This is the ebook cover for Children of the Starry Sea, coming out sometime this summer! If it looks familiar, that’s because I kept the art from my earlier experiments with Stable Diffusion—the feedback was so positive, including from my writing group, that I decided to make only a few minor tweaks, such as the stars in her hair, and removing the weird watermelon-planet thing that was originally in the bottom left corner. Made a few minor changes to the typography too, though I decided to keep the fonts.
Also, you’ll be interested to know that I just finished the first revision pass of this WIP a few hours ago! I’ve been racing to finish it before the new baby comes, because it’s probably going to be touch-and-go after that. Now I just need to do two more revision passes, one to look for and clean up any issues that I may have missed, and another to trim it down by 10% and make sure the writing is all solid. After that, it’s off to the editor!
This is officially the new ebook cover for Star Wanderers. I’ve uploaded it to all platforms, though I haven’t updated the epub files yet. I’ll also update the paperbacks as soon as I have a chance, though that may take a while, especially with the new baby.
This image was AI generated using Stable Diffusion. It went through a lot of iterations, and can probably use some improvement, but this is the best I can do with the skills I currently have. Maybe a couple of years from now, after I’ve mastered the technology, I’ll make a new cover for this title. But I think this one is good enough to keep for a while.
Just for fun, here are some of the old covers:
The original novel cover, which this latest one has replaced.
The second omnibus cover, from the novella series. The cover itself is by Libbie Grant, though the planet itself is a screenshot I took from Celestia.
The art from the complete series omnibus, which replaced the first two omnibuses and was the immediate precursor to the novelization itself.
The original cover for the first omnibus. The art is by Ina Wong, who also did the current cover art for The Sword Keeper.
This is the original art for the second omnibus, by Derek Murphy.
This is my personal favorite from the art by Libbie Grant. She did all eight novellas and both ominbus editions in this style.
This is the second cover for the original novelette. Derek saw my crappy self-made cover and offered to make me this one for free, so that he could showcase both of them in a before-and-after post on his blog. It worked out really well!
And this is the original ebook cover art for the first novelette that started it all. I had just launched Desert Stars, after draining my bank account to publish it since the kickstarter had failed (This was back in 2011, and I had no idea how to run a kickstarter—or how to profitably publish a book, for that matter). Since I didn’t want to spend another $900 to publish a full-length novel to the sound of crickets, I decided to turn my current WIP into a novella series, put them all out on a shoestring budget, and reinvest whatever money they earned into better editing and cover art.
The image is taken from NASA and is totally in the public domain, and I think the font is too, or at least it’s freeware of some kind. I put it together over the summer, when I was home from teaching English overseas in the Republic of Georgia. For this one, I think I used my desktop, but most of the other ones in this style were done on my tiny ASUS netbook with a screen the size of a postcard, in an old farmhouse in a tiny Georgian village at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, which had no heating aside from the woodburning stove downstairs. The power would also frequently go out for hours at a time.
I wrote a bunch of the original novellas out there, in that tiny little Georgian village. And now, they’re all combined into one novel, which I’m turning into a trilogy right now! Just need to finish revising the second book, hopefully before that new baby comes. I should probably stop procrastinating.
Note: this post originally appeared in my newsletter, but I was so excited about it that I decided to post it here too. Enjoy!
So my wife is getting a PhD in computer science, which means that she’s on the cutting edge of research into things like language learning and topic models and other techy stuff that I don’t totally understand.
A couple of weeks ago, she downloaded Stable Diffusion, an open source text-to-image program that creates AI art, kind of like Dall-E and Midjourney. Besides playing with it herself, she thought it might be useful for me to create my own cover art. So for the last two or three days, I’ve been playing around with it, and the results are absolutely amazing!
These were some of my first attempts. I’ve forgotten what the prompt was: I think it was something like “a spunky young woman with short black hair, surrounded by stars, in the style of Frank Frazetta and Minerva Teichert.” The difference between the first one and the second one was adding “in space.”
I also tried inputting a couple of paragraphs straight from my novel, including a lengthy description of this character, but the results were… uncanny. These AI art programs tend to do better if you give them short descriptions with only a handful of details.
The next day, I played around with it some more, and came up with this one:
The secret sauce for this one was adding “Minerva Teichert” and “Baen Books.” Who is Minerva Teichert? She’s a famous Latter-day Saint painter from the early 20th century who paid for her son’s tuition to Brigham Young University in original paintings, many of which are still on display in the BYU Museum of Art and the Joseph Smith Memorial building.
As you can see, there are still some weird artifacts to this piece, such as the stars on the character’s jacket. That’s the tricky part with AI art: if you look at it closely, you’ll find something weirdly uncanny, like a hand with seven fingers, or a person with three arms. The steepest part of the learning curve has to do with removing these uncanny bits, either by giving better starting prompts, or by tweaking it in subsequent iterations.
I believe the prompt for this one was “a dreamy young woman with short black hair, bare shoulders, in space surrounded by stars and galaxies. Minerva Teichert and Baen Books.” The original image was a woman in a space suit, but I used something called “image to image” to create new images based on the previous one, in batches of four. I would pick what I thought was the best one for that generation, and run the program again. That’s how I eventually got to this one:
and this one:
Still need to work on the hands. Also, there’s this weird artifact, almost like poor JPEG compression, that happens if you don’t give the program enough creative leeway with each successive generation. Another method I’ve heard of is to create a really large batch based on a given image, and then use GIMP to cut and paste all the pieces that you like from each one, before running it through one final image to image pass to seamlessly combine them.
A lot of people are either really angry or really scared about AI art and what it means for the future. It’s the same with other forms of automation, I guess. Will it replace artists entirely? Will all our art be 100% AI-generated in the future? Personally, I don’t think so. These programs are just another set of tools, and require quite a bit of practice to master.
Same thing with stuff like ChatGPT and other language learning models that can be used to write poems and stories. It takes a lot of work to come up with an AI-generated story that isn’t totally boring, or has a terrible ending. It can be done, but it does require quite a bit of human input.
So I don’t see these tools replacing artists or writers, at least in the forseeable future. Rather, I think that the successful artists and writers will be the ones who incorporate these tools into their workflow, using them as force-multipliers to make some really amazing stuff. Personally, I would absolutel love it if I could use something like ChatGPT to put out a new novel every month, or even every week.
The other thing with things like novels is that most people only read them once, because they already know what’s going to happen. So if you use an AI to write a novel, but you have to feed it all the twists and plot points… what’s the point? You’ve basically already read it. This is a problem that a lot of amateur writers have with outlining: since they already know how the story is going to end, they find it difficult to sit down and write.
Now, what I could see is a prompt like “rewrite Lord of the Rings so that Sauron wins,” or “rewrite such-and-such romance novel so that this other guy ends up with the girl.” Or “make Lord of the Rings a gritty cyberpunk novel,” or… you get the picture. And honestly, I’m fine with that. If someone who enjoyed the “alpha” version wants to create a “beta” or a “gamma” version for fun, that’s cool. It might be kind of fun to see how an AI tweaks my books.
What isn’t cool is if someone takes that beta or gamma version of my novel and tries to sell it under their own name. And that’s where most of the legal stuff needs to be hammered out, over issues like copyright. I’m not going to use Stable Diffusion to remove watermarks, or to take someone else’s copyrighted art so that I can enjoy a derivative product without having to pay the artist. And when it comes to using prompts, I’m going to err on the side of using artists like Minerva Teichert who have already passed away, or large publishing houses like Baen whose style doesn’t belong to a single artist.
So after playing around with it some more, I finally came up with some concept art for my current novel WIP and used it to throw a cover together! What do you think? This isn’t going to be the final version—in fact, I will probably produce quite a few other test covers before I settle on the one I like. But for my current skill level (still beginner), I’m quite pleased with how it turned out!
