What's in a Cover?

Over 3.5 million books will be published in the U.S. this year, most of them self-published, and most of them with AI-generated covers. Many of them are also written, in whole or in part, by AI. This is just one of a multitude of examples of how AI became normalized in our culture virtually overnight. Even as I write this blog post, Wix's AI is popping up on the screen offering to write it for me.

I will never use AI to write my books or to generate my book covers. The covers of three of my poetry collections feature works by painters of my acquaintance, and the fourth has photographs by a professional photographer friend.

Selkie Songs Publishing, the London publisher of my novel-in-verse Leeds Point, is a delightfully analog operation whose values I fully embrace. They reject the current commercial-fiction cover trend of overly-stylized AI-generated dramatic scenes in favor of warm tones, handwriting, and watercolors. Much like the European publishing houses which still issue most serious literature and poetry with no image at all on the cover (just the title, author, and a short quote), Selkie Songs Publishing is selling books based on their values, a sense of community, and the high-quality content of the works.

I am thrilled that Selkie Songs Publishing agreed to utilize this remarkable image, Jersey Deville, by Charlie Adams of Pond Water Studio, Maine, on the cover of Leeds Point. Charlie is an interdisciplinary artist raised on his family's ancestral farmland in southern Vermont, whose works in printmaking, sculpture, painting and medicinal tattoos reflect a supernatural ecology and ancient forms.

A friend of mine saw Charlie Adams at the annual Barre, Vermont Queer Arts Festival, and knowing that I was writing a novel that involved the Jersey Devil, bought this print for me as a birthday gift. I instantly knew I wanted it as the cover image for Leeds Point, and hoped that Selkie Songs Publishing would agree, and that Charlie Adams would be amenable. My publisher said yes, and Charlie Adams most generously licensed the work and provided all the files necessary to use the image in book publicity.

Working with a small, indie, inclusive publisher and supporting works of other writers and artists is where I want to be in my work, squarely at the core of the analog movement, pushing back against the AI tide with small works of love, beauty, and human creativity.