Here is where the fun really begins, and you can really play around with the visual side of AI.
For many authors, the cover is the hardest part of making a book. People spend hundreds, even thousands of hours just to get good at designing book covers. And taking a book that you’ve always described with words, and being tasked to put visuals to it, is no small feat. Before AI, you either had to design the cover yourself, which would often turn out poorly given the lack of designing experience or a budget for a professional photo shoot. Or you could pay a professional to design it for you, but this could cost upwards of a thousand dollars, even more if a photo-shoot is needed.
Thankfully, new involvements in AI program generation allow you to create near-professional quality covers, for free, in minutes. You can do this through prompting, where you just describe to the AI what you want, in detail. For instance, I could say “Generate an image of a green ATM with a glowing screen, with a dark blue background, with a lamp shining onto it from above, moody lighting”. You can fine tune exactly what you want just by being specific with it: Mention a background being blue, mention a vase being red with ornate patterns, mention it being backlit, etc. Some AI programs will allow you to enter single-word adjectives at the end to change the style of the image being generated, almost like an Instagram filter: “Handmade”, “Abstract”, “Anime”, “Cinematic”, “Charcoal”, “Watercolor”, “Two-tone”, “Comic Book”, and more. The only limit is your imagination.
The website that we use to generate book covers is https://labs.google/fx, more specifically the “ImageFX” program. It’s completely free to use, very easy to use, automatically generates four different images for you to pick, and you can keep refreshing the results to get what you want. What I do when generating a book cover with ImageFX is to change the aspect ratio to a vertical 9:16 orientation, then download the images to my computer after generating them. I then go to a different website (https://imgupscaler.com/) to increase the resolution of the picture, that way it isn’t blurry when it gets printed. Of course, Google’s ImageFX isn’t the only AI image generator, far from it. Sites such as Stable Diffusion, Co-pilot, ChatGPT, and Dall-E are all either capable of generating AI images or built specifically to generate AI images. Experiment with some of them and see what works for you!
On the downside, AI can’t handle certain elements well. More intricate elements, such as text and fingers, will often melt together in a somewhat incomprehensible way. This is especially true for very text-heavy AI-generated images (especially comics): too many letters in an image will mold together and form nonsensical words and letters. AI images are 99% of the way there, but it isn’t quite up to snuff just yet. So when using AI for your cover, always double check for hallucinations!
What I personally do to get around this bug (since book covers naturally require text on them with the book’s name and the author’s name) is to just generate images without text when using an AI tool. Then I open Photoshop (but any photo editing software will do) and add the text that I want, manually, on top of the cover.
Ultimately, the best way to make a pretty cover using AI is to use it for elements that you can’t do, and add text on top yourself, manually. For example, the cover that I designed for Earline May’s upcoming book, seen above, had the ATM and the blue background AI-generated, while all text elements (along with the cross, seen on the right side of the ATM) were edited in on top of the picture. This mixture of AI and manual edits I’ve found produces the best-looking results, but depending on the type of book you’re publishing, it can be as simple as just generating an image and adding the title on top. The best part about AI is how quick it is, so feel free to experiment with as many pictures as you like!
That’s really all there is to it when it comes to AI and creating covers! This is my favorite step when it comes to using AI to make a book, finally being able to see your work visualized is the best feeling in the world, and the results are consistently good. There are all sorts of great tools and tutorials out there, in case you want to learn more about when and how to use AI to generate covers.
In the next blog post, we will cover how AI can help you list and publish your books online.
Written by Connor Mayhorn
ChatGPT was used for additional research for this article. Book covers in featured image are used for illustrative purposes only.