Judging a book by its cover

During the many years of writing my first book I have spared a little thought to how the cover might look. Not a huge amount of time but it always seemed so far off and a problem for another day. I did find a nice royalty free image from Unsplash that I worked up to look like a cover using Canva but that was about as far as I went, and I was never really convinced it was any good but it stopped my mind from wandering.

As the book neared completion the explosion in generative AI was in full swing and I couldn't resist the urge to feed some of the details into ChatGPT, and later Gemini 3, to see what they would come up with. ChatGPT did a pretty lousy job but Gemini 3 came up with a concept I really liked and it has become my placeholder for now. Depending on when you are reading this blog it might well be the image you can see on the Books page of this website.

But I decided, as good as it is, I am not going to publish my book with a crappy AI cover design. I think that would be a failure on my part and a lack of respect to the thousands of hours I have spent working on the words. Why put all that effort in just to slap a crappy cover on and hope for the best? Book covers are really important. I know I definitely judge books by their covers when I am making a choice about what to read. And even if others don't do the same consciously I am sure there is a deep recess somewhere thats pointing out the font looks a bit cheap on that one, or the flowers make it look like its going to be soppy. Its human nature.

So right now, as I type, I have someone toiling away for me coming up with a design. I should have started this process sooner as I am now ready to publish except for the damn cover! Never mind. Patience is a virtue! Hopefully the cover will be done this week and I can finally get the book published on Amazon, and achieve my goal of having it published in 2025. Fingers crossed that I like the design concepts