I recently signed up for Thomas Umstattd Jr.’s Patreon, which has given me access to all of the amazing AI tools for authors that he’s been building. One of them is a super slick cover generator. I’ve been planning to rotate “A Hill On Which To Die” into the Vasicek Free Library next month, so I uploaded the book and used the tool to generate a new cover. This is what I got:
And when I asked it to take that and make it an audiobook cover, it came up with this:
Great stuff!
I’ve been playing around some more with ChatGPT, working on cover art for the Falconstar Trilogy. The best way to do it, I’ve found, is to make the art with AI, but to do the typography myself.
Anyhow, here are the test covers. What do you think?
The one that I feel most ambivalent about is Queen of the Falconstar. I really like how Zlata turned out, and the Falconstar looks pretty cool too, but the background… let’s see if I can fix that:
Anyhow, what do you think?
I’ve been working on this for a while, but I finally have new cover art for the old Gaia Nova books! I’m also renaming this series to The Hameji Cycle, and plan to publish a series box set very soon.
In the meantime, check out these new covers—I’m very pleased with how well they turned out!
I’ve also done one for the sequel, Children of the Starry Sea:
What do you guys think?
I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT’s new image generator, and I decided to toss in the cover for Star Wanderers and see what it could do. This is what I managed to come up with.
What do you think? I’ll play around with some more to see if I can get something better, but I do kind of like this one.
ETA: I think I like this one even better!
And this is the cover art it gave me for my current WIP, The Soulbond and the Sling!
It still needs some work, but I am extremely impressed!
So I was playing around with ChatGPT this morning, and came up with a slightly better cover mock-up for The Soulbond and the Sling:
Still needs some work, but I’m on the free plan and only get three images every day. I’ll keep playing with it over the next week or so, maybe try out another AI image generator like Stable Diffusion. But at least I have a cover image now that I can add to my posts whenever I’m talking about this WIP.
This is another great cover by James, over at GoOnWrite.com. I’m really happy with how it turned out! I’m working on the AI draft right now, but should have it done very soon. If all goes well, I’ll be publishing it either in July or August. Here is the working back cover copy:
To save his orphaned daughter, the ghost of the greatest wizard must depend on the lowest thief.
Corin has never been more than a street rat and a petty thief. But he can also hear the voices of the dead—whether he wants to or not. Usually, the dead leave him alone after they realize he has no power to help them. But when the former court magician begins to haunt him, nothing that Corin says can convince him to go away.
Lyra, the magician’s daughter, has been delving into the dark arts to find her father’s killers and avenge his grisly death. But the very people who killed him are grooming her for a devious purpose, and the intrigue of the court has put her in more danger than she knows. Her father is the only one who knows enough to warn her, but without Corin’s help, he is powerless to save her.
To save her, Corin must be more than merely a ghost whisperer: he must rise above his circumstances and become a man worthy of trust. But will that be enough to convince Lyra to turn back to the light before her thirst for vengeance consumes her?
From time to time, it’s a good idea to put up new book covers—especially when the originals were ones you made yourself. I realized last year that it was high time to get new covers for my Gunslinger novels, and this month I went ahead and got it done. Check them out!
I will try to get them up before this post goes live, but there might be some delays. Regardless, they should all be up everywhere within a week or two.
Also, if you’re curious, these covers are done by James at GoOnWrite. He does really good work!
Behold!
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.