Moving Away From AI-Generated Book Covers

A change to the covers

If you've been reading my books for a while, you'll have noticed the covers. Rich, painterly, atmospheric — and, I'll be honest with you, generated with the help of AI image tools.

That's changing.

From here on, I'm moving away from AI-generated cover art entirely. The new covers will be minimalist, text-only and AI-free.

Why the change

There are two reasons, and they're both practical rather than ideological.

The first is that commissioning professional cover artists is genuinely difficult and expensive. A single bespoke painted cover from a working illustrator can run into hundreds of pounds, and a series of ten or fifteen books makes that number climb very quickly. For an independent author, that's a hard cost to absorb on every title.

The second is that AI-generated art, while fast and cheap, comes with its own problems. The quality is inconsistent. The style drifts between books. Characters and settings never quite look the same from one cover to the next. And, increasingly, readers can spot it — and some of them don't like it.

I'd rather not be in that conversation at all.

What the new covers look like

The new direction is clean, typographic and deliberate. Title, author name, series tag — nothing else. No generated figures, no painted landscapes, no fake photographic renders.

It's a quieter look, and I know it won't be to everyone's taste. But it has one enormous advantage: every cover will be consistent with every other cover, forever, because they're built from the same type and the same rules rather than from the output of a model that never produces the same image twice.

It's also honest. What you see is what I made.

What happens to the existing covers

The books already published will keep their current covers for now — changing them all at once is a big job, and I'd rather do it properly than rush it. But as new titles release, and as older titles come up for refresh, you'll start to see the new minimalist style appear.

The stories inside aren't changing at all. The Zombie Fall of Britain, The AI Blackout, the Stone Witness mysteries — they're exactly the same books. Only the wrapping is different.

A thank you

I want to say thank you to everyone who's bought, read and reviewed these books, whatever was on the front. The cover gets you to open the book; the writing is what keeps you there. I'm going to keep focusing on the writing.

— JC