copy that matches the original covers you had. But other times I guess we have to accept being cursed with cover inconsistency.

Have you ever been cursed with a mid-series cover change? Do you repurchase the books you already own or hunt down special edition matching covers? Or does it not bother you that much?