It's not easy to create art for book covers. You have to grab the attention of potential readers with a single image. That's why it's necessary to hire a good designer for book covers.
If you're a designer who has worked on book covers before, you already know that you might need to go through countless iterations of your design until you have a satisfied client. This requires a lot of time.
Using Midjourney to generate design drafts can help you be more productive, keep your clients happy, and save you a considerable amount of time. Today, I'm going to show you some prompt examples for book covers.
How to Write Midjourney Prompts for Book Covers
It's quite simple to write Midjourney prompts for book covers. The technique I find works best is to simply explain what the book is about in a concise way. You should also mention the genre whenever it can have an impact on the generated design.
As far as the aspect ratio goes, I like to leave it on default when I'm creating book cover designs.
Make sure you use keywords in your prompts whenever it makes sense to do so. The keywords you use will greatly influence the overall design of the book cover.
Before we get down to the prompt examples, I have to say that at the time of writing this article there isn't a feature that enables you to edit text in Midjourney. They are planning to release it in the future, but for now you'll only see random symbols generated instead of actual text.
It may seem weird to some people to look at book covers with random symbols, but remember that when you use Midjourney to create these images they should serve only as inspiration for the actual book cover you'll design.
10 Midjourney Prompts for Book Covers
I'll show you how to effortlessly write Midjourney prompts for book covers. You will pick up on what I'm doing through the 10 prompts that I'll share below. Let's start.
/imagine book cover design for a fantasy book set in a magical land where the battle for peace an order in the world has been going on for centuries, monsters, magic, undead, heroes, warriors --v 5
Now, this is what a good book cover looks like. I'm really impressed with the design here. The prompt is also quite concise and includes important keywords that shape the design of the book cover.
/imagine book cover design for a digital marketing book, online marketing, social media marketing, SEO marketing, affiliate marketing --v 5
I decided to use a very simple prompt here that consists of only several keywords. Digital marketing books are widely popular and often vary in the design of their book covers, so it was definitely interesting to see what Midjourney would generate as a cover.
I would say that the AI model did a pretty good job. The hands definitely look a bit weird, but this is only a draft design. You'd need a marketing expert/author to pose like this for the actual book cover.
/imagine book cover design for a crime mystery novel, man who is wrongly convicted of murder quietly learns about the criminal underworld while in prison and gets out seemingly a good man but what people don't know is that he is about to commit some terrible crimes
This is a completely different type of prompt compared to the previous one. Instead of using keywords, I only described what this fictitious book is about. The plot is something that just came to me when I started writing the prompt.
/imagine book cover design for an astrophysics and astronomy book, the cover design should feature illustrations of some phenomena in the universe, wondrous, awe --v 5
One of my favorite books of all time is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I wanted to create a book cover in Midjourney that could be applied to that very same book.
/imagine book cover design for an adventure book about a young explorer who has gone to the North Pole to retrieve a long lost treasure that has been buried for thousands of years --v 5
I would really like to read a book like this. Imagine if there was treasure buried beneath the ice by a forgotten civilization at the North Pole that's been there for thousands of years. That would be absolutely mindblowing.
/imagine book cover design for a science fiction novel about two planets on a collision course, the planets will ultimately destroy each other so people on both worlds must find a way to enjoy their lives before it's all over --v 5
Should I start writing books? I came up with these plots at a moment's notice. I don't even know how my brain does it. This would also be a fun movie to watch. It can be either a serious, introspective book or a comedy where people let loose and party until their last days.
/imagine book cover design for a science fiction book about a dystopian future where artificial intelligence has taken over the world and humans must band together to survive --v 5
No, I don't think that artificial intelligence will take over the world. This is only a work of fiction and I thought the prompt would help create a dramatic book cover, which it definitely did. If I saw this cover at a bookstore, I'd buy it immediately.
/imagine book cover design for a travel book that talks about some of the most beautiful natural landscapes around the world, inspirational, motivational, travel --v 5
The two stones on the table are such a random addition to the image, but the overall book cover design is extraordinary. I love books that contain beautiful photography.
By the way, you can create photorealistic images of nature in Midjourney. If you want to learn how I suggest you read my article about Midjourney prompts for nature. It's an easy-to-follow guide that will help you learn how to write the perfect prompts for generating photorealistic images.
/imagine book cover design for a romance novel about two college students who fall in love together and go on various wholesome adventures --v 5
I wanted to create something wholesome, so I figured it makes sense to generate a book cover design for a romance novel. The prompt here is so simple that I didn't even go into any details aside from mentioning that the two people are college students.
/imagine book cover design for a time travel fiction book about a man who thinks he created a machine that enables him to travel to alternate universes only to find out that he actually made a time travel machine --v 5
I'm not sure whether someone wrote a book with a similar plot already or not, but if one exists I have to find it. This would be an amazing read, and the experience would be even better with a book cover design like the one above. This is arguably the best book cover design Midjourney generated while I was writing this article.
Final Thoughts
What's incredible is that Midjourney will in most cases create a great design for your book regardless of what it's about. I'm continuously impressed by this text-to-image AI model.
I've seen many people experiment with designing book and album covers in Midjourney, and I have no doubt that this practice will become even more popular when the team behind the AI model releases a tool for editing text.
