It’s been several years now since generative AI images really began to seep their way into the indie publishing space, and every day seems to bring more and more of these kinds of images into the spotlight as it becomes more and more difficult to tell which book covers amongst the thousands that are published every year have not actually been crafted by human hands. 

The allure of generative AI models for indie authors is quite simple, and quite understandable: indie authors, especially self-published ones, often do not have the financial resources to match the big publishers, and generative AI is a cheap way to come up with relatively “high quality” assets for your book cover that can—at first blush—mimic the quality and style of a cover made by a professional designer or illustrator.

But those of you who already share my beliefs about generative AI know that “at first blush” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. 

But this is not a post to meticulously detail all the ways in which I think we should critically view generative AI (and the ethical and environmental considerations of its development and use) because there are myriad others who have done that work better than I could here (all I will say is that it is my personal view that images made with generative AI models are the artistic equivalent of wet farts). This post will instead intend to be a guide by which you, presumably an indie author, can make your own professional-looking book covers without the use of generative AI. Because, for better or worse, there are many reviewers out there (myself included) who will not touch a work with an AI cover, no matter how good the prose hidden beneath it may or may not be. My stance, and the stance of many others here at SFFI, is that an AI cover does not necessarily suggest a spirit of frugality on the part of the author, but instead betrays a lack of care for the presentation of the story, and a lack of interest in the artistic process more broadly. Surely, for all the care and attention you’ve given to your story, its presentation deserves that same love, and not some algorithmically manufactured picture that says, “Yeah, I don’t really care how this looks, just slap anything on there.” 

But, okay, enough preamble. Let’s talk about what you can do to make your own covers for your own indie books in ways that don’t piggyback off the theft of the work of thousands of other artists.

Budgetary Considerations and Other Creative Caveats

Before getting into any of this “self-design” stuff, I do want to take a brief moment to talk about commissioning art from actual artists, because it’s likely that there is somebody out there capable of making something within whatever tiny sliver of a budget you have on hand. I’d recommend taking a casual stroll through the #portfolioday hashtag over on X/Twitter. You’ll see a lot of extremely professional work in there, but also a lot of incredible work from small artists who’re looking to make a name for themselves. Reach out! Even if it turns out you can’t afford them right now, you’ve begun to build a relationship with them. And even if you can’t afford something custom from them, maybe they have a previously existing piece they’d be open to licensing to you. I’ve reached out to artists before and asked about that very thing, and they’ve always been super receptive to that contact. Artists are great and they deserve our attention and protection from unethically developed generative AI models. But if you truly have a $0 budget, you can still make something great on your own. 

One thing I’m sure many of you will notice as you explore this post is that much of what I document below could broadly be considered to be “minimalist”. I know that we’d all love to have our own Micheal Whelan or John Harris book cover; but in lieu of commissioning a work from one of these masters, we lowly indie authors will need to turn to other, more financially reasonable paths, and often that means—for those of us who aren’t traditional artists ourselves—slightly lower visual complexity. But trust me, there is still plenty you can do to make your covers pop! I will do my best to only provide you with examples of works which you can create with the tools already at your disposal; under the assumption that you own a computer capable of running basic image editing software (for those of you who’ve written your novel by hand or by typewriter, I am sorry). We’ll walk through several design workflows in order from least to most complicated, and least expensive to most expensive (“most” being not necessarily a financial hurdle in this case, but a time one). Because I understand that even this post is coming from a certain place of privilege. I’m financially comfortable enough to be able to afford an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription every month, and comfortable enough to be able to afford some of the more “craft” oriented design methods we will discuss later on; but know that for every time I mention Photoshop here that there are dozens of other free Photoshop alternatives out there that you can use instead, whose workflows will still closely mirror that which we’ll talk about here.

And though some of the examples you’ll see below are for movie posters (they were what I would design for fun back when I was first learning to use Photoshop, and I even wrote a whole post-mortem of that experience on Medium, in which I made 30 movie posters in 30 days); the goal of a movie poster is the same as that of a book cover: to get you to see/read the thing they’re about.  

Secondly, no process I’m about to talk about is “quick”. Some are quicker than others, but each will require your time and consideration. In this regard, generative AI beats true artistry every time. But what I’m asking for from you is patience and thoughtfulness. I promise that if you stick with it, what you can make yourself will be infinitely more meaningful to you in the long run. As Solaris author Stanislaw Lem said in a 1977 essay, “Where anything comes easy, nothing can be of value.”

So what can you do to make your own book cover without generative AI?

Before You Begin

If you are coming to this task with absolutely 0 experience in the world of Graphic Design, there are two things I would implore you to learn and study prior to undertaking this endeavor: the rule of thirds, and rudimentary color theory. 

The rule of thirds is simple enough. As the common wisdom goes, the most compelling images can be split across equal divisions of thirds.

For whatever reason, human psychology has deemed that images composed along thirds are more exciting than those that aren’t! Don’t make me explain it any further, because I can’t!

Color theory is a bit more esoteric, but there are easy shortcuts to make sure you’re on the right track. Most important to the beginner is the concept of complementary colors. I’m not going to blast a bunch of color theory images here, but any cursory Google search will get you what you need. I’d also like to direct those interested in the design of color palettes to the Game UI Database, which has recently added a function that shows the overall color palette of any given videogame. This can be a great tool with which you can explore new compositions and designs. 

Remember also, just as the addition of conflict in a narrative makes for more interesting stories, so too does “conflict” (what we’ll often call “contrast” in visual mediums) make for interesting visual art. To clarify, I am not simply speaking here of the black/white balance of any given image, but about the contrast amongst the whole of a composition. This could be something as simple as varying the weights of your chosen fonts, or pulling down the vibrancy of certain colors to highlight others, or figuring out how to balance areas of high visual density with more negative space. Think about the elements to which you want to draw the viewer’s eye, and how you will go about supporting that goal. Is it by making the title font a bit brighter? Or by adding a vignette to the edges of the composition? But now I’m wandering into slightly more cerebral territory. Back to the simple stuff.

With these basic building blocks in mind, let’s explore how you can bring your creative vision to life:

As you sit down to plan out your cover, think of yourself as the Art Director for your own book. Perhaps, even as part of the writing process, you developed a Look Book (sometimes called a Mood Board) to help you guide the aesthetic of your world. This can easily be used as a jumping off point for your cover. But if you haven’t already made something like that, now is a good time to put some research into the kinds of covers you’d like yours to emulate. Take a look at your bookshelf. In fact, don’t just look at your bookshelf. Look at your movies. Look at your CDs and vinyls. Look at any photographs you can find. Go on a walk and look around your city or town. 

Take stock of what you like. Take note of what you don’t. Do the things you like have any similarities? Any differences? What mood are you trying to convey? Is there any particular theme of the story you’d like to highlight with the cover?

Once you have this exploratory foundation laid, you can begin workshopping ideas for the cover itself:

1) Phone photography, or: You are a better artist than you think

To quote a much meme-d Blizzard Entertainment Diablo press conference, you all have phones, right? In this age of digital photography, it is easier to capture compelling images than at any other point in history (and easier to store them!). If you have a modern smartphone, odds are you have hundreds, if not thousands of images tucked away within it. Maybe one of them could be the basis for your next book cover? Here are some examples of things you can make with just one photograph:

Both of these are aggressively simple compositions. For the Predator poster, the whole thing is essentially just the source image, two adjustment layers (Curves for contrast and Hue/Saturation to boost the green of the ferns), and then the text elements.

The poster for The Witch is similar (you’ll forgive me, I no longer have the Photoshop file for reference): a simple lasso-ing of the ram skull with a color overlay (don’t recall which Blend Mode I used, sorry) to match the dark blue background; and then all the text elements.

So that’s one avenue of design at your disposal; but say you don’t have quite the right photograph already in hand. Where should you go to seek out alternatives?

2) The Public Domain is your best friend, if you know where to look…

There are a lot of websites out there that provide a wide range of Public Domain or Creative Commons images (Pexels.com has yielded some good results for me, but don’t underestimate the power of the Wikimedia Commons), with varying degrees of freedom to use these commercially (make sure you check the guidelines on each image and on each website to make sure the images can be used commercially, and if you need to provide credit in your frontmatter or elsewhere). I’ll also note what seems to be common knowledge already, that Google image search is nowadays a wasteland of AI generated pablum. For those who’re unsure about their confidence in detecting AI images by sight alone, if you find something compelling on Google images, make sure you’re clicking through to the source of the image to confirm it’s not AI. And if you’re still not certain, just ditch it entirely; there’s a lot more fish in the sea.

But let’s say you’ve found a legit piece of great photography, and it’s in the Public Domain. Let’s see how we could combine your image and a Public Domain image.

So here’s the cover for one of my upcoming novellas, The New Patriots. The story bears a lot of DNA from stories like 1984, Soylent Green, and Logan’s Run; and takes place in a near-future America. Back during Spring Break 2014, I took some pictures of this fire me and my friends were using to cook s’mores. Those images weren’t anything special on their own, but as a hoarder of photographs, nearly 10 years later they’ve finally found their purpose. 

You’ll see from the Photoshop file that this one is stupidly simple. The flag image from Pexels is simply rotated and laid overtop of the flames (which I’m realizing now I should say has definitely been processed through VSCO or Instagram, though I’m unsure which and I don’t know exactly what edits, though it looks like some contrast flattening and saturation boosting) with the Color Dodge Blend Mode, then there’s a little Curves adjustment for contrast, and then all the text. Bada bing bada boom, thematically rich and visually striking novella cover using two photographs for which I paid a grand total of $0 (not including the price of my phone and my computer and my Adobe subscription, blah blah blah, you get it).

But what else can we do with Public Domain photography? Let’s take a look at another novella, this time with a slightly more complicated design. The novella is A Goddess Trapped in Glass, which—like the title indicates—involves searching through an alien world for a body that is supposedly trapped in a pillar of glass.

I had an idea for the cover of trying to photograph a real person underneath or behind a sheet of frosted glass; but even that simple notion presented a mess of logistical hurdles I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to try to surmount. For one, I’m not an exceptionally skilled photographer; and for two, outside of friends who might agree to stand in for a photo session, booking a model is an expense I couldn’t necessarily afford, at least if I wanted to pay them fairly. 

But then, providentially, it was while editing this novella that I came across the cover of J. Michael Straczynski’s The Glass Box, and immediately knew that I could make my cover for Goddess a reality, even without scheduling time in a real photo studio. I was almost positive the cover for The Glass Box was comprised of separate elements, but even if it wasn’t, it got my mind thinking of how I could do something similar myself. 

So, after some carefully worded Google searches, I had a Public Domain image of my “Goddess” and a glass texture underneath which I could hide her. The layers were then assembled in Photoshop (on a 5x8 in. canvas) as such: the “Goddess” (with a 20.0 pt. radius Guassian blur), the glass texture (using the Screen Blend Mode), a Photo Filter Layer (Deep Blue, 64% density), a Curves adjustment layer for heightened contrast, and a Color Fill layer (solid black w/ an Add Noise filter [35%, Guassian, Monochromatic], using the Soft Light Blend Mode). Then all the text layers over top of it. 

And to prove this method can be used for Fantasy as well as Sci-fi, here’s a cover I whipped up using Creative Commons photography from Pexels.com and DeviantArt (which has recently undergone some intensely pro-AI changes, so be careful over there).

The workflow was, the original mountain photograph, a lasso’d selection of the cracked rock texture, a lasso’d selection of the snowy blade, a Gradient Map (Red_04, set to Subtract Blend Mode), an all-black Solid Color layer with an Add Noise filter (35%, Gaussian, Monochromatic, at 45% opacity), and then two gradient layers to add some darkness at the edges of the image to draw the eye toward the center composition; and then all the text! 

But there’s a lot of other visually rich Public Domain imagery out there, one source of which I would love to tell you about is the Biodiversity Heritage Project. Per their own description on their website, the BHL (Biodiversity Heritage Library) has “over 300,000 free nature images from its collection, enabling greater discovery and expanding its audience to the worlds of art and design.”

The Library is robust enough that their images have even appeared on the covers of bigger name authors, like in the case of Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander.

But the Library is vast, and includes not just illustration but also photography. Below are some examples of what you could make with elements from the BHL:

Let’s break down the process then for the above poster for The Fly. Sourcing an image of the bug itself was simple—all it took was the time needed to peruse through the Library and download the highest res file of the image available.

Because I was making a movie poster, I created an 11x17 Photoshop canvas in Landscape orientation (given how the source image was framed, I felt Landscape would be better than portrait, and would allow me to maintain more of the original detail without creating too much negative space elsewhere within the composition). Here then is how the final layout looks in the Photoshop file.

You’ll see there are 7 layers, not including the background. 3 layers are just text, one for the title, one for the credits block, and one for the tagline; and 2 layers are simply affecting the source image: a white color overlay layer to wash out the tan paper texture of the source image, and a curves adjustment over top of the whole composition to help increase the overall contrast. And that’s it! If you want an idea of what something like this would look like in the bookish world, take a look at the cover for Andy Marino’s The Swarm.

All you need to navigate the BHL is a lot of patience and an imaginative eye. Like their website says, they’ve got hundreds of thousands of pictures up there—most of which are completely in the public domain. But thankfully, if you do encounter an image that is still under copyright, the BHP has helpful, thorough guidelines about how to reuse and cite images from their collection. 

I should also mention that Flickr as a whole allows you to search for “Commercial Use Allowed” images, but make sure to check if those images require attribution in your frontmatter!

Secondarily, for those authors of an explicitly sci-fi persuasion, you’ll be pleased to learn that NASA has thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands at this point) of images in the public domain as well. One of my favorite sources of theirs is the Project Apollo Archive (though much of that photography would be very case-specific to Space Race era stories, like Chris Hadfield’s The Apollo Murders).

But just about anything you source from official NASA sources (this includes the Hubble and James Webb telescopes!) will be in the public domain, and can be used for any number of sci-fi covers. The ESA also makes many of its own captured images available via Creative Commons, but be sure to consult their FAQ for clarity on when and how their images can be used and adapted.

4 More Complex Processes (Arts, Crafts, and Costumes)

If you really want to go all out, and really put yourself into your cover (at slightly greater but still fairly minimal financial expense), here are some slightly more complicated methods to try.

Though a highly specific use case, I recently mocked up a cover for one of my WIP novels using a combination of Public Domain photography and an 8x8 acrylic paint pour I made in my garage. For those who may be unfamiliar with the concept of paint pouring, it is essentially as the name suggests: pouring different colored, very liquid-y acrylic paints onto a canvas and then manipulating the orientation of the canvas to achieve an interesting visual result. As painting goes, it is relatively cheap and relatively low-commitment time-wise (though the drying process can take a long time), and doesn’t take a whole lot of “skill”; but the results can be really cool. 

For a story about a relic that has the power to open portals through space, I thought it might be interesting to use my paint pour as a stand-in for a nebula. The layers then are: the paint pour, a black to black Gradient Fill (one end at 100% opacity and one end at 0%, set to Radial/Reverse to act as a vignette over the composition), one layer of the Pexels.com starfield photography (merged with a Black and White adjustment layer and set to the Lighten Blend Mode), an Ellipse shape with a solid black fill (matched to the circumference of the eclipse photography), a duplicate of the Pexels starfield layer Clipping Masked to the Ellipse shape and rotated slightly to give the effect of it being a different starfield than the layer from which it was copied (also set to Lighten), the eclipse photograph set to the Screen Blend Mode, and then all the text elements. 

And just to prove that you literally have way more tools at your disposal than you’re likely aware of, as I’ve been editing this post I decided to make one more cover, and to use myself as the subject. Below you’ll see a still image from an unreleased short film I made in 2015 (actually the narrative basis for the novella you saw above, A Goddess Trapped in Glass). In that frame you’ll see I’m wearing a shirt, vest, black jacket; and am carrying a NERF gun spray-painted black. Using this single image, can I make a compelling book cover?

Here’s the process: I lassoed out myself from the forest background, and copy/pasted that new element over a Color Fill background. I set the “Me” layer to the Difference Blend Mode, and then used the Smudge tool at various radii to distort some of the more pixelated sections of the source image, and to give it a little sci-fi flair, like maybe to suggest I was a time traveler or something. I added the text and a layer of “spray paint” splatter using a few of the default Photoshop brush tools. Surely you can do something similar. Head on down to your local thrift store, find some interesting costume elements, a prop or two (a sword or a staff? For the fantasy authors out there?), and then go nuts in the image editing software of your choice!

But if you’re a sci-fi author writing about spaceships and are feeling extremely adventurous, you may wish to indulge in the time-honored sci-fi tradition of kitbashing your own models. You can literally do this with garbage, and end up with a ship that looks pretty respectable (especially under the right conditions). If you happen to be of the 3D modeling persuasion, you’ll likely be able to do this much more easily in the modeling and rendering softwares of your choice, but that ain’t me, so I gotta put these things together in real space and then take pictures of them on easily keyable backgrounds.

The models in the above image were made from (in no particular order) an old humidifier, a broken light fixture, a box that once housed a bottle of wine, some pencil sharpeners, soda cans, water bottles, pill bottles, and a copious amount of discount model parts all hot glued together. 8 years ago I made a video guide on this process.

And I’ll say here, these kinds of kitbash models are not the only avenue by which you can include physical models into your cover compositions. If you look closely at the covers of Yuval Kordov’s Dark Legacies books (The Hand of God, All of Our Sins, and The World to Come), you’ll notice that the mechs on the covers are made of LEGO. 

But let’s look at how we could add one of these physical models into a book cover.

For this as yet unpublished short story collection, I combined an image from the ESA’s Rosetta program with a very tiny version of the model ship I made in the above process video. Very few edits overall, just a Black and White filter over the model ship; and then a duplicated, Color Overlay-ed, slightly smaller version of the same model ship to give the impression the model was casting a shadow on the asteroid. And then the text!

Speaking of which… let’s talk about fonts!

3 Sometimes all you need is a great font…

In the ongoing discussion of what separates Sci-fi and Fantasy, we could say that design-wise, Fantasy is Serif while Sci-fi is Sans Serif. But as with everything we’ve discussed here, this is not always the case! Neon Genesis Evangelion and The Creator both use gorgeous Serif fonts; and though I’m sure there are Fantasy novels out there that make use of Sans Serif fonts… I am having a heck of a time finding any. 

But this is another moment where you should return to the books you love. What kind of typography are they using on their covers? What movie titles have really jumped out at you recently? What band’s album cover has really good fonts?

There are a lot of places out there from which you can source awesome fonts. If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you should have access to the Adobe’s library of fonts, which you can sync to your local font book (and soon you’ll begin to recognize them out in the wild. You’ll be watching TV and suddenly shout, “That’s Gill Sans!”). But if you’re outside of the Adobe ecosystem, there are still plenty of options for you. Firstly, and perhaps the most basic is Dafont.com. Dafont has tons of fonts in tons of styles, and allows you to filter your searches for fonts that allow commercial use (they call these fonts “100% Free”). Another site I’ve often used is Pixel Surplus, which has a whole section dedicated to free assets (including a lot more than just fonts!).

Once you’ve downloaded some promising fonts, it’s simply a matter of getting them onto your composition! Don’t be afraid to experiment and get a little wild. Play around with tracking and kerning. Slap an interesting texture on that bad boy. Readability is key, but if you find something out of the box that really seems to fit the design you’re trying to make, go nuts. After all, if we’re not making art that makes us happy as creators, what’s the point of any of this?

In Conclusion

I hope something here may have inspired you to do the hard work of designing your own book cover, or at the very least given you an idea of where to start. Please know that nothing I’ve written here should be taken as some sort of design gospel—these are merely the workflows I’ve found have worked best for me and my stories. But they’ve allowed me to create books that feel distinctly mine. And so I hope you can use these tools to create stories that feel distinctly yours, that readers will look at 10, 20, 30 years from now and think, “Hey, that’s really cool; and it’s really cool that a real person made it.”