Cover Mock-ups Using AI
Use AI to imagine a cover for your novel.
My debut novel A Reluctant Spy is due to be published next year; and my publisher has set up a meeting to discuss the cover. The Actual Cover!
Visions of mysterious women and dark hallways dance in my head—I have such a clear idea of the kind of contemporary cover I’d like. My imagination, however, far exceeds my artistic ability. How can I effectively convey my ideal cover?
The answer for me is to use an AI image creator to make cover mock-ups. The plan is to send these to my publisher before our meeting. The mock-ups won’t be great works of art, but at least they’ll give my cover designer a glimpse of what I’m thinking.
The Microsoft Bing image creator is in its infancy and is prone to some serious faux pas. But between the two of us, I think we can make beautiful music. The software is free and very easy to use.
Here’s what it produces when I ask for a dark office, a computer open on a desk, and a woman’s hand on the mouse.
Yikes—two right hands! Not quite what I had in mind. But the mysterious screen content is fabulous. Let’s draw some more pictures.
I ask for a woman in a dark hallway, and get more skin than I bargained for.
Why the black frilly nightdress is anyone’s guess. Algorithms written by men, anyone?
Moving on …. the image creator and I have an outrageously entertaining morning. I settle on two images to use for my cover mock-ups: A campus quad at night with the back view of a woman; and A short-haired woman in a dark hallway.
In the campus image, I tried to get a pale moon behind clouds, but good luck with that. The image creators are wedded to their full-bodied moons. The other picture is beyond excellent—I’ve lucked out with a scary image, a face in shadow. Too bad about the creepy background figure growing out of her head.
I save all the promising pictures in a Cover directory on my computer.
Now to make a cover. I open PowerPoint and create a New Slide; then select a template that enables you to upload an image in the center of the slide. Next I produce a black background (because my brand is dark), by clicking on Design —> Format Background —> and choosing my color.
Voila! A creepy picture with a black background. I like it already.
For the title of my novel, a text box is provided above the image, which I resize to fit the dimensions of my picture. It’s easy to do this: just drag the edges of the box. Be sure to select your text color from the Home menu before you write in the box. I choose white and type A Reluctant Spy. You can select any text and change the formatting in the Home menu. Lots of fonts and sizes available. And the colors! Blood red if your dark heart desires it. If you have the inclination, you can rotate the letters and make them drip blood. (I’m tempted, but I resist the urge. My book isn’t that kind of book.) You can select a font with curlicues if your book is set in the Middle Ages. You get the idea. (The doomsayers are right: AI is going to take over the world.)
Back to my cover. I need two more text boxes, one for adding A novel of suspense under the title, and another for my name at the bottom of the cover. No one says my name has to be microscopic, so I go big. A girl can dream. To add a text box, select Insert on the top menu, and in the Text group click on Text Box. Now click on your slide where you want the text to go. Again you can adjust the size and fonts and so on.
The result looks like an honest to goodness cover. Maybe not a professional design, but a cover, nevertheless.
I repeat the process for the second cover, saving the two slides in a single PowerPoint presentation. The best part is that I can save the whole presentation file as one pdf file, and send the document to my publisher.
Two cover mock-ups (shown below), saying this is the kind of vibe I want. Dark, creepy, mysterious.
