Once you have decided what the cover image should show, how do you produce it? If you are traditionally published, your publisher may have the skills necessary in-house, or may point you to a cover artist. Those of us self-publishing do not have that, albeit expensive, luxury. One option is to find a cover artist ourselves, perhaps a friend or commercial artist. The danger, in my mind, is that they would charge me a small fortune for something that did not fit with my idea of how the novel should be seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have written before about the search for a graphic which I could use freely for commercial use: others might be happy to pay a fee for a copyright image. For me the negotiating this is even more off-putting than having to pay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another option is to use AI. I tried this about a year ago when I was first thinking about a cover for ‘The Urchin’. My prompt was something like, ‘A picture of a spy in a mid 17th Century London setting’. The result amused and appalled me in equal measure. The spy was a James Bond type in a dinner jacket carrying an automatic pistol. To show it was London there were a few elements including St. Paul’s (the newer one, not the pre-fire one, of course) and Big Ben. In fact, to hammer home the point, there were three copies of Big Ben in this version of London!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AI graphics have come on greatly in the last year. Hardly ever do you get people with six fingers or two and I might be able to write a much better prompt now. A friend almost always uses AI to produce a first draft of a cover, though he invariably then puts it into Photoshop to make it much more like what he wanted, changing lighting, shading, etc.. Unfortunately, my graphics software skills are not up to his level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How do you produce your covers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Once you have decided what the cover image should show, how do you produce it? If you are traditionally published, your publisher may have the skills necessary in-house, or may point you to a cover artist. Those of us self-publishing do not have that, albeit expensive, luxury. One option is to find a cover artist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions\/206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}