AI cover art

Cover artwork comes from the Cover Director, the chat in the Cover Studio's Design stage. Ask it for a picture, a change to the current one, or a new palette, and it answers with a card. Nothing is drawn or charged until you press the card's button.

Image settings live in the chat

The chip beside Ask first in the message box shows the quality, the area and the price of the next picture. Tap it to change:

• Quality — each one says how many dots per inch it gives on this book's cover, and whether that is enough to print or only a proof.
• Area — Front, Back, or Full cover: one picture across back, spine and front, with no lettering in it. It is twice the paper a front is, so the same quality is softer across it.
• Visual reference — page art from this book whose style the cover should follow.
• Standing art direction — anything you want carried into every picture.

Each artwork card also has its own Quality and Area pickers. Changing them changes that one picture and the price on its button; your chip settings stay as they were.

Showing the Director an image

Press the paperclip beside the message box, paste an image, or drop one on it. The Director sees it with your message, and when you ask for artwork or the full cover "in this style" or "with this character", its card draws from that image and says so. The image is saved to your art library like any upload.

The Director knows your book

Once your chapters are in the book memory, the Director can read what happens in them, so artwork ideas can come from real places, moments and objects in the story rather than from the premise alone. It keeps the ending, twists and deaths off the cover.

What it costs

The price is on the card's button before you press it, and it depends on the quality and the area. If a price has not been measured, the button says so and will not run. A failed picture is refunded in full.

Working with the result

The result is artwork, not a cover. The layout is still yours:

• Title, subtitle and author stay on their own text layers above the picture, crisp at print resolution and easy to change.
• Every new picture is kept in Artwork, so you can go back to an earlier one.
• Undo puts the previous cover back.

Restyling without a new picture

Ask for a new palette, a different background or a change to the spine's lettering and the Director offers a Restyle card: the background colour or gradient, the spine's title, author, colour and size, and one ink for every unlocked text layer. It shows each value before and after, it is free, and it is one undo step. If the spine is too narrow for lettering, the card says so.

The full cover, lettering included

Three ways in: the Full cover with lettering starter in an empty Director chat, the Generate the full cover button at the bottom of the image settings (it names the quality and the price, and runs straight away), or simply asking the Director. Ask it to design your cover without saying which kind, and it offers both: editable layers, or the full cover as one finished picture. This is different from everything above:

• It is one flat picture of the back, spine and front, with the title, author, spine and back copy painted in. None of it can be edited afterwards.
• It is drawn at your wrap's exact shape, and the request tells the model where the spine, the trim and the barcode area fall on your book. Only the qualities that draw an exact shape are offered for it.
• Your live cover guides the layout, so choose the template you want first. It is followed loosely: a framed picture may come back painted edge to edge.

Image models still misspell words and drift from instructions, so when the picture comes back its lettering is read back: the title, subtitle, author and spine are copied off the picture letter by letter and compared with what you typed. The Director tells you what it found, and the release board shows Cover lettering spelled right: a tick when every line matches, or a warning naming each line that does not ("the title reads ‘Meadow & Mtoh’") and any words on the cover you did not type. The read-back costs nothing extra.

It is a second pair of eyes, not a guarantee. It can misread, so a warning never stops you exporting, and it never reads the back blurb. Proof the blurb, the spine and the barcode area yourself before you print.

AI disclosure

An AI-generated cover image is evidence for the AI content declaration on the release board, which most platforms now require.

The evidence is derived from the layers in your book, so deleting the AI image deletes the evidence. Declaring more AI use than can be demonstrated is always fine; declaring less is a blocker.

What to watch for

• Image generation is a paid-plan feature, like page art and research.
• Prompts steer, they do not guarantee. Negative instructions ("no text", "no border") are advisory to an image model and are sometimes ignored. Look at what came back before building a design around it.