Bringing My Stories to Life: Why I Love Creating My Own Book Covers

One of my favorite parts of writing a novel actually happens when I step away from the manuscript and open Photoshop.

As much as I love writing stories, I have an equal passion for creating the covers that bring those stories to life. For me, the cover is an essential part of the creative process, and something I genuinely look forward to with every new book.

I've always been a very visual person. Having spent years writing screenplays, I naturally see my stories as movies playing out in my mind. When I'm writing a scene, I can picture the setting, the lighting, the expressions on my characters' faces, and even the way a particular moment might look through a camera lens. I see the characters moving through their world as clearly as if I were watching them on a screen.

That visual connection carries over into how I design my book covers.

I also spent many years working as a portrait and wedding photographer, which I believe has had a tremendous influence on how I approach cover design. Photography taught me to pay attention to lighting, composition, facial expressions, and all those small details that can make an image feel alive. When you're photographing people, you learn how much a slight change in expression, the angle of someone's face, or the direction of the light can transform an image. Those are things I still find myself thinking about when I'm creating a cover.

I'm especially particular about the faces of my characters. By the time I've finished writing a novel, I know exactly what these people look like. I've spent months, sometimes years, imagining their expressions, their personalities, and how they interact with one another. When I create a cover, I want the characters looking back at me to be the same people I've been seeing in my imagination all along.

And I admit, I can be very picky about getting them right!

My love of digital design also began long before I started creating novel covers. For years, one of my favorite hobbies was digital scrapbooking and digital art journaling. I loved collecting images, textures, decorative elements, and beautiful typography, then combining them into something entirely new. I could happily spend hours experimenting with layers, colors, shadows, and effects in Photoshop.

That hobby eventually became something more. My digital art journaling and scrapbooking work was published in several print magazines, along with articles I wrote sharing my techniques and creative process. It was a wonderful opportunity to share something I loved doing with other people who enjoyed the same kind of artistic experimentation.

Looking back, I realize how much that experience shaped the way I approach visual storytelling today. The idea of taking separate elements, sometimes from completely different sources, and bringing them together into a cohesive composition has always fascinated me.

As it turns out, all those years spent behind a camera and experimenting with digital art were wonderful preparation for designing book covers.

Where AI Fits Into My Creative Process

I've received some lovely compliments about my book covers, and I truly appreciate them. I've also received occasional comments about the use of artificial intelligence in digital artwork. Since creating these covers is something I enjoy so much, I thought it might be interesting to share a little about how I actually make them.

Yes, I use AI-generated imagery as part of my creative process, particularly when developing the faces of my fictional characters.

For someone who sees her stories so vividly, having a tool that allows me to experiment with a character's appearance is exciting. I can work toward the particular facial features, age, expression, or atmosphere I've been imagining while writing. Sometimes it takes many attempts before an image comes close to the person I have in mind.

My background in photography probably makes me especially particular about this. I pay close attention to whether a face looks natural, whether the lighting makes sense, and whether the expression feels believable. I want my characters to look like real people who could step right out of the story.

But generating those images is only one part of my process.

Once I've gathered the visual elements I want to work with, I bring them into Photoshop, where I do the part I've loved doing for years: designing, arranging, layering, and experimenting.

I might combine several images to create a particular setting, adjust the lighting to establish a mood, introduce architectural details, or incorporate decorative elements that connect the cover to the story. I'll work with textures, transparency, color, and composition until the individual pieces come together.

It's a process that draws on the same digital art techniques I enjoyed long before AI image generation became available.

I understand that people have different feelings about AI and its place in creative work, and I respect that. For me, it has become another tool in a creative process that is still guided by my own imagination, aesthetic preferences, and design decisions.

The story, the characters, and the world I'm trying to represent are already in my head. My challenge is finding a way to bring that vision onto the cover.

And Then There's the Typography!

I absolutely love fonts.

I can spend an embarrassing amount of time deciding between two typefaces that probably look nearly identical to everyone else. But to me, those little differences matter. The curve of a letter, the spacing of a title, the color and texture of the lettering can completely change the personality of a cover.

I also love experimenting with decorative borders, antique lettering, and visual details that reflect the period or atmosphere of a particular novel.

Sometimes I'll think a design is finished, only to come back the next morning and decide the title needs to move a quarter of an inch, the lighting is too bright, or a character's expression isn't quite right. Before I know it, I'm back in Photoshop, happily making adjustments.

I can lose an entire afternoon doing this, and frequently do!

Every Story Has Its Own Visual Personality

One of the things I enjoy most is that every book presents a different design challenge.

A historical novel might call for rich colors, period architecture, and a sense of another time. A contemporary supernatural mystery might need something darker and more cinematic, with subtle visual clues suggesting that something extraordinary is happening beneath the surface.

I particularly enjoy hiding little details in my covers that connect to the story. Sometimes they're symbols, sometimes architectural elements, and sometimes they're simply choices in lighting or composition that hint at the atmosphere of the book.

Readers may not recognize those connections until they've finished the novel, but I love knowing they're there.

And then comes my favorite moment, when everything finally clicks.

The characters look the way I've imagined them. The colors work together. The typography feels right. The individual layers have become a complete composition, and suddenly I'm looking at the world I've spent so many months creating through words.

It's an incredibly satisfying feeling.

Of course, I want my book covers to catch a reader's attention. That's part of their purpose. But there's also something very personal about creating them myself.

When I think about it, my love of screenwriting, photography, digital art, and novel writing has always come from the same place: a desire to tell stories and bring the images in my imagination to life.

Writing allows me to tell those stories with words. Designing the covers gives me another way to share the worlds I've created.

And honestly, after spending so many hours writing, researching, and revising a manuscript, there's something wonderfully relaxing about putting on some music, opening Photoshop, and losing myself in a completely different kind of creativity.

Well, relaxing until I spend three hours trying to decide which font looks better!

But I wouldn't have it any other way.