Blog Dis
Not likely to contain AI-generated content
2024-11-19
I write my posts all by my lonesome, and I don't surf the web to extract tidbits from anyone's feed, not once, not ever. All my ideas for my blog pour out of my noodle and have been drawn from my first-hand life experiences, influences from books I've read, juicy conversations, and sometimes I just bloody-well wing it or lean on conjecture and pure imagination. There. I've stated it here for all to read.
So, the point of this post is to highlight the present and treacherous terrain of choosing a graphic image for your novel cover, whether it's a new novel or to settle on a re-designed cover. I use this dramatic word with delicacy, to define this process as treacherous only because of negative feedback that has occurred to some graphic artists I know, and also in part what I've experienced bcus of AI - how only some of these images may apply to authors seeking to purchase a pre-made cover or when they hire a graphic designer to create a wholly new design for your novel cover.
Know that not all images are created equal.
About six years back I attended a presentation at one of Ottawa Independent Writers monthly meetings, open to the public, where a professor from Algonquin College spoke to our group, with decades of graphic design experience under his belt. It was a good talk to, and I was happy to attend. Our speaker began his presentation by putting up on the big screen some well-known covers, the ones that are immediately recognizable, like J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, or the simplest of covers like J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. He highlighted what was special about them (or unremarkable) and how using more than three fonts on a novel cover is a big no-no. Then he put up on screen a cover image with a distinct title, then added a second cover, with the exact same image but different title, and then a third cover, again with the very same image yet a different title. His examples spoke for themselves: spend the money and hire a graphic designer w/ the skills who'll create your wholly original cover image, and who in the process, will include within the price of purchase the right to request changes, and rights to the licence of said image to ensure that no other author can buy it or use it as their novel cover. His point was to work with a graphic designer, rather than to shop online at a place like Shutterstock where the same images are sold and re-sold again and again.
Novel covers can fall into traps, like any other artistic medium - a good example of a trap would be a cliché depiction, where the image shows a woman held by a man; he's husky, burly and very much a he-man and she's scantily clad in lace with a cleavage-bearing top. There's nothing wrong with these covers, and if your book is picked up by a major publishing house, more than likely they'll make the choice for you, and you'll have to live with it. Romance novels depict covers that have a specific look to them. These major publishing houses are sensitive to trends, so they'll probably run with a cover design that typifies the most popular font and trend. They'll also utilize in-house graphic artists who know what's expected of them.
If, however, you're an Indie author like me, the only way to go is with an original idea, to hire a graphic designer. I searched for five years for a cover for my seventh novel. I watched one graphic designer and her work on Twitter for years, and would periodically visit her website http://fantasy-art-z.com to view the ready-made covers, which are varied and run the span of multi-genres: Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy, as some examples, until I landed on one image that jumped out at me. Initially, it was the face that sold me, not quite perfectly human but neither was it non-human; an authoritative face with cat-like eyes and sumptuous lips, attired in a headdress that implied privilege and prominence - the perfect complement to one of my principal characters. So, over the course of weeks, I requested a few changes until the final image was finished, what is now the cover for my seventh novel POM, an acronym for Portals of Middle-Vision (hybrid fantasy).
I paid for title and author name placement, as per my revisions and her suggestions, to include a full-wrap, based on total page count, and I ended up circling back to her to buy an Amazon Kindle cover in PDF, according to Amazon's persnickety specifications, as well as a new design for a six foot banner to display at Comic-Con. My graphic designer
@fantasy_art_z
is awesome and to show her appreciation, she threw in a media image which is perfect as a header for social networks.
There's much to consider when it comes to a graphic design image for your novel. If you can hire one that provides one-stop shopping, all the better.
Then the proverbial sh*t hit the fan with AI in 2023 and it was all over social media, with graphic designers making judgements of covers by other graphic designers, and accusing them of utilizing AI to create their images. AI is here to stay, and we won't be able to shed this tool from our lives, considering that AI has become entrenched in many other areas of our lives. But with graphic design, some illustrators take it personally if images contain AI enhancements, but this doesn't appear to apply to album covers used in the music industry. You need to make a judgement call that best suits your needs, on what is important to you, not what others tell you that you have to do. Some contest organizations won't accept entries from authors whose covers contain AI, while others have no issues. Similarly, one author at the last Comic-Con I attended told me in Montreal the event organizers threatened to eject any illustrator selling AI images at their exhibition. I get it. Artists view AI and its learning algorithms as a form of stealing from original creations and this offends them. Though, we as artists learn from other artists, and we're influenced by them, so one could say artists are inspired by the work of other artists. Imitation is, after all, the greatest form of flattery.
My graphic designer is transparent. Her website differentiates between those images that have been 'AI-assisted' (in terms of backgrounds) vs those that are created from her original sketch, after which she completes the graphic design using PhotoShop. I'm not in possession of PS skills to explain to you what techniques are used to finalize an image, but any graphic designer worth their salt will tell you that it's a long process of hours upon hours of work, to finesse, and that images are finalized using a variety of techniques, one of which is applying layers. What I like about my graphic designer is that she uploads short videos of her creation process, along with completing a new cover design.
In this current climate, we have to begrudgingly acknowledge that AI has created a new reality, one that is becoming more dynamic. Backlash will come from other graphic designers who are causing grief to some cover creators, and who feel entitled to tarnish their reputation. I just don't agree with this behaviour one bit. Be kind to your fellow artist and dialogue with them first before you attempt to trash their name.
So here are the results, taken from one of many new sites cropping up that detects the usage of AI. It's not something that I would've ever thought of doing, given that my last novel was released ten years ago, but times have changed. AI is forcing us to change. We as authors still possess, however, the means to hire a skilled graphic designer to achieve our writing dreams. Note: my graphic designer tells me the novel's title, author name, and presence of fonts can eschew the results bcus AI detects text as being 'AI-enhanced', so keep this in mind, if and when you're shopping around for a cover image, and you decide to run it through a site that detects the usage of AI.
I say thank you to graphic designers for their patience and skills, and now for their tolerance of other testy graphic designers who like to fling sh*t or point fingers at others in their trade. There's no need to be nasty.
We may all get to this point, as artists, where we need to prove our images don't contain AI content (unless you're in the music industry, apparently). Honestly, I don't know how graphic design will evolve. I only know w/ 100% certainty that when I was ready to release my novel, I asked my editor who also handled my book's interior design to include a specific blurb along with the inside content/copyright page:
No portion of this book has been written by Artificial Intelligence, not one Gotdamn word!
If I had used AI to write my novel, I would've finished long before nine years had passed. But isn't this the point about writing? A human author takes years to create, to reflect, to improve and finish, whereas AI doesn't even understand what it means to be an author, much less reflect one bit.
The rest, I leave up to you.
So, the point of this post is to highlight the present and treacherous terrain of choosing a graphic image for your novel cover, whether it's a new novel or to settle on a re-designed cover. I use this dramatic word with delicacy, to define this process as treacherous only because of negative feedback that has occurred to some graphic artists I know, and also in part what I've experienced bcus of AI - how only some of these images may apply to authors seeking to purchase a pre-made cover or when they hire a graphic designer to create a wholly new design for your novel cover.
Know that not all images are created equal.
About six years back I attended a presentation at one of Ottawa Independent Writers monthly meetings, open to the public, where a professor from Algonquin College spoke to our group, with decades of graphic design experience under his belt. It was a good talk to, and I was happy to attend. Our speaker began his presentation by putting up on the big screen some well-known covers, the ones that are immediately recognizable, like J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, or the simplest of covers like J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. He highlighted what was special about them (or unremarkable) and how using more than three fonts on a novel cover is a big no-no. Then he put up on screen a cover image with a distinct title, then added a second cover, with the exact same image but different title, and then a third cover, again with the very same image yet a different title. His examples spoke for themselves: spend the money and hire a graphic designer w/ the skills who'll create your wholly original cover image, and who in the process, will include within the price of purchase the right to request changes, and rights to the licence of said image to ensure that no other author can buy it or use it as their novel cover. His point was to work with a graphic designer, rather than to shop online at a place like Shutterstock where the same images are sold and re-sold again and again.
Novel covers can fall into traps, like any other artistic medium - a good example of a trap would be a cliché depiction, where the image shows a woman held by a man; he's husky, burly and very much a he-man and she's scantily clad in lace with a cleavage-bearing top. There's nothing wrong with these covers, and if your book is picked up by a major publishing house, more than likely they'll make the choice for you, and you'll have to live with it. Romance novels depict covers that have a specific look to them. These major publishing houses are sensitive to trends, so they'll probably run with a cover design that typifies the most popular font and trend. They'll also utilize in-house graphic artists who know what's expected of them.
If, however, you're an Indie author like me, the only way to go is with an original idea, to hire a graphic designer. I searched for five years for a cover for my seventh novel. I watched one graphic designer and her work on Twitter for years, and would periodically visit her website http://fantasy-art-z.com to view the ready-made covers, which are varied and run the span of multi-genres: Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy, as some examples, until I landed on one image that jumped out at me. Initially, it was the face that sold me, not quite perfectly human but neither was it non-human; an authoritative face with cat-like eyes and sumptuous lips, attired in a headdress that implied privilege and prominence - the perfect complement to one of my principal characters. So, over the course of weeks, I requested a few changes until the final image was finished, what is now the cover for my seventh novel POM, an acronym for Portals of Middle-Vision (hybrid fantasy).
I paid for title and author name placement, as per my revisions and her suggestions, to include a full-wrap, based on total page count, and I ended up circling back to her to buy an Amazon Kindle cover in PDF, according to Amazon's persnickety specifications, as well as a new design for a six foot banner to display at Comic-Con. My graphic designer
@fantasy_art_z
is awesome and to show her appreciation, she threw in a media image which is perfect as a header for social networks.
There's much to consider when it comes to a graphic design image for your novel. If you can hire one that provides one-stop shopping, all the better.
Then the proverbial sh*t hit the fan with AI in 2023 and it was all over social media, with graphic designers making judgements of covers by other graphic designers, and accusing them of utilizing AI to create their images. AI is here to stay, and we won't be able to shed this tool from our lives, considering that AI has become entrenched in many other areas of our lives. But with graphic design, some illustrators take it personally if images contain AI enhancements, but this doesn't appear to apply to album covers used in the music industry. You need to make a judgement call that best suits your needs, on what is important to you, not what others tell you that you have to do. Some contest organizations won't accept entries from authors whose covers contain AI, while others have no issues. Similarly, one author at the last Comic-Con I attended told me in Montreal the event organizers threatened to eject any illustrator selling AI images at their exhibition. I get it. Artists view AI and its learning algorithms as a form of stealing from original creations and this offends them. Though, we as artists learn from other artists, and we're influenced by them, so one could say artists are inspired by the work of other artists. Imitation is, after all, the greatest form of flattery.
My graphic designer is transparent. Her website differentiates between those images that have been 'AI-assisted' (in terms of backgrounds) vs those that are created from her original sketch, after which she completes the graphic design using PhotoShop. I'm not in possession of PS skills to explain to you what techniques are used to finalize an image, but any graphic designer worth their salt will tell you that it's a long process of hours upon hours of work, to finesse, and that images are finalized using a variety of techniques, one of which is applying layers. What I like about my graphic designer is that she uploads short videos of her creation process, along with completing a new cover design.
In this current climate, we have to begrudgingly acknowledge that AI has created a new reality, one that is becoming more dynamic. Backlash will come from other graphic designers who are causing grief to some cover creators, and who feel entitled to tarnish their reputation. I just don't agree with this behaviour one bit. Be kind to your fellow artist and dialogue with them first before you attempt to trash their name.
So here are the results, taken from one of many new sites cropping up that detects the usage of AI. It's not something that I would've ever thought of doing, given that my last novel was released ten years ago, but times have changed. AI is forcing us to change. We as authors still possess, however, the means to hire a skilled graphic designer to achieve our writing dreams. Note: my graphic designer tells me the novel's title, author name, and presence of fonts can eschew the results bcus AI detects text as being 'AI-enhanced', so keep this in mind, if and when you're shopping around for a cover image, and you decide to run it through a site that detects the usage of AI.
I say thank you to graphic designers for their patience and skills, and now for their tolerance of other testy graphic designers who like to fling sh*t or point fingers at others in their trade. There's no need to be nasty.
We may all get to this point, as artists, where we need to prove our images don't contain AI content (unless you're in the music industry, apparently). Honestly, I don't know how graphic design will evolve. I only know w/ 100% certainty that when I was ready to release my novel, I asked my editor who also handled my book's interior design to include a specific blurb along with the inside content/copyright page:
No portion of this book has been written by Artificial Intelligence, not one Gotdamn word!
If I had used AI to write my novel, I would've finished long before nine years had passed. But isn't this the point about writing? A human author takes years to create, to reflect, to improve and finish, whereas AI doesn't even understand what it means to be an author, much less reflect one bit.
The rest, I leave up to you.
