Midjourney

I recently discovered the Midjourney bot and have been having much fun playing around with it and using it to try to come up with covers for my books!

If you haven’t already come across it, Midjourney runs on Discord. You give it a text prompt and the bot generates AI artwork based on your prompt. There are a few tricks you can use – setting the aspect ratio or different types of lighting or render to help generate a better and more specific image. And of course lots of self-published authors are using it to generate artwork for use in their book covers.

Self-publishing is something I was always wary of. I’ve read too many poor quality poorly edited self-published books. But as more people are following this route they are putting in more effort to make sure their books are of professional quality, and I can now safely say that I’m finding far more good than bad.

With the rights to Red Rock returned that is one book that will definitely be taking this route, followed, in time by others. And so I came to Midjourney with a great deal of interest.

I’m really pleased with the results I’m getting. So much so that I’ve nearly run out of free credits! So I reckon I’m going to have to take out a subscription so that I can play some more!

The Lifecycle of a Book

Today I received my rights back for Red Rock, almost nine years to the week since it was published. For now it is still available on Amazon, but it probably won’t be long before it is taken down. And then it will go back to being unpublished once again.

But this isn’t the end. I have a clean edited copy so at some point in the not too distant future I will self publish it on to Amazon, possibly along with a couple of other titles that I wrote but never sold – books that I believe in, even though I wasn’t able to persuade the publishing industry to take a punt on them.

For Red Rock all I will need is a new cover and to format it for kindle. The latter will be easy. The former less so as I’m not a graphic artist. I may be able to buy a cover off the shelf though – there are quite a few available.

So this isn’t the end for Red Rock. It’s only a pause before the next phase of its lifecycle begins.