A few tips for generating book cover and promotional artwork on MidJourney

Using MidJourney to generate artwork in support of my forthcoming self-publishing adventures has been a lot of fun. I’ve learned a lot along the way and I’m going to share a few tips with you. I hope, if you’re going to give MidJourney a try, that you find them useful.

1.    Discord channel: Set up your own Discord Channel and then invite the bot to it. This will enable you to keep all your images in one place and to easily find earlier prompts if you decide to generate further variations or upscales. The feed in the Midjourney channels moves far too fast!

2.    Aspect ratio: Midjourney defaults to a square image format. But you can change this. The aspect ratio’s I found most useful were 16:9 for a widescreen format, and 1600:1256 which is the ratio I used for book covers. You can use whatever you like but the algorithm responds to some better than others. The command to set aspect ratio is --ar 16:9

3.    Test algorithms: These are fun to play around with. More keep coming on line but the two I’ve tried are --testp and --v 4. Of these v 4 gave the results I liked best, however it does not allow you to set aspect ratio. So keep an eye out for whatever is new. You might find something you like.

4.    Lighting effects: You can influence the mood of you image by adding commands such as dramatic lighting, cinematic lighting, or octane render. Play around and see what works.

5.    Time of day: Moonlight, night-time, sunset, dusk. These all change the colours in your image and can dramatically change the outcome. I particularly like moonlight! Why not also try snowy landscape or stormy skies. And anything else your imagination suggests!

6.    Mood and style: You can make your image fit with a particular mood or genre. I’ve tried post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk and fantasy, all of which were very effective and created some interesting results

This however has only skimmed the surface of what you can do. If you have a hunt online you will find many more useful guides. Here is one I found particularly handy. Midjourney Prompt Database - A.E. Alexander (aealexander.com)