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This week on Brave New Bookshelf, we are exploring the visual side of the AI revolution. In episode 63, hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite sat down with Melinda Kucsera, an epic fantasy author who has mastered the art of blending traditional digital painting with cutting-edge AI tools. From navigating the complexities of Kickstarter to overcoming major publishing hurdles, Melinda shares how AI has become an indispensable part of her creative toolkit.
Meet Melinda Kucsera: Epic Fantasy Author and Publishing Pro
Melinda Kucsera brings a unique perspective to the table, balancing a 16-year career in traditional science journal publishing with a prolific career as an independent epic fantasy author. While her “day job” is rooted in the world of non-fiction and scientific data, her creative life is spent building vast magical worlds and chasing dragons.
Melinda is perhaps best known for her Curse Breaker series and her recent Rogue Gods trilogy. She is a pioneer in using AI to enhance her storytelling, particularly through high-end cover design and interior illustrations. Despite facing a significant setback—losing her Amazon KDP account due to a technical glitch—Melinda has successfully pivoted to a “wide” publishing model and crowdfunding, proving that authors can thrive outside of a single ecosystem.
From 48-Hour Renders to AI Efficiency
Before the rise of AI art generators, Melinda used Daz 3D to create her characters and scenes. However, the process was grueling. High-quality renders could take upwards of 48 hours, during which a single computer update could wipe out days of work.
When AI tools like Midjourney and NightCafe emerged, Melinda saw an opportunity to cut down on “render rage.” By using AI to generate backgrounds or textures and then compositing them with her Daz 3D character models, she was able to achieve the “glow” and magic necessary for epic fantasy in a fraction of the time.
Her approach is far from “push-button.” Melinda views AI as a base layer, often spending hours in Photoshop over-painting, fixing “AI weirdness” (like hands and eyes), and mashing multiple images together to create a cohesive, professional cover.
Using AI to Power Six-Figure… or Six-Campaign Success
Melinda has successfully run six Kickstarters, and AI has played a role in almost every aspect of these campaigns. For her Rogue Gods trilogy, she used AI to create over 300 interior illustrations, offering backers a truly immersive, illustrated edition that would have been cost-prohibitive using traditional methods.
Beyond the art, Melinda utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude and Gemini to help with the heavy lifting of marketing:
- Identifying Tropes: Since epic fantasy doesn’t always follow the same clear-cut tropes as romance, Melinda uses AI to analyze her books and identify “sellable” elements for her sales pages.
- Drafting Sales Copy: AI helps her distill 500-page novels into punchy, sales-oriented blurbs for Kickstarter.
- Transparency: Melinda emphasizes the importance of the “AI Disclosure” on Kickstarter, noting that being open about her hybrid process helps build trust with her audience.
A Look at Melinda’s Cover Design Process
One of the highlights of the episode was Melinda’s “pro-tip” session for authors looking to create their own covers. Her main takeaway? Never let the AI do the text.
Melinda recommends a layered approach:
- Separate the Text: Always do your typography in a separate program like Photoshop or Affinity. This ensures you can respect print margins and maintain consistency across a series.
- Reverse Font Search: If you love the font style an AI generator like Ideogram produces, take a screenshot and use a reverse font search tool to find a similar, licensed font you can use manually.
- The “Remove” Tool: Melinda swears by Photoshop’s AI-powered “Remove” tool to clean up text or unwanted artifacts from an AI-generated background.
- Fixing Hands: Instead of struggling with prompts like “anatomically correct hands,” Melinda suggests prompting the AI to have the character hold an object, like a sword or a magic staff, which often forces the model to render the hands more accurately.
Diversifying Beyond Amazon
Melinda’s story is also a cautionary tale about the “all eggs in one basket” approach. After losing her Amazon account to a glitch, she has leaned heavily into tools like Publish Drive for wide distribution and Book Vault for high-quality print-on-demand services, especially for special editions involving gold foil. Her success on Kickstarter has provided a vital alternative stream of income, proving that a dedicated fan base is more important than any single platform.
Favorite Tools & Recommendations
Melinda and the hosts highlighted several essential tools for the AI-forward author:
- NightCafe: Melinda’s current favorite for art, thanks to its variety of models (including Ideogram and ChatGPT) and its ability to use “start images.”
- Ideogram: Steph’s top choice for book cover layouts and typography inspiration.
- Photoshop: Essential for “Generative Fill,” “Expand Background,” and the “Remove” tool.
- Daz 3D: Still used by Melinda to create consistent character bases before bringing them into AI tools.
- Claude & Gemini: Her go-to LLMs for analyzing tropes and writing Kickstarter sales copy.
- Affinity Photo: A powerful, lower-cost alternative to Photoshop for authors on a budget.
Key Takeaways from This Episode
- AI is a Hybrid Tool: Use AI to generate the “impossible” elements of your cover, but use human skill (and Photoshop) to polish and finalize the image.
- Don’t Ignore Kickstarter: Crowdfunding is a fantastic way to fund illustrated editions and connect directly with readers.
- Typography Matters: Keep your text on a separate layer to ensure it meets printer requirements and stays consistent across your series.
- Diversify Your Distribution: Don’t rely solely on one retailer. Tools like Publish Drive can help you reach a global audience.
- Prompt for Action: To fix common AI errors like messy hands, give the character a specific task or object to hold.
Resources Mentioned
Here are the links and resources discussed in this episode:
Transcript
Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry.
Steph Pajonas: Hello everyone. Welcome back to an episode of the Brave New Bookshelf. I am one of your co-hosts, CTO of Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press, where we’re teaching authors how to use AI in any part of their process. And we’re publishing AI forward books. We are doing a lot of that right now.
I’ve been publishing books, like a lot like the last few days, just one right after another. We’re getting caught up on the wide stores, because we were in KU for a little bit in Kindle Unlimited for all of the people who don’t understand the lingo. We were in Kindle Unlimited for a little bit. And then when we decided to go to the wider stores, they’ve just been trickling out and I’ve been catching up.
Now that we’re in the new [00:01:00] year. So there’s lots of work to do, and I’m enjoying the process. You know, sometimes you just put your headphones in and you lock into the music and you get the work done, which is how I get most things done around here. Right? Danica’s laughing at me over there.
Yeah. So I’m here with my lovely co-host as usual Danica Favorite. How are things going with you?
Danica Favorite: Pretty good. Pretty good. I feel bad, because everybody else is talking about how cold it is, and here in Colorado we have unseasonably warm temperatures.
Steph Pajonas: Aw. Send some of that our way. Come on.
Danica Favorite: I’m, I believe it or not, as somebody who’s always cold, I actually am trying, because even though I don’t want the cold weather, we desperately need the moisture.
We’ve had such high fire danger, and if we don’t get a whole bunch of snow real soon this summer is going to be fire central, and I do not want that. So yeah, happy to send the warm weather, although I don’t mind not freezing every single day. [00:02:00] So there’s the trade off right there. But yeah, I’m doing good otherwise.
For those of you who don’t know me. I am the Community Manager at Publish Drive, where we help people get their books distributed as wide as possible to all those fun wide stores. And we also help with other things at the other stages, the journey. We have AI tools to help you create your book metadata, book covers, as well as then once you sell your books, we’ve got some tools to help you split the royalties. So between us getting your books out there and Future Fiction Academy teaching you how to write the books, you are in the right place to learn all about publishing. And we are so excited today to have a guest today, Melinda Kucsera, who we’ve known her online for a while, been following her and her journey, and she’s doing some really cool things with AI art. [00:03:00] And she’s got some Kickstarters going. And I had realized we hadn’t had an art guest in a while when I was in the AI for Art Group, I was like, Hey Belinda, oh my gosh, she does really great stuff. Really excited to have her here today. We will talk about some other things besides AI art, when we were just chitchatting beforehand, she had so many cool things to share, I really hope we get to all of them. Always excited to have another cool new guest.
Without further ado here is Melinda Kucsera.
Melinda Kucsera: Hi.
I write epic fantasy books.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, yeah. Tell us about yourself. Tell us like what you write and then you can get a little into AI art and how you’re using AI in general.
Melinda Kucsera: Yeah I write epic fantasy books mostly. I don’t really write, I don’t think I write anything else. And yeah that’s me.
I also work in traditional publishing for science journal publisher for 16 years at one, and now another publisher bought them. So now I [00:04:00] work for the new parent company. So on both sides, the nonfiction journal side and the genre fiction, like as far away as you could possibly get on two totally different sides of publishing.
So.
Danica Favorite: I love that. Works different sides of your brain. So that’s always fun. You get to be scientific and you get to be creative. And I love the epic fantasy genre, because it seems to me that, I will be careful in how I say this because I know some epic fantasy authors are pretty, not fond of AI, but I see like for those of you who are listening, you don’t get to see the video, so go to YouTube and watch the video, because Melinda’s got her covers behind her that utilize some AI elements and really beautiful covers. And I’ve always thought that epic fantasy is such a great place for AI art, because you get to take things that don’t theoretically [00:05:00] exist into something that actually you can put on a cover. So I’d love to hear about how you’re using AI and what that looks like for you.
Melinda Kucsera: Sure. I, the thing is like even before there was the AR generators, there was Daz 3D. I don’t know how many people. It’s still out there. It still exists, but you, the way it, what Daz 3D is, where people don’t know, is you get a, you have a 3D space and you buy models and things, and you move them around, put them together, and then render it out With the render cards getting so expensive, I started trying to figure out, okay, how can we do this better, faster? So I was playing around with a lot of the effects in it with rendering the characters and backgrounds separately, just anything to cut down the render time, because I had the most beautiful, wonderful scene that took 48 hours to render.
And of course, Microsoft had to update and…lost everything. So you have to do it again. And then when you need this for a cover, and the book is [00:06:00] done and you’re still trying to render the darn thing out, but, and you still have to then make refinements to it and it takes you 48 hours to get just something to see. That’s just too much.
And then I think it was 2023 or end of 2022 when, I think it was Midjourney first came out and, and some of the stuff coming outta there was like really, like the colors and stuff reminded me of what I was trying to do in Daz 3D, with playing around the materials, the shine giving things a glow.
‘Cause you know, with fantasy you need magic. Things have to glow. And I was really intrigued by it, by its color palettes and stuff, because it was just natively popping out what I was spending hours to try and do in Daz. And so I played, or I didn’t understand Midjourney too well, but another one came out.
I don’t remember the name of it anymore. ‘Cause it doesn’t exist anymore. It went out of business. But it was like you just pop, you just wrote in what you wanted, and if you entered the same keywords, it would just give you different variations of the same thing. And it kept the character somewhat similar.
And I was like, this is, this is interesting. [00:07:00] So I started playing around with having it generate a character and then I’d bring into Photoshop. And of course in like end of 2022, early 2023, you had to creatively crop things. Get rid of the hands and the feet and the legs sometimes. And I could repaint the faces and fix the cross-eyed and some of the other weird things it would do.
It would just add a whole bunch of weird lines and noise to the skin. But that was, I knew how to fix that. I’d been learning how to digitally paint for years. I only got into doing covers ’cause when I bought them, they didn’t sell. I could buy the most gorgeous cover and it wouldn’t sell, but I’d make some homemade thing that didn’t look that great and it would sell.
And I never, I still don’t understand why that is, but that, that, that is the way it is. So I’ve just continued with going and I was like, well, I don’t want them to look ugly, even if the ugly is what sell. So I. I’ve been learning how to digitally paint over the years. I wouldn’t say I’m like a master at it or anything, but I’ve gotten pretty good at some aspects of it.
So yeah, so I started with that in 2023 and still I had to do like heavy over painting. [00:08:00] So in 2024 I launched the Rogue Gods Trilogy, and I did all three covers were AI generated images. And I generated multiple images and in Photoshop, mashed it all together, overpainted it. And I liked, I thought it looked really, I thought it looked really good.
And I guess other people agreed. I did a Kickstarter for it, and I decided to do, as I’d been hearing, people want art, people want art, they want illustrated editions. Well, I can do art. And so I went into the AI generator, the art generator, I don’t remember the name of it anymore. And cause if you entered the same keywords, you get the same character.
So I just kept doing that and getting different things and compositing it altogether. I did, some full color and some that were black and white sketches. And I illustrated the entire trilogy and it ended up being over 300 images. And I ran the Kickstarter and 55 people backed to, which I thought was really awesome for a trilogy that they had not read, that they had, that was not, there was not like, it was tangentially related to other series that I write, but [00:09:00] like not, there wasn’t like a character that was a popular character in it. It was just a brand new, ridiculous high story of a guy in hell who needs to steal a book from a library in hell. And things just go progressively from there, spiraling out of control, because it’s never a good idea to break into a library that is run by a fallen angel and steal something. There’s going to be a, that’s gonna cause problems. There’s, there’s no good ending for that.
Danica Favorite: It sounds like a very intriguing read, I have to admit. I’m like, hey, could we just talk about this book forever?
Melinda Kucsera: I put that the, that first book is called Gateway to Hell, and it’s actually in SPFBO 11. It made it into the, be one of the 300 that are part of that. It’s like a, it’s a, it’s the Self Published Fantasy Blog-off run by Mark Lawrence. I think I’m in the Abel Montero group.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with that. I lost my Amazon account, so I don’t know that I’m gonna get anything from being part of this, this, contest, because a lot of people read the [00:10:00] books on Amazon, and I don’t currently have an Amazon account due to a glitch.
Steph Pajonas: I remember that glitch.
Melinda Kucsera: Still processing my rage on that.
Steph Pajonas: I’m
Melinda Kucsera: is
still
Steph Pajonas: sorry
that happened to you.
Melinda Kucsera: It’s still ongoing ALLi’s like I, the Alliance of Independent Authors. I remember. So I reached out to them back in the end of December. And they’ve been going back and forth with KDP and there’s no update. So…
Steph Pajonas: Fingers crossed.
Melinda Kucsera: I have the ticket proof that, you know. I don’t wanna get into it.
Danica Favorite: Yeah.
Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: It’s a whole thing. But it has more to do with crosswired email addresses and extra accounts than anything.
Melinda Kucsera: They told me to create the other account. Yeah. And then they terminated it, because I couldn’t get into the old account anyways.
Steph Pajonas: It’s a whole thing. Yeah. Poor thing.
Danica Favorite: But how great that you’ve got this other stream of income, like through your Kickstarters. Because you were mentioning, before we started that you’ve done a few Kickstarters and you even have one going on now.
Melinda Kucsera: Six.
Danica Favorite: So six.
Melinda Kucsera: I’ve done six.
Danica Favorite: Six Kickstarters. [00:11:00] So why don’t you tell us about Kickstarters and how that’s gone?
Melinda Kucsera: Yeah, they’re kind of, the AI art is, they’re heavily intertwined. I started doing Kickstarters. I first, I don’t remember how it came on my radar about Kickstarter ’cause I didn’t even, I didn’t know what it was or why anybody was doing them.
And then I was hearing about it and I, there was a Kickstarter for Author’s Group started. So I joined that just like, I think I was one of the first few people who joined the AI…one of the, one of the groups that you started Steph.
Steph Pajonas: AI Writing for Authors.
Melinda Kucsera: That’s it. That’s it.
Steph Pajonas: Yes. You, I remember you being there in the very beginning.
Melinda Kucsera: Yes. Yeah. I didn’t quite know what I was gonna do with it, but this is, I’m interested in all things science and technology. And if this is the way of the future, I wanna at least understand it, even if, and see if there’s a piece that I can use, that makes sense for me. I’m one of those people I read every post.
I don’t comment a lot in there, but I read every single post. ‘Cause I’m just one. I need to see what other people are doing, even if I wouldn’t use it that way. I’m just I don’t know. I [00:12:00] just need to know. Anyways, back to Kickstarter. So in, in 2023, I ran my first Kickstarter in October, and it was for my Curse Breaker series, which is the one that, if people know me, that’s the one, that’s what they know me for.
It’s the longest series that I’ve written. It’s the most popular one that I’ve written. And I did, I just did to, to try it. A uh, three omnibuses, like at the time. there were nine books in the series. There’s more than that now, but then there was only nine, so we, I did three omnibuses with three books each, and these things were on 900 pages.
I couldn’t do illustrations, because we’re already hitting up against the page limit that you can have before the spine just like gives up and just lets all the pages go. Um, But at the time my computer was old, and the chips were starting to get really expensive, and I looked into getting a new render card and I was like, I can’t do that.
I’m not gonna spend 48 hours waiting for Daz 3D to render this stupid scene. So I [00:13:00] took I went into Daz and just rendered the character, and then I went to the AR generator and was like, can I get just some kind of fantasy looking background, something that I can put him against and I could paint him to match it.
I just need something that I don’t have to go into Daz and spend 24 hours rendering. And so I did, so all three covers, and I did, I’m very open about that. You can go to Kickstarter, you can click on my name. You can see all the campaigns I’ve done. There is a statement, ’cause Kickstarter doesn’t care if you use AI, but you have to you have to say that you do. Because some people do care.
A lot of people don’t care. But you do have to say that you’re using it. And I, in every single one of mine, I do have that statement, and I do explain exactly what I’ve done. And it is a hybrid. It’s not purely just generated AI image. I am. I can’t not play with them. I know too much about how Photoshop works.
Yeah, so that campaign had about 30 people back it, which was awesome, ’cause I had never done a Kickstarter. I had no follow. I didn’t know the thing was gonna even fund. And it did. And I was just so grateful. Almost everybody backed the eBooks instead of the [00:14:00] hard. That was okay. Because, you know, that’s what they like.
That’s cool. They’re good, as they want my books. And that was just exciting. That made me very happy. And so then I decided, I had another, um. I wrote it, I wrote a fantasy book as an epic poem in iambic pentameter. And I, after my sister passed away, the grief does very strange things to authors. So I did this and it’s a Christmas story.
They basically have to rescue Santa and it, the whole thing is written in iambic pentameter. It’s it, instead of paragraphs, they’re sonnets. So there’s 200 sonnets in this thing. It is absolutely ridiculous. I was like, nobody’s going to want this, but I’m gonna do it anyway. So I illustrated it with AI generated art that I then painted over and I just, I put it out there.
I was like, let’s see what happens. No pre-launch, nothing. I just hit launch on the day before Thanksgiving in the evening and didn’t tell anybody, and until I sent my newsletter out a couple days later. It did fund. It, it just barely [00:15:00] funded, but hey, it funded. That’s the important thing. Because it, there was, it was just one book, so the tiers were very low.
So I, that was, there were a number of things, I could have done differently with this, but that was one of the reasons why it struggled to fund was the tier, the, the ebook was $5, the paperback was $20. So no matter how many people backed it, I mean if most people are backing the ebook, $5 each time is not going to creep up the total ’cause with Kickstarter, it’s all or nothing.
So you have to hit the funding goal. So I think I should have said it a little bit lower and that would’ve probably helped, but it did fund, so it’s all good.
Danica Favorite: I think that’s great. And how fun is it that you’re like, hmm. I think I’m gonna do this weird thing. I don’t know how it’s gonna go, but let’s try it anyway.
And…
Melinda Kucsera: I had it, I’d written it, so I was like, why not?
Steph Pajonas: You might as well, right? Yeah. We’ve had a few, we’ve had a few guests on here, Jill Cooper and a few others who have done…
Melinda Kucsera: She does phenomenal.
Steph Pajonas: Kickstarters, right? And they’re just like, I had this fun idea that I wanted to make happen. And then they throw up a Kickstarter, you know, they [00:16:00] work on, they work hard on it.
You know, there’s lots of,
Melinda Kucsera: Oh, it’s a lot of
Steph Pajonas: work. Yeah, it’s a lot of work, right? Kickstarters are a lot of work, but you know, seeing them put that out there and then fund and then. Then they have all of these new readers who come about from it. It’s just, it’s a really exciting thing. I think that
Melinda Kucsera: It is.
Steph Pajonas: Kickstarter with like with AI, which helps with that page, that fundraising page, you know, it’s a long page, it’s got a lot of information on it and you can break it up with all these really pretty images and whatnot and makes it fun.
Melinda Kucsera: You can have the AI write the page for you, which I didn’t do for the first two, but for Rogue Gods and the two that I did last year, I did put in one of them, I had Claude write, one of them I had Gemini write. ‘Cause after a while you’re like, well I wrote the books, but I don’t know what they’re about.
There’s like 500 things happening. Can you tell me what. It, what should I say [00:17:00] this is about? How do I explain to somebody the madness that is this book and make them at all sound like it would be a fun read.
Steph Pajonas: Thank goodness for AI for that.
Melinda Kucsera: Yeah, and it’s great, because I did that with the last one.
I just, I put it in there and I was like, I don’t know what tropes are in this. This is, these are the books. What tropes are there? ‘Cause we see all the time, the romance tropes, they’re in mo, there’s a, romance is such a big thing, and it’s posted everywhere. But if you don’t write romance, you’re sometimes, you’re like, I’m sure there’s tropes in here.
But there’s no fated mates. There’s no enemies to lovers. No love in here. We’re chasing dragons and things. I did lean on the AIs for that, for help, and they picked out some really fun, some things that I didn’t even realize were tropes. So I, I do recommend at least throwing it in there and getting like this.
Anytime you have a sales page or something, a Kickstarter is a sales page, you’re trying to sell something. It’s not, you’re trying to get a donation. People are backing ’cause they want the book or they want the thing that [00:18:00] you are running the Kickstarter for, so you really have to sell them on it. So, um, Yeah, so if you don’t know how to describe it, which we can write books, we’re not always great at selling them.
So Claude and Gemini are like really good at figuring out like, what would someone want to know about this book? To think, to consider purchasing it. So, um,
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, because as authors we don’t always see the forest for the trees. Like we pick out the things we love…
Melinda Kucsera: mm-hmm.
Danica Favorite: about the story, but that’s not necessarily what a reader is going to love. And that’s, ultimately, like you were just saying, you’re writing a sales page. Once that book is done, I always say this it’s a commercial product.
Melinda Kucsera: Yes.
Danica Favorite: And you have to figure out how you’re gonna get that commercial product into people’s hands.
So I love that approach, because it really does give a lot of, to me it takes a lot of the pressure off. Because…
Melinda Kucsera: It does.
Danica Favorite: You have to remember all the things.
Melinda Kucsera: Oh yeah.
Danica Favorite: The [00:19:00] AI tells you what the things are.
Melinda Kucsera: Yeah, I mean, you do have to let it know. ‘Cause the structure of a Kickstarter sales page is not the same as if you were doing like a sales page for your shop.
You know, there’s things that you wanna put upfront on the Kickstarter that you wouldn’t do on your sales, on the your shop page. So you just have to give it that like, you know, um, like, Hey, I need the tropes then I need, why would somebody want this? And then. Give me a shortened version of this blurb that’s salesy.
And it does it, you also have to take out some things, ’cause it will, they’ll put in a lot of, oh, this is why you should want this. But you don’t wanna, you, the Kickstarter potential backers don’t wanna hear why you would want something. It’s show me, you know, so you do have to dial back some of their like.
Some of their language is great for sales page, but not so good for Kickstarter. So you have to take some of that out, and make sure you’re selling it without telling someone what to do.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think that’s,
Melinda Kucsera: Gemini did a lot of that. I kept deleting it. I’m like no, no Gemini, we can’t be doing that.
We can’t be telling people what to do. That’s not why they’re here. [00:20:00]
Danica Favorite: But this goes back to something that Steph and I have said a lot in the past couple of episodes, is that you still have to have that human knowledge of what’s going to work well on the sales page. And you still have to guide the AI to say, Hey, this is what I want you to do.
No, don’t do this. Yes, do that. You know, all of those things that really are still what’s under your purview as the author, as the person creating the page. So I think it’s really cool though, as I’m listening to you talk about all the different things that you’re putting in the sales page and what you’re asking for and how you’re asking for it, because I think that is something that people don’t necessarily know that they’re gonna have to do.
So that is such a great perspective on, oh, okay, this is what I need.
Melinda Kucsera: Yeah. Yeah. And another thing that I found is great, because sometimes it’s hard to come up with comp titles. And like for this one, that the Kickstarter that I’m running now, which ends Thursday at [00:21:00] 10 AM Eastern time, because I forgot to change the end time.
So if you run a Kickstarter, don’t be me. Remember to change the end time before you hit launch to something sane, like midnight or something.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah, it’s a hot tip.
Hot tip.
Melinda Kucsera: Then send your newsletter out. I got so focused on it’s gotta be launched. Make sure it’s launched. Then send the newsletter. ‘Cause Monday and Tuesdays the best days to launch in the morning Eastern Time, which I work Mondays and Tuesdays, Easter standard time.
So I’m trying to do this before I start work and get the sequence of events, and I’m not quite awake at the time, so don’t be me. Remember that last step.
Danica Favorite: But you know, like we can say, don’t be me. But you’ve given us so many great tips that I think anyone who’s wanting to launch a Kickstarter, this is an episode that would be really great for them to listen to because we’re definitely learning from so many of the things that you’ve done. So what about some of the extras that you’ve done, like in terms of [00:22:00] illustrations and things like that? Like what kind of extras that maybe you’re having the AI generate for you, for your Kickstarters?
Melinda Kucsera: I do a lot of images, and then I edit them. Like one of the things I did for this recent campaign, since the generator that I loved with all of my heart went away, I’ve now switched over to using NightCafe, which I like that too. It has a lot of options, and it has a whole bunch of models right now that you can use a start image for, and some of them you can use more than one start image.
And I’ve wanted for a long time, like the characters together, which is hard to gen, to render out of Daz, because the more geometry you have, the longer it takes to figure out how is the light hitting them. And the more calculations that it is doing , the longer it takes to render, and then you run into the risk of Microsoft restarting your computer in the middle of it, because it doesn’t know that you’re…it just sees your computer as idle, because you can’t really do much while it’s [00:23:00] rendering, it’s using all of your CPU power.
So I used Seedream 4.5 I think is the model a lot with this one. And I put in, ’cause I’ve used Daz a lot, I have some of the characters, like just lots of it’s, you can in 10 minutes generate from Daz even you have a really bad render card, like I have, a character with no background, just some light on them.
And so I put that in, and I’d say, hey can you put them, I don’t know, with a castle behind them? Or I would have multiple characters that I had generated from Daz and I’d say, can you put them together in, in a scene? And I got a couple of scenes. It took a number of generations, ’cause it, more people you add sometimes it, like the limbs get bent in strange ways.
Why? They weren’t like that in the reference image. And I got a couple of ensemble pictures with multiple characters. And it looks exactly like the ones that I rendered. They’re just, the lighting is a little bit different, ’cause it’s a different scene. And they’re all together and interacting and [00:24:00] that was just like, I really, that was worth every hour it took to get that.
Danica Favorite: That’s awesome.
Melinda Kucsera: That was really fun.
Danica Favorite: And I love that you’ve explained some of this to us, because I’m looking at the covers in the background. And again, for those of you who are watching the video, you can see them behind her. If you’re listening to it, please do come and look at our page, look at the videos and see, because I think these covers are really spectacular.
Melinda Kucsera: Thanks.
Danica Favorite: Just so gripping, but notice it isn’t just, oh, yeah, I threw up a prompt into ChatGPT and look what I got. It really is someone who is taking their talent and their knowledge of art to create something with the AI that’s really pretty spectacular. So I’d love to have you share some, about your workflow.
You’ve talked a little bit about it, but let’s just pretend I, I know that you’re not doing covers necessarily for people, but let’s just say I said, hey Melinda, I have this book [00:25:00] idea, like I wanna cover for it. How would you approach it? Or maybe you’ve got a new book you’re working on, how would you approach creating that cover for that book?
Melinda Kucsera: I have actually done covers for people, actually. Oh, okay. A couple of, I, I actually helped one author in the Kickstarter for Authors group with her entire Kickstarter. I did her whole special edition. I did the foil, the whole cover, all the art inside, all the formatting, so I have actually done that.
So the way I approached it was, we were chatting, and she didn’t quite know what she wanted, and we were going back and forth. And then she decided she wanted a symbol cover, and then she came up with a symbol that she really liked. And so I was like, I could put some quick text treatment on this.
I have the font that she uses. And I did that, and I had the foil. Um. I had something that simulates gold foil effect in Photoshop. It’s a layer style. And I bought it from creative, I think it was Creative Fabrica or Creative [00:26:00] Market, one of those ones where you can buy. Um, and, and I recommend that even if you do a lot of AI art, because if you can have your text in a separate layer, you can do so many cool things with that, that you can’t really do if you have the AI giving you the text.
So I do not recommend getting. The whole cover from the AI with the text in it. It’s better if you do the text treatment yourself, because if you use a different printer or something. Also AIs don’t quite understand like margins and things. And those are really important when you’re printing physical books.
I’ve had to help someone, because they did get an AI cover with the text on it, and there wasn’t enough margin and things were cutting off. And I used the um, I have a Photoshop, which has expand background, so I did that and that was able to give some extra margin. But. Yeah, so that’s a pro tip.
Do the text separately, because then you can resize the text if you need to and move it away so it doesn’t get cropped when the [00:27:00] book gets cropped. ‘Cause they, they do, they do cut the, they print the book and then they crop it down to size. And anything that falls after the margin gets cut with it, whether it’s text or whatever.
They don’t care. They don’t look at it. You’re, you have to respect the margins yourself. Yeah, so she, she wanted this, it was a scepter, like a frozen scepter. So I put the text on it, did the effect and then she came up with different ideas for the background. We went back and forth a bit on it.
And then she settled on something that she liked and like gave her the full cover and broke down the layers, because I print a lot with book vault, especially now that I can’t use KDP. And for book vault you need a separate layer for the foil. And the foil has to be just pure black on a white.
So, um, That’s the other reason why if you’re gonna do AI art for your cover to, if you don’t have the text separate, you need someone like me who could separate it for you. Cause I could actually separate it for you in Photoshop. The way that you would do that would be to, photoshop now has this tool called Remove.
So you [00:28:00] would select the text that’s currently there, hit the remove thing, see what that gives you. Usually that doesn’t, I had to do this for somebody. That’s how you know that I. That’s how I know it works. I end up having to go letter by letter, because if you do the whole word, it was too much for it to interpolate, although it just, Photoshop just got an update yesterday, so maybe it could do the whole thing now.
But when I tried it a couple months ago, it it was all blurry and weird when it interpolated, but when it went letter by letter, you could not tell afterwards that the text had been part of the image and that I removed it, and redid the text as a separate layer, so it could be separated for the foil.
Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah, I make a covers for Future Fiction Press. Yeah. So I call up the, call up a cover with a bunch of prompts in Ideogram, which is my, my tool of choice for making book covers. And I usually ask it to give me the text. I just want to see what it envisions for text, whether it’s gonna choose a script font and [00:29:00] where it wants to put it on the page, so that I get an idea of what I wanna do for fonts.
And then when I get a background image that I really like, actually. Open it up in the canvas inside of Ideogram, and then I select all of those areas that have text and tell it to basically get rid of it. Take, get rid of the text and put background in here. And then I go through all the options that it gives me.
I choose one that I like, and then I download that, and then I do my own text treatment on top of that, because of everything that you were saying, you know, you need to have proper margins for printing. Not only that, but if I’m doing a series, and I wanna have consistent text treatments across the entire series, I wanna be able to do all of that myself.
Melinda Kucsera: And drag the text layer from book cover to book cover.
Steph Pajonas: Book cover.
Melinda Kucsera: So you don’t have to worry about Is it the same font, is it the same size? It’s the shadow the same.
Steph Pajonas: Is it in the same place?
Melinda Kucsera: It’s shape layer. Yeah. That’s what I used.
Steph Pajonas: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Melinda Kucsera: Drag the layer over.
Danica Favorite: Yes. I love this.
This really is like, I wasn’t, we never know what we’re gonna get out of the podcast, but I feel like this is [00:30:00] definitely going to be the masterclass in how to create the AI cover. This is so many good lessons.
Melinda Kucsera: And, and, one other thing you can do if you fall in love with the text that Ideogram gives you is output that with the text, just select that text layer, crop it out, put it into a reverse font search, and and it will come up with options for fonts that look pretty close to that. So you can, so instead of you trying to guess or go through, ’cause if you have Photoshop, or you’re doing this in Canvas, there’s lists of fonts.
You don’t have to sit there and scroll through. You can let the reverse font look up, tell you what fonts are similar, and then you can go check those in your design program and see which one you like.
Danica Favorite: That’s…
Melinda Kucsera: Another pro tip for you.
Danica Favorite: That’s a very good one. I think we need like a whole pro tip list from Melinda, because this is so much good information.
So
Steph Pajonas: We might indeed. We might indeed.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. So we have talked a lot about really great methods, [00:31:00] and all the different things you’re doing. I know you’ve mentioned a lot of tools. Is there a favorite tool that you like to use or, I know you’ve got a bunch that you use just even for a single cover, but are there some favorites you might wanna mention to our listeners?
Melinda Kucsera: I think I’ve mentioned most of, my mind right now, I’m using NightCafe, because it gives you a, like they have Ideogram. They have Ideogram, or they have like a whole, I mean, everything except Midjourney is basically in there, even including ChatGPT and all of Gemini’s uh, Google’s image gener….
There’s, there’s so, and there’s so many that I’ve never even heard of, and some of them, a lot of them have take start images. And you, and a lot of them approach it differently, and you can get different styles and things with just by putting your start image in and saying, make this, you know, whatever you want, like make the sky blue or whatever.
And you get totally different results using different ones. So I recommend that as a good place to start. And they give a lot of freebies and especially if you are subscribed. So I think there’s a lot of value for it. It wasn’t originally when it first [00:32:00] started, but now I feel like there’s a lot of value for it.
Like I have a hard time getting through the credits that I have, ’cause they give you so many, like freebies and stuff. Like if, if you have a subscription. I also, I um, Photoshop is super expensive, but I really, I love it. And I love all its AI features. Like I mostly use expand background and that remove thing, it’s so great to just highlight a thing you don’t want and click remove, and it just goes away. You don’t have to type a prompt or anything. Just highlight it, select it, click remove. It’s gone in 30 seconds. The expand background is great because a lot of indie authors, like some of us don’t sell a lot of print books, so we don’t need like a beautiful print background, because we’re just gonna stick the blurb there.
We just need something for the blurb to go on top of. So that extent background is really great for getting you, even if you don’t have AI on the cover, like just if you need to expand the background of the front to go around to do the cover wrap, that can be a really great solution. And, the, is [00:33:00] another, what’s the name of it?
I’m helping another author with his cover, he’s using stock art and it’s not gimp, it’s the other one. Affinity. And that’s a really powerful tool too. It’s very similar to Photoshop. Things are slightly different places called, slightly different things, but it’s very powerful. It has so far, I have not, in helping him, run into anything that Photoshop has that, it doesn’t. Haven’t found the AI features in it yet. I don’t, I haven’t been using it myself. I just, we go on Discord, and he shows me his screen and what he’s got so far with the cover. And he’s very much against AI art, so he’s not looking at that. I haven’t, I have to download Affinity myself and start playing with it.
I’ve heard there is AI options in there, so that’s a really good solution for somebody who doesn’t wanna shell out a thousand dollars for Adobe Photoshop. I just, I love Adobe Photoshop, so I did shell out for it, but you don’t have to be me. The other thing you can do, which is really powerful, and I don’t know if other ones have it, but NightCafe has, because it has a lot of models that take start images, [00:34:00] it also has this edit feature, and I used it for this cover, Curse Breaker Jousts, the original base layer I got his clothes are really torn and all over the place, and I’m like, this is a joust. You need, we need some armor. So I did the edit and I said, can we just put him in armor? And I did a bunch of trials with that. And so I got something I liked and then I was like, okay, I can work with this. I can over paint this.
I can work with this. That’s another option is if you’re, the AI art that you’re using has an edit feature, try that first. Like, they don’t really work all that well if the hands are messed up. But one thing you can do instead of saying fix the hands or make the hands anatomically correct. You can say, have him hold a sword, ask it to do something with his hands. And it will gen, it will regenerate them. And and that works really great if you’re using an image from an older AI version that you fell in love with and just never found a use for, as with that one.
And, now they have more powerful ones that’ll get it to change the hands, and they will now be correct, because it is making the hands do [00:35:00] something, like hold a sword and shoot some magic. You may wanna split them into two separate prompts. ’cause asking it to fix both hands and make them do something can sometimes give you strange results.
So one hand at a time.
Steph Pajonas: I do one thing. I do one thing at a time too with my images, especially in Midjourney. Because Midjourney, I actually can’t like, do two things at once for some reason. So I’m like, if I have a bunch of things on an image that I need to change I do them one at a time.
Melinda Kucsera: Mm-hmm.
Steph Pajonas: One at a time until I get it perfect. So I get that. Yeah.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. This was amazing. I feel like this is again, gonna be one of those episodes that people listen to over and over, because there are so many great tips and so many ways that people can really up their AI art game and be able to change something that is good to something that’s really great.
And I think that as [00:36:00] AI and AI art just gets better and better, you’re gonna see more and more really cool covers and images and all sorts of other things that people wanna do with AI art. So thank you for giving us such an in-depth look at how to do all this.
Melinda Kucsera: Oh, sure.
Steph Pajonas: I love it, because I’m seeing more and more covers every day and they’re getting so like, exciting and pretty and that just makes my heart happy.
I don’t know, I like uh, I love looking at pretty things. I think a lot of people do like looking at pretty things. They wanna see pretty covers on stuff and whether or not that is hand drawn by human or, you’re using human ingenuity with AI to make these things happen, I think that they’re all legitimate paths towards putting something on your cover that is going to sell your book and let readers understand what your book is even about, signaling the genre and that sort of thing.
And then also [00:37:00] giving authors options, because not everybody can afford to have a custom drawn cover that’s going to maybe cost a thousand dollars or more. Now they get a chance to do something different with AI art if they want to. Excellent. So I think this is a good good primer on AI art.
We’ve talked about AI art before on the podcast. We had some people here in the first like maybe dozen episodes or so. I will have to go back and link to that, but I’m glad that you were able to come here today and tell us about all the cool stuff that you’re doing with AI art, including like your covers and your Kickstarters and everything.
So I wanna make sure that everybody can find you online when the time comes. I know that you’re not on Amazon, so I would love to hear some URLs that we can send people to you.
Melinda Kucsera: Best URL is my website, melindakucsera.com and it’s K-U-C-S-E-R-A. Melinda’s pretty self-explanatory. I [00:38:00] dunno that I need to spell that.
That has all the links to everything. My shop, the next Kickstarter, which is gonna be this one probably towards the end of the year.
Danica Favorite: Excellent. That’s awesome. Yeah, and we will have the link on the site and everywhere. If you didn’t quite catch the spelling, you can always just go back to the show notes.
We’ll have all that listed there as well.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah, we will, I’ll be sure to put together all the show notes for everybody. So come by bravenewbookshelf.com. Check out the show notes, find all the links to all of our places online that we are. Just a quick mention for people that my podcast host changed servers changed URLs, they went the whole hog changed everything at the end of December and into January. And in the middle of January I went through Apple Podcasts, went through Spotify and a bunch of other places, and made sure that the RSS feed for the podcast was updated on all of the major players.
And then I hit some of the smaller ones too. I’m hoping that everybody [00:39:00] can find us. So if you’re watching on YouTube, because you couldn’t find us on your podcast app, please drop us an email, leave a comment on the blog or something and let me know, because there are a bunch of podcast distributors that I don’t have access to, but I’m sure I could figure it out if I needed to and we can get that resolved.
So hopefully everybody can find us. But if you can’t. There’s always YouTube and there’s always coming to bravenewbookshelf.com to find all of our information. Danica, what else do you wanna say before we sign off?
Danica Favorite: I think that is great. I know we had a few hiccups with the first episode that came out this year, so if you did miss something, everything should be fixed.
But like Steph said, please let us know. And this is a great reason to follow us on Facebook, because that’s how we found out about all of this. And make sure that you are liking, subscribing [00:40:00] to Brave New Bookshelf everywhere you possibly can, as well as make sure you like and subscribe to Future Fiction Academy, Future Fiction Press, and Publish Drive on all of the major social media channels.
Steph Pajonas: All the places. All the places.
Danica Favorite: All the places.
Steph Pajonas: All right. Again, thank you, Melinda, for being here. Everybody else, thank you for listening, and we’ll see you guys in the next episode. Okay, bye.
Danica Favorite: Bye.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us at bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.