The Book Cover Saga

Having talked in the last post about how I wouldn’t use AI for writing my stories, an area where I have been happy to use it is in book cover generation.

AI use is contentious, which I’ll talk about in more detail another time.  One of the main issues is that illustrators and graphic designers who might have been paid in the past to do covers are now being replaced by bots.

I was never planning to pay an illustrator to create my covers for several reasons.  Although my design skills aren’t up to their level, they are good enough that I was always going to do my artwork myself.  Fortunately for everyone who has to look at them, AI helped make them better than they might have been!

It wasn’t an easy process though and I still had to do a lot of work.  Let me share the highs and lows of that journey with you…

I LOVED the first image that was created, although it ended up being the cover of SOTL, rather than GMTS.  I used Gemini and I think the prompt was fairly basic – “please create a book cover for a young adult science fiction romance story”.  I got lucky.  Especially when it also created the image I used for GMTS later in that session too.

Something must have changed between then and when I went to create the cover for HBTD. 

Returning to Gemini, I put in more or less the same prompt.

It told me that it didn’t do images, it was a text-based program.  That was a bit of surprise given what it had produced last time!

So, I switched to ChatGPT.  I gave it the photo from Unsplash that I wanted to use as the background (I loved the colour and there was a strong Opal Mountains vibe, a key location in the book).  Then I asked, “Please turn this image into a book cover for a young-adult science-fiction romance story”.  It whirred for AGES.  I got excited.

It gave me this.

Any concerns I had about AI taking over the world in the near future were dissipated instantly.

I decided to go back to Gemini and see if my luck had returned.  I tweaked the prompt.  It decided it could do images again now, although the Disney vibe wasn’t quite what I was after.

I was starting to lose the plot (there were more attempts than that), so called in my tech genius son, Sam, to rescue me.  He gave Gemini the GMTS front cover and asked it to analyse it.  It came back with the most fabulous, detailed and spot-on description of everything I’d been trying to achieve with it, and everything I therefore wanted for book 2’s cover.

So, we asked it to create a new image, based on all that information and using the Unsplash photo as the background.  It came up with this.

Not bad, but not the same vibe as the GMTS (or SOTL) covers.  I couldn’t have such a different cover for one book.  How was I ever going to get something similar AND with characters that looked vaguely like Will and Celeste do in the other two?

Sensing a meltdown, Sam took charge of the prompt and went back to ChatGPT.

The attached image [GMTS cover] is the cover photo used for the first book in a sci fi young adult romance saga. I need you to generate a cover image for the second book in the saga. The cover image should be consistent in same realistic digital painting style with a cinematic feel and use the same main two characters. Use the mountainous background and turquoise colours from earlier in this chat. Do not include any text. The two main characters should be on opposite sides of the cover, apart but looking towards each other. Ensure the style of the artwork is consistent with the first cover. Please feel free to ask any clarification questions that would help you to generate a better result.

I have a lot to learn about prompt engineering! I still didn’t have a lot of hope but, praise the Lord (genuinely), after a bit of whirring, out popped this image, which was perfect.  I possibly cried in relief. 

After I’d got each of the images for my front covers, I still had to do plenty of work on them, mostly using Canva, and also Photoshop.  For the paperback back covers, I chose photos from Unsplash (all creators credited in the Acknowledgements), colour adjusting to match them to the front covers, and Sam designed the spines.

We got there in the end and despite the hassles – or maybe because of them – I absolutely adore my three book covers!