The author says:
Sci-fi/Space Opera action/adventure story. Targeting older children/pre-teens. Newly qualified Captain Aurora Starlight sets out on a time and space-bending adventure to save a uncontacted race of aliens from annihilation.
This is final and published cover, but returning back to the writing world after a long break and considering a redo.
Nathan says:
Consider that redo! This cover may win some nostalgia points among readers who are old enough to remember the simplified covers of SF for young readers in the ’60s and ’70s, but that’s not really your target audience, is it?
I just looked at the top-selling science fiction books for readers age 9-12 on Amazon. (Click to see it larger.)
What I see is colorful, dynamic artwork, mostly with figures in action. (Red Sun is an outlier — in other words, that’s statistically not the example you want to follow.)
The good news is, this is exactly the kind of thing that A.I. is good for. Play around with it; see if you can come up with an illustration that evokes the kind of reaction you want in your readers.
Good luck!
First, a note to Nathan: Please, please, please do not encourage anyone to turn to AI to generate a cover image! You are not doing them any favors by doing that!
Now to the cover: It has a nice retro feel to it…but it is not going to work well for your intended audience, for whom anything retro is not going to have any significance. I think you may be best served by setting this cover aside and starting again from scratch, taking a close look at the covers of commercially published science fiction for younger readers.
A.I. illustration is no worse than stock illustration or photography; it’s a tool at one’s disposal, and it can be a useful one for book covers.
Yeah, don’t knock the medium or the equipment used to produce the content. Like any other tool, the quality of what A.I. produces depends on its user. I, for instance, just produced these two images from a quickie A.I. image generator by feeding it a paraphrasing of the pitch from this submission.
Those aren’t so bad, are they? Of course, if you want an image generated to be high-resolution enough for a professional-looking cover, you have to get a paid account at the A.I. site, so I’m just spitballing here. Still, I could easily imagine a full-sized high-definition version of either of those images gracing the cover of a children’s space novel like this one.
Yes, if you’re selling to the latest generation of children to be in their preteens right now (or—if we’re being honest—to the parents and teachers and libraries that are catering to them, since most of those children probably aren’t out buying these books for themselves), the cover definitely needs updating. While nostalgia might motivate the adults getting books for their children a bit, it’s worth remembering that today’s parents and teachers mostly grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, not the previous decades where this kind of abstract minimalism was in vogue; and a lot of the professionally produced cover art for books from the 1980s and 1990s still holds up pretty well to this day, as it was simple and to the point, and yet also gloriously detailed.
Since I know nothing about the main characters in the pitch or the alien civilization it says they’re going to encounter, the pictures that A.I. generator spat out in response to my instructions are pretty generic (and yet still amazingly good). The author who knows about these finer details, of course, may be able to craft something a bit more customized to the specific story. Don’t hesitate to give A.I. a shot, although—important caveat—don’t rely on it to do all the legwork for you either; that some of the things these programs can produce can look truly inspired doesn’t mean they actually know what they’re doing.
What these programs actually do is mash up the material they’ve been fed as examples of various genres and styles, and then send you the mashup that they calculate most closely matches your instructions. Needless to say, those calculations are not always accurate, which is why you don’t always get quite what you’re requesting. If you want something so new and different and innovative that nobody’s ever tried anything like it before, A.I. won’t be able to help, and you’ll have to get a professional human artist to produce it; but in any endeavor which mostly involves imitating what makes other people successful—such as book cover design—A.I. can be a very helpful tool indeed.
Looking at these remarks. I think I severely miscommunicated my target audience. The advice is greatly appreciated and I will definitely be making a change, but those covers you have included as examples feel way below the age I am targeting.
This reads more on the level of an earlier Harry Potter or perhaps The Hobbit. Not sure if that changes anything but I do apologise for the misunderstanding.
Not really. The Harry Potter covers (at least those prior to using images from the movies) also filled that bill: colorful, dynamic, with figures in action.
(The Hobbit isn’t a good example because no one in living memory has been attracted to it initially by the cover — there’s a reputational component that your book, alas, can’t hope to have for decades.)
Well, it’s not strictly true that no one was ever attracted to The Hobbit by its cover; I was, due in good part to the copy my mother had being an illustrated edition (now long out of print) with the illustrations being based on the Rankin-Bass animated adaptation. Interestingly, although Beorn the bear-shifting bee-keeper wasn’t in that adaptation, the book did have a number of illustrations of him to go with that part of the story anyway; maybe some material that got cut from the adaptation due to budget constraints or something.
So yes, even The Hobbit has had some attractive covers over the years. As long as we’re making Harry Potter comparisons, however, have a look at the very first cover of the very first book that kicked off that series: the cover illustration’s a bit crude as cover illustrations for children’s books typically are, but it worked, didn’t it? For your book, I figure you can have your choice of whether to make the cover as sophisticated as some of the later editions of that first book were (and I’m not even talking about the ones that used still frames from the movie), as crude as that first edition, or somewhere in between.
What’s important is having artwork concrete enough to make it immediately accessible to its target audience; whether it’s line drawings or paintings, you want the imagery to be recognizable as science fiction for preteens. If you think the artwork on the books our esteemed host showed you looks a little too childish for your audience, then feel free to go for something more sophisticated. Whoever published the first editions of Orson Scott Card’s book Ender’s Game didn’t feel any need to dumb down the paperback’s cover illustration for the sake of its younger readers, and there turned out to be a lot of those in elementary school (including yours truly, for one).
Also, Jack Author, what do you think of my artificially generated examples? I figured their level of sophistication to be somewhere around the middle; they could easily have graced the cover of any YA science fiction novel back in the 1980s. If you’ve got something different from all of these examples in mind, well… a lot of those A.I. image generators come with numerous adjustable settings to make the art’s style look however you want it to look.
Very interesting, thanks for the help. Unfortunately I seem to completely lack any artistic skill so have been plugging away on some of these generators. I am just finding it difficuly to produce something that is not obviously AI looking. Trying out both character action shots and wider landscapes. Will keep trying, or consider contacting an artist.
So you’re running up against artificial intelligence’s limits; that’s understandable. Just remember that when we say the art needs to be more concrete, that doesn’t mean it absolutely has to be literal, as in an actual scene from the story that establishes everything you want readers to know about it. None of those covers from The Hobbit or Harry Potter or Ender’s Game do anything like that.
In my experience, A.I. has two major weaknesses:
A) It cannot understand abstract concepts like body language; try as I might, I have never been able to get any image generator to understand simple descriptions like e.g. “gazing into each other’s eyes” or “standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders.” It will also tend to interpret any description you give it as literally as possible, e.g. tell it to show you the “eye” of a hurricane, and it will show you a hurricane with a literal eye looking out from it.
B) The more complicated the description, the more certain the image generator is to screw it up. Case in point: when I was trying to generate sample images for The Human Bet last month, you would not believe how many times the image generators tried to make the man the green-skinned-and-haired half-orc and the woman the fair-haired Caucasian human despite very specific instructions to do the opposite. (Among other things, apparently no one taught the gender difference between the words “blond” and “blonde” to the A.I.)
My solution? Don’t bother asking A.I. for interaction between the characters; focus on this being a futuristic story set in space (with maybe a little time travel thrown in depending on what you meant by “time… bending” in your pitch there). Ender’s Game was all about the titular protagonist’s adventures in a future in which humanity has gathered all of its most militarily capable child prodigies into a space station academy to train them to fight a war for its survival against a bunch of bug-eyed monster extraterrestrials, but you don’t see any of that on its very first cover: all you see is a futuristic space shuttle launching from what looks to be a futuristic space port with a reddish moon on the horizon.
Likewise, your cover needs not necessarily show Captain Aurora Starlight or any of her subordinates or these previously uncontacted extraterrestrials. A glimpse of what might be her ship navigating through these futuristic settings should be sufficient; and if there’s anything visually unusual about these settings, so much the better for you and your book. Also, be aware that some “imperfections” in the image might actually be a benefit for the cover of a children’s book, as they reflect how children’s imaginations are not yet limited by grownups’ scientific knowledge: out of the two artificially generated sample images I showed you, I actually liked the second one best because it has the “imperfection” of a planet with an off-center ring—which is pretty much an impossible structure according to the laws of physics, but is something a child too young to know about such laws could easily imagine.
Very interesting stuff, about the limitations of these generators. You’re right I have been trying to incorporate my main character which has mostly resulted in some extremely uncanny and off-putting images. It’s true many book cover then (and even now) have very generic and non-specific covers. I wonder if publishers has collections of genre art ready to go?
May I ask which generator you are using? Mine does not seem capable of producing those illustration style ones like your example.
I specifically used DeepAI to generate those two images for free; which are only about half as tall and wide as the ones it used to generate not too long ago, sadly. I’ve also had some success working with NightCafe, which I should warn you will bait you by allowing you to make some images free with no strings attached, but eventually start insisting that you sign up for a free account if you want to go on using it. Most recently, I’ve also been experimenting with Perchance, which works a lot like DeepAI, but with a few more features and fewer restrictions.
(By fewer restrictions, I mean two things: DeepAI has a daily limit on how many images it’s allowed to generate for your IP address per day which I have never yet encountered using Perchance, and—as I discovered when generating sample images for The Human Bet—no filters on NSFW content up to and including X-rated material, though I imagine like all the others it will probably still refuse to generate extreme images of the NSFL kind, e.g. of explicitly underage characters engaged in pornographic activities; pretty much anything else goes.)
I agree with the other comments about the cover is not going to work for the intended audience. However, I like the minimalist, mid-century style so maybe keep it and write a sci-fi tale set in the atomic age, maybe revisionist history. It’d be perfect.
The least you could do would be to add a kid or two to whatever new cover you come up with.
I do really like the cover but i feel it could be a little more. I like the style a d think it would work great to catch the eye against other books. I feel like the astronaut could be doing something. For example maybe have them floating in space next to a ship.