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What the cover generator does

The book cover generator creates professional cover art concepts from your manuscript's analysis data. It works in two phases: first, a text AI analyzes your genre, themes, characters, and tone to produce a structured creative brief describing the ideal cover. Then, an image AI generates three cover concepts from that brief.

You can iteratively refine the brief with natural language feedback, regenerate concepts, approve your favorite, and overlay title and author text before saving the final cover for EPUB export.

The cover generator requires chapter synopses to understand your story. Run chapter analysis first if your chapters don't have synopses yet.

Generating a cover brief

Open the Export modal from the Publish section, then click the Book Cover button. Click Generate Cover Brief. The AI analyzes your manuscript data and produces a creative brief with mood, color palette, imagery description, composition suggestions, genre conventions, and typography direction.

The brief panel is collapsible and shows all elements of the creative direction. Review it to ensure the AI understood your story's visual identity before generating images.

Refining your cover brief

If the brief doesn't match your vision, use the refinement input to describe changes in natural language. For example: 'Make the palette darker and more ominous' or 'Focus on a single figure rather than a landscape.' The AI revises the brief while preserving elements you didn't mention.

Refining the brief clears any previously generated concepts, so you can iterate on the direction before committing to image generation.

Generating and selecting cover concepts

Click Generate Cover Concepts to create three cover art variations from the current brief. Image generation takes a moment since each concept is generated individually. The concepts appear in a grid once complete.

Click Approve on the concept that best fits your vision. You can regenerate concepts at any time if none of the options work. Approving a concept unlocks the finalization phase.

Cover art is generated without text or lettering. Title and author name are composited separately so you have full control over typography.

Finalizing with text overlay

After approving a concept, the text overlay controls appear. Adjust the title and author font size, vertical position, color, font family, and drop shadow. A live preview shows how the composited cover will look.

Click Save Final Cover to composite the text and save the result. The saved cover is automatically used as your EPUB cover image on export.

  • Font choices include common serif and sans-serif families. The default is Georgia, which works well for most literary fiction.
  • Text color presets include white, black, beige, and silver. Use the custom color picker for precise matching.
  • The drop shadow option adds readability when text overlaps busy imagery.
  • You can re-save with different settings at any time without regenerating concepts.

How covers are used in export

When you export an EPUB, Bookshaper checks for an approved cover with a saved final image. If found, it embeds the cover as the first page of the EPUB and registers it as the cover image in the package metadata. E-readers display this image as the book thumbnail.

Cover images are stored in your project's assets/covers/ directory. The final composited cover is saved as final-cover.png at 1600×2560 resolution, suitable for ebook distribution.

In BYOK mode, cover generation requires an OpenAI API key for image generation, even if you use a different provider for text analysis. Add your OpenAI key in Settings.