Cover Art

Planning for the self-publishing route, one of the early tasks I undertook was designing a book cover. This seemed like quite a daunting and expensive process. I didn't know who to ask or what a reasonable price was. Luckily, my brother-in-law invents board games as a hobby and has been using the same Brazilian artist for many years. I reached out, and he was more than happy to design me a cover based on my brief. I really liked what he produced. It almost matched exactly what I was after.
Not long after, I started following a lot of independent authors and critics on Twitter (I can't call it X). I started to see examples of book covers from many self-publishing authors. I was blown away. They were awesome. I began to realise that there were not hand crafted images like mine. These were full-blown AI masterpieces. It was quite a hard decision. Did I stick with what I had and had paid for, or did I see what I could create with AI? I started playing around with some of the free image-generation software on the internet. I was amazed. The detail and realism that could be generated from a small prompt. I did this for about six weeks before I finally got something I liked. It is pretty amusing that AI cannot draw hands. The number of six or even seven-fingered Li Chiungs that were produced was laughable. Now that I have a new cover, the tricky part might be getting a cover for book two that is in a similar style.