The self-publishing journey for red Rock continues.
Since Red Rock has already been professionally edited my first major task is to generate artwork and create a cover. There are two cover formats required. One is a simple cover for the kindle edition and the other is the full wrap around cover for the print edition. I also need to generate supporting artwork for use in promotional activities.
To do this I took out a subscription to MidJourney, the AI art generator that runs on Discord. When you sign up you get 25 free credits after which a month’s subscription costs £12 for 200 credits. I let my subscription run for two months before cancelling it. This has given me plenty of images to work with.
To generate an image, you enter a text prompt. For example, one of the prompts I used to generate images for Red Rock is: “A girl walking through flooded city ruins at sunset.” I used variations on this theme as well as specific instructions such as changing aspect ratio, lighting effects, and which algorithm I wanted to use (there are constantly new test ones coming available. Some work for me and others don’t.)
Now I’ve generated images that I’m happy with I will turn to Canva to add text and turn the image into a book cover. I can also use Canva to generate various promotion graphics as well as videos which I will be using on social media to try to get the word out.
But I will talk in more depth about these in future posts. In the meantime, here are a couple of images to whet your appetite.
