Book Cover Manipulation at Scale --

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

So on Friday’s call a subscriber asked if we could create a system that would make it possible to change out book covers for translations.

I’d already posted up all my 84 diff vs of Bend Her up on KDP and IS (ppb, hardback, and large print) but, frankly, I’d done kind of a half-ass cover job, with just a black bar as the spine.

That was until I realized I was an idiot (on said call) and dove off into a corner while Novae presented his latest video app’s new abilities (SO AMAZING) and then I returned with some science, which I’ve since tripled down on, which you can see here:

We’ve since fixed the back images to have more breathing room, like so:

But the point of the image up above, the proof of everything, was that all those covers were created spine-sensitive, built around the sizes you’d actually need to make 84 different paperback, hardback, and large print, pdfs, for KDP and Ingram both!

The secret sauce was running the OG covers through my Content Factory set up (which I’ll toss behind the paywall at the bottom of this post again), getting massagable blanks with the title taken off, and having content factory do titles for both the front and spine on alpha channels:

that can easily be removed later.

Basically you just need the pretty blank, the title to replace yours, and the spine title, and then for your AI to do some ‘this is how wide your spine gets to be on KDP and IS’ science and geometry.

Here’s a blank I’m using for one of my Dragon books —

And then for the title —

But you see how I could have any language on any alpha channel and have it put onto the blank?

And here’s an example of a spine we’re doing in Czech —

It’s not a big deal to do it horizonal either!

And then you toss all the components to an AI (one that has a folder where all your PDFs are so they know your page counts, and one you’ve introduced to the IS and KDP cover calculators.)

You will have to jump thru some additional CMYK hoops for IS, but any AI can getcha there.

So — pretty awesome, eh?

If you’re interested in doing this too, you can probably just copy and past this entire post over to Fable or Sol, and then toss your copy of Content Factory over to an OpenAI subscription, for the graphics! (If you want to do it large scale, you’ll need to be on an unlimited images monthly level at OpenAI.)

Depending on the quality of the images involved you might also want to do a local Ersgan upscale too, for print covers — it’s an AI upscaler, but it’s free, and uses python on your machine, any AI can talk you through getting that if you need it as well <3.

In today’s Cassie’s plans: assorted AIs are getting my books up in Czech everywhere, making ppb and hardback covers for them, getting all these Bend/Break/Make Her covers fixed and posted, and doing a run of my MSA books in Polish on Arachne because I have Good Feelings in my Tummy about that. I’m also preparing to dive back into audio work hard, ‘cause I’m hoping THIS WEEK WILL BE THE FINISHED ONE, lol, we’ll see.

I know it feels like a lot to do, all the time, and to set up, and it is when you’re learning, but that’s just the tax of figuring out how to do shit and fucking it up 2-10 times.

But then after that it’s all downhill!

Attack your plans with the confidence of an AI that’s not afraid of updating Ingram Spark (IYKYK, looooooooooooooooolsob, hahahaha.)

xo!

Cassie