Designing Covers on a Budget with AI

When it came time to make covers for my books, here's the problem I ran into immediately: professional cover art wasn't in the budget for most first-time authors, and it definitely wasn't in mine either.

So what did I do instead? I use prompt engineering and AI image generation. And I want to be direct about something before going further: that's not cheating. It's using the tools actually available to you to get a book you're proud to put your name on, without needing thousands of dollars you don't have yet.

What the process actually looks like

Here's what surprises people: you won't get the right image on the first try, and you shouldn't expect to. The process is to describe the scene, mood, and genre cues you want, generate a batch, and look for the one or two that feel closest, not perfect. From there you refine the prompt based on what's actually wrong with it: the lighting, the composition, a detail that doesn't fit your genre's visual language.

Why does genre matter so much here, more than most first-time authors expect? Because readers judge a book's genre by its cover in about a second, before they ever read the description. That's not enough time for nuance, so it's worth generating with actual comp covers from your genre open next to you the whole time, checking your result against what readers already expect to see.