Most books published in hardcover get a redesign for their paperback edition. More information has to fit on the cover, and the publisher may have a better sense of the book’s audience by the time the paperback comes out. But sometimes the makeover is particularly dramatic.

One striking example this spring is the paperback edition of Sherill Tippins’s “February House” – a nonfiction book about a house in Brooklyn where W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee lived together in 1940 and 1941. The book got good reviews but sold poorly. According to Nielsen BookScan, less than 4,000 copies were purchased.

The hardcover jacket of “February House” asks to be taken seriously, as a work of literary history. With photographs of each of the artists superimposed on a graphic of a house, the books touts itself as “a literary find.”

The paperback cover shed its tweedy look and took up a sprightly style. It has a white background, bubbly cursive writing, photographic heads on cartoony bodies, and glasses of wine everywhere. The paperback asks to be taken along to the beach. Hardly “a literary find.”

Disappointing sales are only one factor in a publisher’s decision to rethink a book for paperback. Feedback from readers, blogs, and reviews help guide the process. In the case of “February House,” reviews described it as “gossipy” and “deliciously readable.” Walter Vatter, a publicist at Houghton Mifflin, said that the cover was changed “to highlight the fun and accessibility of this great literary story.”