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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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But this might be helpful. When self-publishing, and when you've got everything else done that you have to do (editing, uploading, checking the files, etc), buy one month subscription to an AI platform to generate your cover image. I recommend ChatGPT, which costs $20/month for a package that provided more than enough image-creation attempts.
I say use ChatGPT because of the various styles that it can do well. I also tried Grok, but it is too "reality based," if you will. Everything wants to look photorealistic coming out of Grok, but it never quite is. Whereas you can tell ChatGPT, "build Book cover ABC in a pen and ink style" (which it will do well), and then say "now alter that image so that it's in a woodcut style" (and it will do what you expect).
The AIs are incapable of consistently spelling words correctly though, so getting it to put the author name correctly - even though you spelled it correctly for the damn machine in your prompt - is the starkest evidence of A-ity in the I.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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The nut to crack is figuring out how to get it to produce a file with accurate sizes, bleeding edges, spine widths, back cover text, etc etc.
The real hang-up is probably my own failure to manipulate the prompts correctly, but I eventually gave up on doing a full wraparound cover and stuck only to the front cover image.
None of that is outside its reach, clearly, given that they are just dimensions and such, but the asking became futile. Every time you ask for a tweak to an image, you might get 3 more errors that you have to whack back down.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| was the first "winner" of Barnes & Noble's "Best Novelists Under 40" |
There are 894 prize competitions for 'young writers' (I've counted them) and none for anyone else (I've counted them).
| just set up his own agency. Since all you need to be an agent are contacts at publishing houses and an Agency Name |
I confess I had never thought of this. And if I haven't thought of it, precious few will have. It's surprising what you can do with a letterhead. Or at least, used to be able to. A lack of a Google footprint might hold him back. That's why I now use The Applied Epistemology Library as my publishing imprint. [A Hattie suggestion, it hadn't occurred to her in ten years, the dozy mare.]
| one month subscription to an AI platform to generate your cover image |
I (we?) need all the help we can get from this direction.
| The nut to crack is figuring out how to get it to produce a file with accurate sizes, bleeding edges, spine widths, back cover text, etc etc. |
All the bespoke self-publishing outfits suffer from an insane desire to offer all things to all men. I kept looking for buttons marked 'the usual, please', 'Any of the above, I don't mind', 'British national standard'. But I spent weeks getting lost instead.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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| He went with a pen name and used it to get a new agent, after which he sold two popular histories. |
I should add this. Each of these books were well-reviewed. The most recent one (The War of Jenkins Ear), got very positive reviews in the Washington Post and in the Wall Street Journal. This had some effect on sales, but not enough for his book contract to kick him any more money.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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one month subscription to an AI platform to generate your cover image
I (we?) need all the help we can get from this direction. |
I will post up some lessons learned on AI prompts and the actions you can take within the programs themselves. Tonight, I'll send you (Mick) an email about setting up the AI stuff on your laptop to get you up and running.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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ChatGPT Prompts for book covers
This will be mildly shameless, in that I'm going to post up a link to my own book in order to show you how ChatGPT interpreted the prompts I gave it. Of course, feel free to buy several copies.
Here was my initial prompt. The thing to notice is that I had lots of elements that I wanted to include and a general idea of what I wanted it to look like. I think this is the key: if you start with a concept and just describe it in detail, you will get something that you can then tweak:
| Create an image for a book cover. The book is called "C*CKS: an essay on a word" and the title should be at the top of the page. The author is Felix Francis Addo and the name should be at the bottom of the page. The central image should be in a box. It is a crowing rooster with spurs perched on a mountain peak at dawn. A comet is flying through the sky. Going across the bottom are thorny vines with crabs and scorpions crawling through them. There are scattered knives, cogwheels, and hooks among the thorns. Make the image monochrome (brown and sepia), in a pen and ink style. Make the image 1800x2700 pixels exactly |
The result was shockingly good. It made an error where the rooster wasn't crowing, so I changed "It is a crowing rooster" to "It is a rooster," followed by another sentence saying, "The rooster is also crowing." This level of autistic literalism did the trick. I had to be literal several more times, but once I learned the lesson, my prompts got to my desired result much more quickly.
It neglected to give the rooster spurs, so I had to clarify that the rooster must have spurs on its feet. It then gave the rooster what looked like mutated spur-growths shooting out from its feet like porcupine quills, so I clarified "one spur per foot, please." So you do have to guide it in surprisingly simple ways....
PS: when I figure out a place to host these covers, I will post them up here so you can see the results (will do that tonight)
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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I played with monochrome, then colored pencil, then pen and ink stippling, then engraving, even scrimshaw to get that scratched look. ChatGPT handled these all well (except for scrimshaw, which it couldn't manage).
Set measurements first. Settting all the measurements at the beginning is probably a best practice. You want to get the AI engine started off on the right foot, before you go tweaking your prompts. For instance, I had to make sure the cover was 6 in. by 9 in. to match Kindle Direct Publishing's (KDP) requirements, so I altered my prompt to add that info. Even then, I found that sometimes I would have to remind it to stick to the size requirement. It responds cheerfully to such reminders, so don't feel too bad about being overbearing.
To alter a prompt to tweak your image, you can right-click on the original prompt and edit the text, then regenerate the image OR you can copy the prompt and paste it and then edit the pasted text. All of your images will be saved in a "Gallery" section on the ChatGPT website (or phone app....I did all this work on my phone)
Getting the correct DPI. I found that KDP always said my images were 167 DPI, even though I knew they were 300. I printed proofs to confirm I was correct, and I was. KDP seems to have a defect in this regard. But if you need a specific number of dots per inch (300 dpi is suggested for KDP), you can use photopea dot com. Open that site and drop in the file you want to convert, then download it out of the site again.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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Here is the final result. (I can't find a free photo-hosting site that I want to stick my data into, so if anyone has a suggestion, I'll post up some of ChatGPT's other results for this cover)
https://www.amazon.com/Cocks-Essay-Felix-Francis-Addo/dp/B0F8YCR1XF
It's the #1 New Release in Semantics still (this means fewer than three dozen copies sold, though)
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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Last thought, for now. You don't actually need the paid subscription to ChatGPT to generate images. But there is a limit to the number you can generate in a 24-hour period on the unpaid version.
But when it comes to actually finishing a book and building a cover, pay the $20. You will want to tweak it dozens of times, and it's so very fast that you won't want to stop to wait till tomorrow to keep going. I landed on my cover on prompt #116. This would have taken weeks to do on the free app.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | That's why I now use The Applied Epistemology Library as my publishing imprint. |
I learned the hard way that if you are cheap and take Kindle up on its "free ISBN," then you don't get to assign a publisher, at least to the print version. You are stuck with "Independently Published" as the listed Publisher on the Amazon page.
If you do a Kindle version of the book, you do get to assign a Publisher, because no ISBN is needed.
ISBNs are on the bulk pricing plan. Buying one is something like $200. Buying 5 is about $300.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Pete wrote: | | The most recent one (The War of Jenkins Ear), got very positive reviews in the Washington Post and in the Wall Street Journal. This had some effect on sales, but not enough for his book contract to kick him any more money. |
This demonstrates why publishing books the normal way is totally futile. A straight publisher does two things
1. Prints the book
2. Sends review copies to people who might review it.
It is only the second of these that has any advantage over self-published books since reviewers are more likely to pluck a book out of the groaning pile sent to them every week if it has Oxford University Press on the cover than if it has The Applied Epistemology Library.
But Pete's friend found, as I found, as everyone finds, that even if you hit the relative jackpot in terms of reviews it is only relatively better than if you don't.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Pete Jones wrote: | | ISBNs are on the bulk pricing plan. Buying one is something like $200. Buying 5 is about $300. |
The only lucky break I ever got was buying ten of them for twenty quid back in the day when they were non-profit. I've still got a couple left. But after that I'll be priced out of the self-publishing game.
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Pete Jones
In: Virginia
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Campaign Trail...leading nowhere
I set up a $20/day max budget to have an ad campaign that injects my book into the searches of unsuspecting Amazon users. The system allows you to pay a few cents for each time someone clicks on your ad. It runs on some sort of engine that I don't understand, but essentially, you can set it to "bid higher" for ads on the search results of people who are more likely to buy (e.g., the user buys what they click on more often than the average user).
The Amazon Ads dashboard tracks sales, clicks, and "impressions", the latter being what they call it when the ad appears in someone's search.
I started the ad on May 31, almost two weeks ago. Currently, here are my stats:
2,233 Impressions
5 Clicks
0 Sales All of the clicks were on June 1st, making me concerned that even those 5 have something illegitimate about them.
Currently, I'm out $4.12 on the campaign, which is infinitely bad compared to sales but less than a buck per click, which is _______.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I am, generally speaking, opposed to these sorts of things. Only out of a sense of lofty patricianism, you understand, nothing principled. If it works let me know and I will probably climb down off my high horse with unseemly haste.
PS Ishmael: did you try any of these sorts of things with your Game Guide?
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