The next Dorina novel is Fortune’s Blade, and since I’m finishing up the text right now, I’ve also been looking at the cover. The original cover, shown first below, was one that my artist did in the bad old days when covers had to be cobbled together from stock photographs. Unless, that is, you had the budget to hire a photographer and a model for a shoot, which could be thousands of dollars, or an artist to paint it for you, which could be even more depending upon the artist. Since I had the budget for neither of those, my cover artist and I were stuck with whatever could be found in stock. That entailed many long, tedious hours paging through stock art galleries, none of which were really set up for fantasy-type images, and then trying to make whatever we finally decided upon work. It often didn’t entirely, but there was simply no alternative.

The original cover for Fortune’s Blade was typical, being patched together using a head from one image, a body from another, a sword that was painted on, and yet another image for the background. Add in some special effects and a title, and you have a cover–one that looked very little like my heroine, but it was the best that we could do.

But then, something happened, namely the advent of AI technology, giving regular joes the ability to create their own images. I got interested in the new tech a while ago and after experimenting with it, discovered that I liked a lot of the images I was getting back. Of course, I still needed my artist to work with any that I was going to use for cover art, as AI images very rarely come out perfect in one go, and often have poor quality resolution (a real problem for faces). And because she always makes everything look ten times better than I ever could. But doing the base image myself ensures that the heroine looks much more like my character than any stock image would.

Both of them are attractive images, because my artist is awesome like that, but the second is far closer to my vision. As I’ve said to people before, I don’t think AI will ever replace human artists or human creativity. But what it does do is to give artists far more stock to work with, and indie authors the possibility of covers that look much more like our characters. I’m very happy with the new Dorina cover, and hope that you are, too.