This was one of the last ones I did just because it wasn't really important. The background wasn't white but just a blah grayish:
I would have liked a picture of the ball in New York or something but the only pictures were shot from the bottom up and didn't really work well. So since the story is set in DC I found this picture of fireworks in DC that's OK. Better than plain gray.
Happy New Year! Or as I think of it, the last year of American democracy.
This was a silly story I wrote in 2019 and had no real problem with publishing it then. The cover just used a plain white background with this collage of a girl:
The story is about a guy who goes to Hell and is sentenced to come back to Earth as a compilation of his fetishes. The idea was to bring together a lot of the various traits I'd used for stories. Since he went to Hell I found a fiery background to put in. What's the worst that could happen?
Well, Amazon "Blocked" it for...reasons. They had published it for 4 years with no problem but all the sudden it was violating their content guidelines. Yeah, right. Probably some dork in India thought it was naughty. Sure, the company that produces Hard-R-rated shows like The Boys, Gen V, and Invincible should be lecturing me on content.
Anyway, I didn't bother to argue. It sold 0 copies this year and only 4 last year. So I just put it on my Payhip store instead. Still, they're so annoying.
Most of these I used the same original character just for the sake of familiarity. A couple though I decided to upgrade a little. Like with Transformed for Christmas Too it had this pretty boring one originally:
I decided to find something sexier. I found the woman and background separately. I think this is a little upgrade:
Anyway, Merry Christmas and Happy Boxing Day!
This was the original cover for Office Girl, part of the Dark Gender Swap series
Finding a nice office that could be for the CEO of a big company was surprisingly hard. Most "Office" graphics would be a conference room or just look small or dumpy or something. I finally settled on this and cropped the picture so you can see a bit of the city outside the window to get that this office is really high up.
Maybe not the greatest but better than using the landing of a local library stairway like the MST3K/Rifftrax movie Time Chasers.
This was one of the last entries of the 24 Hour Gender Swap series as a Halloween special. It wasn't that great and the cover wasn't either. It just had a sexy witch with no background:
I looked around for backgrounds and found this one with a graveyard with a moon and crow. I made sure to crop it so the moon, tombstone, and crow were till visible. Halloween I usually use orange for the font color but I liked the white to go with the background.
Pretty creepy, right? Not really.
This was one of the first I really thought about redoing, though it took a little while to find a new picture for it. Back when I first did it, I used this picture, which definitely wasn't great:
The story is about a writer who gets bonked on the head and becomes part of the story he was writing about a schoolgirl who becomes a succubus but like Spawn or Ghost Rider uses her power against evildoers.
So I found a new picture of an Asian schoolgirl who has a sword. I forget if she has a sword in the story or not, but maybe she does at some point. The background I kinda like because the sky is reddish and it's about fighting demons from Hell and stuff.
A weird thing with the title as it is now is sometimes the "L" in "Girl" seems to kinda disappear when I look at it on Amazon. It blends in with those lights a little too well. I originally put the font in a red like the sky but it was too hard to read.
This was another of those with a pretty long title. The original didn't have a background.
Since it's in medieval times, I had to find something medieval. I liked this one because she's kneeling and the ground lines up so it looks like she's kneeling on it.
Not a perfect picture, but better than nothing...maybe.
24 Hour Schoolgirl was the second book in the 24 Hour Gender Swap series. I used a schoolgirl picture but it had no background.
On a stock photo site I found this hallway background. Like the last entry it might not be exactly to scale, but I think it came together pretty well. And there's a clock clearly visible to go with the "24 Hour" thing.
This was one of the rare series where I didn't put the series title on the book because it's kinda redundant.
This one wasn't too hard to do. I wrote this story a few years ago for "the big game," aka the Super Bowl. I just used a plain white background. Boring!
I looked online for a football field and found this one. I think it goes with the character pretty well, though it might not be to scale. And like the character, there aren't any logos or anything to get me in trouble with the NFL.
So there you go, pretty cool.
This book is perhaps the one I have the hardest time spelling, to the point I usually just copy and paste it. I think when I listed it originally I had to check the dictionary just to make sure I had the spelling right. I know some people have released books with a typo on the cover, but I didn't want to do that.
Anyway, it's From Restaurateur to Waitress, about a big-time chef who becomes a white trash diner waitress. The original cover has this blonde in a uniform showing some thigh on a white background:
For the background obviously I wanted to find a diner. You'd think that might be easy, but it's really not. The problem is all of these stock photo sites you have to search by keywords. But a lot of these photos are loaded by people in Russia or Ukraine or somewhere like that. In other words, people who don't really know English very well. So you get weird descriptions and keywords that make it really hard to find things.
So when I type in "diner" I get a bunch of weird stuff, like fish on a platter or some damned thing. Because that's what I meant, right? It's too bad "AI" isn't any better at understanding simple concepts in English or maybe that could help the search.
Anyway, with a lot more effort than I'd have liked, I found a diner image:
In the background is a blurry Betty Boop for some reason, so I positioned the waitress to cover as much of that as possible without completely erasing the stools and counter.
What's kind of annoying for something like this is the title is longer, so it's harder to fit it in. Though not nearly as hard as this:
That also was an annoying background to search for because apparently people in Russia or Ukraine don't know what a "gym" is. Maybe their schools don't have those?
There we go. One week down and a couple more to go.
So I mentioned on Monday that I decided to change one of my old covers, to jazz it up a little. I did that by taking the background out of the old picture with this site and then finding a new background on a stock photo site.
Since I did one, I figured I should do more. And I didn't feel like doing anything useful, so why not? One that turned out pretty nice (to me) is Transformed Into Twins. The original has a picture of twins and no background. Boring!
But what could you use for a background? I guess just anything really. I thought maybe a bedroom or something but nothing really caught my fancy. Then on this Unsplash site I just typed in something like "twin background" and it came up with this duplex or whatever where half is pink and half is blue. Eureka! I dropped that in and changed the fonts. To mimic the background, I changed the text colors so one part is blue and the other is pink, only they're opposite the background to stand out:
I think it's pretty neat. Better than the old one.
Since this is about twins, let's twin the entry! Here's the one I did for the sequel Transformed Into Twins Too:
It was a chore back then just to find a picture of the same woman looking normal and less so. I think once when I posted that someone complained about the poses, but I didn't have a lot of choices back then. Maybe I could have searched for new models but I decided to keep them. Only I resized them so they overlap this time:
It was kinda neat (to me) how the arm of the one sort of fits right into the curve of the other one's chest. For a background I just found some picture of DNA because the "twins" are made in a science experiment gone wrong like in that old Star Trek where the transporter separates Kirk into good and evil Kirks.
So there you go, doubled your pleasure! (Or pain.)
For Veteran's Day I decided I should put my 2016 story Sisters in Arms on sale because it involves male soldiers turned into women who have to prove they still have what it takes to be soldiers. I put the book on sale and then thought, "That cover looks kinda boring."
Back in the old days, removing a background was kind of hard unless you were a PhotoShop expert. But now there are "AI" tools that can do it in seconds. I've used this one a bunch because it's free unless you want the "Premium" package, which I can do without. So I found the picture I used originally and dropped the background out.
Then on a stock photo site I found a free image of an American flag. I put it vertically not as any kind of political statement but just so it'd fit.
And then I put the title on in a different font. The problem with the title was at first I used a darkish green that when I loaded it to Amazon didn't show up great in smaller sizes. So I changed the green to more of a tan and reloaded it and it looked better.
Then with some Forrest Gump logic, I thought, "Well I did one cover, so why not some more?"
A lot of the early ones I did had just plain white backgrounds because the stock photo was hard to remove the background. Especially when I was essentially homeless from September 2014-March 2015 and was just using a cheap laptop with PowerPoint on it. But now that I could do that, why not do it? And make the covers a little less basic.
So for the rest of the year I'll put some before and after pictures of other covers I did. Maybe they're better. Maybe they're worse. You decide!
On some Facebook group I saw this question:
I know most authors refuse to consider AI to write books, as I understand it AI stinks at it and authors hate it, but can you use it to write a synopsis of a book? I have to write several synopsis for my books and I suck at it. Can you use AI to write them or would they be just as useless?
And I answered that I don't have a lot of experience with "AI" chatbots but the ones I've used on Bing and Chrome you can't just feed in your book and it would spit out a syllabus. So basically you'd have to tell it your story so it could then tell you how to write the syllabus, which seems pointless.
Except then the light bulb goes off. Maybe if you have trouble with your syllabus or blurb, you should try this as a mental exercise: Imagine what you would tell the "AI" chatbot about your story. Describe it in one sentence, one paragraph, and then several pages.
It can be hard for us humans to distill a story into short bits like that, but maybe if you think of a specific audience like that it might help. Maybe. I don't really do that stuff anymore, so if you try it and it works, let me know and I'll have an "AI" write a book about it and sell it for one million dollars on Amazon.
And now next week I'm going to close out the year with some special posts. Brace yourself...
