Don’t Spend Too Much On Cover Art, But Beware AI
A comment from reader Grace reinforces the idea that you shouldn’t overspend on cover art:
“As someone who reads many, many books on Kindle Unlimited a week, I can confirm that the cover is only used as a quick way to guess the genre and read the title. The small size of the cover shown in Kindle recommendations means that small details aren’t as important as the broad picture. I can normally guess the genre of a book if I can see the title and cover.
Also, the print-book habit of making the author’s name really big, bigger even than title? I’m pretty sure that’s only good for the really big-name authors.”
That is a very good point. I know of people who have spent megabucks on cover art. There can be legitimate need for that – like you’re doing special-edition hardcovers, or most of your sales are print, and so forth. Scenarios where readers might spend a lot of time actually looking at the cover art. Like, to pick a concrete example, the four books that came out of Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter this year will probably have very expensive cover art because so many of the Kickstarter pledges were for the hardcovers.
However, most of us aren’t Brandon Sanderson, and Grace’s comment makes a good point. The majority of your cover’s actual utility will be people looking at it in thumbnail, and you don’t necessarily need to spend a ton of money for it to look good in thumbnail.
It’s a bit how I finally realized that most science fiction readers want covers with a spaceship and a planet on them. It clearly conveys the genre, and the sales of the SILENT ORDER series went up once I switched to covers like that.
However, you don’t want to go too cheaply, since that has its own set of perils. “Free” stock photo sites often don’t have proper attribution for their images.
I would also issue a strong caution against using the new generative AI image tools for anything, especially for something commercial like book covers. For all the talk and hype about the AI “creating” images, it isn’t creating anything. For that matter, calling it “intelligence” is deceptive – it’s just a very complicated mathematical formula and decision-making tree.
It doesn’t create anything new. What it does do, however, is scan thousands of related images, grabs bits and pieces of them, and smushes them together into a composite. That’s basically what I do when I make a book cover in Photoshop, just on a larger scale. The difference, however, is that I pay for all the stock images/3D textures I use for book covers. (The image included with this post was made with a lot of stock photos and 3D textures I’ve collected over the years.) The artificial “intelligence” tools, by and large, do not. There have been documented cases of photographers finding the watermarks they use for images on their sites in the images “created” by the AI tools.
So basically many of the AI tools are industrial-scale plagiarism engines, and there’s going to be a massive lawsuit about this at some point. You don’t want to be the test case!
The most important thing about your cover is that it doesn’t look ugly and it precisely conveys the genre. While trying to do it for free has its dangers, you can achieve what you need in a cover without spending a lot of money.
-JM
