Easily Create a Professional Book Cover Fast with AI Art and Canva

1. Introduction to Easily Create a Professional Book Cover Fast with AI Art and Canva: Hello, and welcome to your cover creation course. My name is Mattha Dewey, and I will be your instructor. Now in this course, I'm going to be showing you how to create a cover for your book quickly and easily using AR image generators, and of course, a design program such as Canva. I'll be showing you how I turn my old book cover for the four horsemen from this into this. Not only is this cover a lot better than what it was before, but it is also a lot more fitting considering the genre and also the market. A lot of people will judge a book by its cover, which is why it's so important to create an appealing cover in order to get more people to look at your book. Now this course is for the independent author who doesn't have the money to hire a cover designer to create something that looks professional. What we're going to be doing is making use of free services and software, a free AI image generator, which I recommend, as well as free design software, such as cretter, or Canva, either one will do. If you have a laptop or computer, you have all that you need to create professional looking book cover such as this, this isn't the only course that I teach. I have an entire library of writing courses from fantasy to science fiction to thriller. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, be sure to check out my profile. With that, I'll see you in the very first lesson. 2. Finding an AI Image Generator: Hello, and welcome to the course on creating your professional book cover using ARR generators. The first step on this journey is selecting an art generator which you want to use. Now there are many great options out there, free and paid. The most popular and widely used paid AR generator is Mid Journey. Mid Journey is an incredibly powerful ARRT engine. It creates some of the best and most realistic AR art which you can use for your book cover. And it is often the most preferred professional version of ARR generation. But as I said at the start of this course, we're going to be making use of the free and available options and creating a professional looking book cover. Now, just like mid journey, there are also a lot of free versions of ARR generation. But there is one version which I highly recommend. This one is known as Playground AR. It allows you to create detailed pictures which you can use for any of your projects. I've often made use of playground AR to create background animations for my story reading videos. You should be seeing examples of the animations that are created from our story readings now. The reason I enjoy using Playground AR is that it's quick and it's effective in creating images that I could use that create an interesting backdrop to the stories. For the purposes of this course, I'm going to be using Playground AR, and I'm going to be showing you exactly how to use it in the next video. Of course, if you are already familiar with some ARR generators and have one that is much more preferred than Playground AR, that is no problem at all. I'm going to be showing those who don't know how to use AR generation to their benefit in order to create a book cover that looks good and also fits your story. As you can see in the playground AR showcase, there's plenty of free art ready for you to make use of. You can also use the search bar above to find any specific that you may want to use for your book cover. But of course, it helps to create our own AR art so that where we can make sure that the images perfectly fit the story we're trying to tell. Not to mention, we need to include the title of our book, as well as our author's name on the book cover itself. We don't want the text to detract from the image or the image to detract from the text. With that, I'll see you in the next video. Time. Tie. 3. Using Playground AI Image Generator: Hello, and welcome back to your course on creating a professional book cover with ARR generation. Now, since I'm going to be using Playground AR, I recommend you create a profile with Playground. It is free, as I said before. It's a perfect AR tool for creating artworks for your book cover. At least in my opinion. Now, once we have created our profile, we go back to the playground website and we should see a create button in the top right corner. Clicking that, we are then led to this screen over here. Now, there's a lot of information that's been presented to us here, and that can be intimidating. I'm just going to go through what is important for creating your AR art. First, I'm going to start on the right. We have AR model. Now, think of this as different updates to the AR models. At the moment, one of the best updates is stable diffusion XL, extra large. We have had previous versions of stable diffusion, as you can see here, 1.5 and 2.1, and both are decent. But Excel is the g21 at the moment. It'll help you create fantastic artworks and using the different filters as we'll go through now. You'll see that these artworks perfectly fit the artistic style of almost any book cover you're looking for. We'll go of Excel. Next, we have the image dimensions. Now these dimensions don't match up perfectly with the dimensions of a book cover, but that's okay. We're going to make use of this one over here, 512, by 768. Now this may seem like a low resolution, but don't worry. This is something that we're going to fix once we create our first AI generations. Now, prompt guidance and quality details, we're going to leave at the default values of seven and 50. For seed, you need to make sure that this box has been checked, the randomize each number to get new variations. The reason I have this box checked is because we want to make sure that the images generated are different every time, especially if we want to create something specific, and the images that we're getting back aren't what we're looking for. If we leave this seed the same, this random number the same, it would generate similar layouts than the ones that they've just generated. By having this box checked, it's a great way to ensure that we'll get images that are different from the ones that simply don't work with our book cover. We'll leave sampler the same. As for number of images, I recommend selecting four. When it comes to AR generation, you are going to generate a lot of images. This is because some of them will simply not work out. Either the images will come through a little warped or there might be a flow in it, that's very difficult to fix, and it's better to just generate a new image or some of them might be a lot better than others, and you want to see if there's a better version of that book cover you have in mind. Now moving over to the left, we have filter at the top. Now filters differ depending on the different model we are using. Now there are many great filters here and some of them will probably work better with your cover than mine. But I'm going to be using some of these to help generate my book cover. What better way to demonstrate how this all works than putting one of my book covers on the line as well. For me, I'm going to be making use of no filter for now. But if I want to make use of a different filter, I might use lush illumination or cinematic. But I think that none or lush illumination will be enough. There are other filters here, and if you want to go back into different models, such as 1.5, there are different filters here as well. I have used back and forth, depending on the project, but if you want to create a cover that is similar to mine, which is going to be a cover for more young adult fiction, then I use X L, and I'll use none or lush illumination. Now, below this, we have prompt. This is where we're going to be doing most of the work. What we're going to do is describe the image we want created. Now we're going to do this simply by putting in the details of what we want created. For example, I want a male figure, leather jacket, cool shirt, I want him to be middle aged because that's the character. I'll go on adding more and more details as I think them up. Simple things that we will separate with an apostrophe. But let's leave that for now before we start generating out because there are some other details we need to talk about. Below the prompt box, we have exclude from image. This is simply about cutting out things that we don't want in the image and we see appearing. I'm going to leave this blank for now because we haven't generated any images and I haven't seen it present something I don't want an image yet. But if you ever want to exclude something from an image in your generations, you'd click custom here instead of none. And include those details here. Finally, we have image to image. This is simply about taking an image that you want fixed and adjusting it in some way. We can put another image into here and we can adjust it and make the AR, build upon it, use that image as a foundation. What you'll get is an image that has a similar size and layout to the one that you insert here, but it's going to be modified by the AR. You can also adjust how much it modifies it. Only a small amount, for example, in which case, you'll see most of the previous image, but these adjustments will be made by the AR. But for now, let's leave that aside because we want to create an image from scratch. Let me just fill out this prompt first of all. This is some of the first generations that I have. The prompts that I use simply describe the character I want in the book cover. Man, brown hair, short beard, brown leather jacket, middle aged, serious expression, cove in blue flames. This is all to do with the book itself. Now, the added prompts that I have, dynamic, stylish, art station detailed epic and beautiful. These are simply prompts that are typically include when I'm generating art. You'll find that a lot of the AR art that has been generated on the site also makes use of it. The reason being is that it conveys the feeling that you want to create with an image. Art station is a popular site where artists post artworks, and AR art generator reads this and creates something that is fitting and professional looking and would probably appear on the site. These are some pretty cool generations. But as you can see, there are some flaws in them. For example, don't much like the shirt for this one, and I feel that the hands are a little warped in this one and in this one. I can then delete these images here. But this image I feel is pretty good. There's also a good spot here where I can put the title of my book. Of course, I don't want to stop here just yet, and I can just generate more images. Now you'll notice that below generate, there is a little safety trigger warning. Sometimes the ARR generation thing will create an image that isn't fit to be seen. With that amount, it will automatically detect that and delete it. Once more, it takes some time to generate the image? As you can see, it's already been 37 seconds. It might take up to a minute, might have to take 2 minutes. But once it's done, it's done and it's certainly a lot faster than creating an image from scratch. It's generated some more images. Again, I feel that some of them work and some of them don't. In this case, all of them just don't seem to fit what I'm looking for, and that's fine. I can always generate more and adjust the prompts as necessary. Why does that? Let me talk about creating something that's of a higher resolution. Those of you who are familiar when it comes to artworks know that 512 pixels by 768 isn't a lot, and that makes it a bit more difficult to work with, especially if you want to adjust it personally. Now, you can fix this by simply creating an upscale image. By hovering over an image like, you can go to actions and you can click upscale by four times. What this will do is take the image itself and upscale the sars by four times as pixel resolution. This will end up creating a cleaner, larger image. There might be a slight adjustment to what is presented, but that's okay. You then click download, and you've got your image in your downloads folder. I see using the filter has made some adjustments to it. It's added a real magical look to things. It's also created a longer hair do for the character, which I feel just doesn't fit. I'm just going to go to the prompts here and go short brown hair. Once more, delete these images and keep generating more until I get something that fits like this one does. But of course, I'm sure you're excited to test this out yourself. So please check out playground AR, make use of the prompt ideas that I have here and adjust it to your own story. But of course, you can also experiment with this, get used to it. If you feel that things are going in the wrong direction, you can always adjust the prompts. Add more details, get it as close to possible to what you're looking for. When you find something that looks good, download that image and try to build up like a folder of ten images. From there, you can pick and choose whichever image you feel best suits your book cover by asking your friends, your family, or simply saying, is this one better than that one and so on. In the next lesson, what we're going to talk about is creating a book cover, placing the title in our author's name, and making sure it's the right resolution size. With that, have fun, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Setting the Book Cover Format: Hello, and welcome back to the course. Now in this lesson, we're going to be talking about setting up the book cover format. That means choosing a picture that we feel will work best for our book cover, and then creating a file, whether it be in your own art program or in Canva, we will be editing and adding the title. Now, let's first take a look at our options. As I said in the previous lesson, I recommend collecting a larger array of images, if possible, for your book cover. Once you've collected enough, you now need to decide which one will best suit your novel. I've collected here nine pictures that I feel best captures the character or the story theme that I'm going for. But obviously, I need to pick only one that I feel work best. Now, there are some here, which I think look pretty good, but at the same time, I don't think they will do so well as a book cover. For this image, I feel the jacket is too large, the face is too close, and for that reason it clutters the page. Now the reason I'm worrying about this is because I also need to fit in the title and the author name on this book cover. For that reason, this image simply won't work. I'll delete that one along with this one. I then need to select the ones that I feel match the characters look. For example, this one of a hoodie, again, not so much. This one looks far too casual. I got to find something that emphasizes the character, and I feel that some of them just don't do it justice. This one again is a bit too much. And I feel this one is far too stylized. That brings it down to three images. Now, these three images I feel look very good, but at the same time, I can only choose one, and there's one that I feel that best matches the character. This one I feel is just too heroic and stand offish doesn't fit what I'm going for. This one I feel is far too intense and angry. But this one I feel is a lot more thoughtful and present, but at the same time, still stylistically, it's a cool image to have as a book cover, and there's plenty of room around here and this lower half to include a page title. Out of these three images, I feel this one best suits the character, and at the same time gives me enough room to add in titles or anything else that I want to include into the image. But for now, I'm just going to be adding the title and alonm. This will be image number three. You must really think about these details. Obviously, if your cover doesn't include a character and includes a scene, it might be a bit easier to find one that best suits the cover. It also will be one that you can include a title and it won't detract from the image or the image distract from the title. But you don't want to have a bunch of different ideas that simply won't work when you've got plenty of ideas that could work, and then just clutter things. Now having chosen our image, we now need to create an image format. I'm going to be using Canva because it is a free service that you can also take advantage of. Canva includes the basic features, but if you want to adjust the art, I recommend using free software such as Creta, that you can edit the image as you want and also add a title. But for now, let's just say that the image is okay, and we just need to simply add our title. Well, then I recommend using Canva. Since we're going to work with Canva, let's go to create a design, go to custom size, and I recommend the following resolution, 1600 by 25 60. This is the resolution that I use for all of my book covers, and it's very easy to use this resolution when you try to create some promotional images as well for your book. With that done, we now simply need to upload our image and add it to the background. You can easily add your image by going to uploads and clicking and upload image. Once you've done that, you're ready to start testing out different titles and edits for your book cover. That's something we'll talk about a bit more in depth in the next lesson. Use this lesson now to organize your images, find the one that you'll feel will best suit your novel. If it's more than one, around three is just fun, but you don't want to have so many images to work with. One way to also cull the images is to just compare them to each other and decide which one you feel looks better than the other. Once you've got your one or three images, create the format, 1,600 by 25 60 on Canva, and we can start adding in our title, and of course, our author name. 5. Title and Author Placement and Design: Hello, and welcome back to your cover creation course. In this lesson, we're going to be finalizing our cover, which means we're going to add our title and our author name. Now we have chosen our image, but of course, we also need to look at the different ways that we can format our title. This is the second most important part of the cover. We need to now find some inspiration. Of course, you can look at your own books and similar ones compared to yours, one of the best places to do that is, of course, the Amazon bookstore or any online bookstore. We can check out the covers, see how other authors had their set up. I'm looking in the teen and young adult section right now because that is where my book would fit in probably the most. With that a mind, what I notice is commonplace along the professional book covers is having the title of the author at the top of the page and the name of the book at the bottom. What's also clear to me while looking at these other examples is that the images themselves tend to put a vignette around the center focus, so that where the title stands out a bit more, as well as the author name. But the image itself will also pop compared to that vignette. With that in mind, I then go back to my book cover, and I'll start editing it as such. First of all, I'll add basic text, such as my name. I'm not going to adjust the font just yet, so we'll just take the standard font for now. But we definitely change it once we get to it. This is just a fill in for now. That clearly doesn't look too good. Now we need to adjust the image, and I'm going to add vignette around it, so it puts more focus on the character's face, the flames here in the jacket and the brighter area. I select the image. I go to edit photo. Now, there are tons of effects that you can do to improve it, filters that you can add, which will adjust the colors, but I feel that I'm going to leave it at none for now and just establish the vignette. I'm going to adjust, scroll down to texture, and I'm going to increase that and just see if I can get a dark vignette around it. Et's try 57. What apps I put vignette very high? I feel that detrats from the image. The colors don't pop so much. I'm going to take it back a step or two. Let's make it 70. Now, with that done, I can see about adjusting the colors. I feel that the colors for this look very good, but let's just try a few filters and see if anything really stands out. That is a too blue. Don't care for that. I want something that will make the age pop, but also not too much that brings down the colors. Some of these are interesting, but they're not exactly what you would see on a book cover. A lot of them seem to dull the brighter tones of the picture. This one I feels far too warm. But I like what it's done with the flames. Maybe we can adjust that and just bring the temperature back down a bit. Saturation. We'll just put that down in touch. That's not that. Now let's have a look at the text before we get to side tracked with the image itself. Now, the author name isn't going to be flashy. We want the title to stand out. I'm going to use some basic text, something very simple, and aerial, maybe anon. Aton bit too bold. Let's try Futura. Futura looks good. Bowl is not too much, but I think I'll leave it at that. Again, let's go back to our image and see if we can find anything else. Let's go back and check our inspirations. Now let's stand it, so we go here and adjust the image. I'm going to add an effect to the, a lift. This will help things stand out a bit more. Instead of making it a bright w, I'm just going to go for a slight gray. Maybe a little bit brighter than that, just a little bit. Instead of some low case, I'm going to go full Matthew Dewey with full caps. That looks good. Now, let's adjust the title. Now, in these examples, you see the titles are big. For some of them, it's the entire cover, but a lot of them will just take up a huge space in the lower third or lower half of the book cover. One thing that's also important to note is choosing a font that best suits your story and theme. For example, this one over here, it uses a flowing one. It's to underline the sense of witchcraft magic, that sort of thing. Then we have this one here, which is a lot more bold, simplistic, and very medieval. It's very standardized, but also at the same time in such a way that it isn't like common print either. Returning to the image, think about the theme that I have for this book and see if we can adjust it to suit. Now, my book is set in a modern setting in a city. With that amount, I'm not going to be using something that is flowy and I'm not going to be using something that looks like old medieval script either. It's going to be modern print, but at the same time, I don't want it to be a boring modern print. I'm also going to look at the ways that I can divide the text. Now, I feel that combining the and four together just doesn't look right. If anything, if we have to separate words, we've got to keep them all separate, or I combine four horsemen with each other. Again, I then have to then look at this and see if I can put it in the lower case, or should I say in a smaller font. I think I'll add that separately and then just edit the four horsemen itself. But at the same time, I feel that such a length is not conducive, so I'm going to actually separate them like that. I think that's going to be what's best. With that amount, I got to also try and figure out how to fill up as much of the bottom third year as possible so that where the title stands out. The amount, I think I'll separate this as well. I'm going to enlarge that. And separate this and make this one also a bit larger like so. But now the text doesn't really work well to each other. Let's see if I can find one that does. If it's not the text, I can also separate the letters and adjust their spacing. I'm going to put this off to the side rather than centered. That way, it follows the dynamic line of the image here. That a mind, I could also do the same thing with the four and bring it down like that. Already, this looks like a lot more professional than my older cover. Now this is an older cover that I created a few years ago, and included my own drawing, included my own text, and the difference is very clear. For example, the text is at larger, the image is a lot better, a lot more colorful. And the author name isn't so small, is it full caps. One thing I should say is that the text also helps to confirm the type of genre that the story is going to be in if the title and the image itself don't already tell the reader that. The reason I'm going for more modern looking text is because I want something that fits into a current time period. That way, the reader doesn't believe that what they're looking at is more of a fantasy or something that's set in the future a science fiction. If you want something that looks a bit more science fiction, what you would do is use actually thinner text. This is commonplace for a lot of Safa novels. But when it comes to more modern settings, you'll find that the text itself is a bit more standard. And bold, not so thin. If I went for the four horsemen, but I use this text right now, it would appear as if it's set in a more futuristic setting or has a lot more sci fi elements to it. It suggests something that's a bit more futuristic or spyh more than it is actually a action adventure. One more tip that I'll give you before you settle straight into creating a book cover is that when it comes to moving things around and you want to make sure they off center, You click and hold to drag things around, but you'll notice that it automatically locks in place. Well, if you want a bit more freedom in moving things around, you can hold down control, and that will break all the bounds and locking in the system. You can move things exactly to a point where you feel your eye says it's where it should be. With that, you're ready to start creating your cover. We should do the best of luck. In the next lesson, we'll be talking about where to go from here, as well as some additional tips, and also, of course, your final project. I'll see you then b for now. O 6. Final Touches and Marketing: Hello, and welcome back to your cover creation course. Now, this is the last video as we have finally got our book cover. But now we need to go a step further and to create some more promotional material for our book. One of the best ways that I think a lot of independent authors overlook is creating a three D book cover, which is basically a digital image version of your book as if it was a print book. It will have a picture of your book on a phone, a tablet, something that lets the readers know that they can get this book digitally, and if possible, they can print it as well. Once more, we're going to make use of a free service, but these are the two things you'll need first of all. You'll need your cover, which is, of course, one of the most important bits. But the next is just a blank color that you feel will best fit the spine of your book. Now, this is a promotional image. It's not the actual printed book, so the back is not going to be shown, and the spine is irrelevant. So it'll be blank as well. I have a 600 by 600 image. I took the darkest background color from the image, and I'm going to be using that as the spine. Now the next service that we're going to be using is known as DRY book design, that allows you to create a three D mockup for your book. You can see examples of this below. If you're selling an ebook, you can select a phone or tablet, and that works well. If you're printing it, then you can also select one of these templates. You can also get a composite, which is what I would normally use. This way, you can show off the digital versions and the physical edition in different formats. Find one that best suits what you're going for. Now, personally, I like to use this one here in the bottom right corner. It shows off the book, it shows off the digital sides. Also, if I'm just selling the e version of the book, then I can easily erase this part out and just show off the phone and tablet. That being said, let's just select one and I'll show you how it works. I'll select this. And then I'll click next. Once that's done, you'll have two options for things to upload. The very first is of course, your book cover, and the second is your span. Click here on browse and find your book cover PNG or J Pig and upload it. Here's my book cover, upload that first. Once it's double selected, you won't see anything, but don't worry. You simply need to click upload, and there it is. Once that's done, these images will then upload and you're ready to go. After some time, you'll see your images will load, as you can see Man has here, and there's the bind in color. Then I'll simply go here and click next. It might take a moment, but once it's done, you should have your image ready. Simply click on P&G if you want a transparent version or JPEG, but I would recommend a PNG. Once you click on that, it will then download the image files. You won't be able to move the screen, but don't worry. It is working on it, and soon it will have the mage downloaded, just like that. And there you have it, an excellent promotional image to show of your book cover. I highly recommend this tool, whether you are an independent author and you plan on self publishing, either be through draft or digital or on your own website. Or if you are a published author. This is a great way to create something that looks snappy and interesting, and you can put it on your social media with a link to your book and really just show it off. With that, we are ready to talk about our final project, and that's simply to create a book cover for your book and show it off in the project section. I want you to use this opportunity to also show off your work and perhaps promote your book. Create your cover, create your three D composite image if you want. And go to the project section, the finished, tell us a little bit about your book, and if it's out, where we can get it. I'd like to thank you for joining me on this course. If you're interested in learning a bit more about writing, I have a library of writing courses from fantasy to science fiction to thriller all of my profile. Be sure to check that out. With that, thank you again and happy writing.