On the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, host Howard Lovy talks to Pablo Yáñez, founder of BeYourCover, about how artificial intelligence is changing book cover design. A professional book cover photographer for more than fifteen years before building AI tools, Yáñez explains where AI can help authors create marketable covers, where it still falls short, and why genre conventions matter more than many writers realize. He also discusses the ethics of AI, the continuing value of human designers, and how authors can decide which approach is right for their books.
Listen to the Podcast: How AI Is Changing Book Cover Design
Further Reading
- The Alliance of Independent Authors' AI Policy
- ALLi also has a sample template AI policy for members to use on their websites, which can be downloaded in the member zone.
About the Host
Howard Lovy is an author, developmental editor, and writing coach with a long career in journalism and publishing. He works with writers at many stages of their careers, with a focus on helping them develop their ideas and strengthen their work while preserving their unique voices. He lives in Northern Michigan.
About the Guest
Pablo Yáñez spent fifteen years as a photographer, many of them shooting book covers for authors and publishers, before founding BeYourCover, an AI book cover generator built for indie authors. Frustrated by generic AI output that ignores how covers actually work, he developed BeYourCover's AI book cover generator, a tool that respects genre conventions, survives the thumbnail test, and produces print-ready files—with the author directing the design rather than rolling the dice on a prompt. He works from Madrid, where he also shoots street photography. Learn more at BeYourCover or contact Pablo.
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Read the Transcript
Howard Lovy: Hi, I'm Howard Lovy, and this is the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast. I'm an author, developmental editor, and writing coach at howardlovy.com, and today we're talking about how artificial intelligence is changing book cover design — what it does well, where it still falls short, and what authors need to know before using it. My guest is Pablo Yáñez, founder of Be Your Cover. Before building AI tools for cover design, Pablo spent more than 15 years as a professional photographer specializing in book covers, and his experience on both sides of this technological shift gives him a unique perspective on how AI is reshaping the industry while highlighting the continuing importance of human creativity and market knowledge. Pablo, thank you for joining me.
Pablo Yáñez: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today.
From Northern Spain to Book Cover Photography
Howard Lovy: Before we go into the issue, tell me where you're from, where you grew up, and how you came to found Be Your Cover.
Pablo Yáñez: I'm from Spain. I was born in northern Spain, but I moved early to a place called Logroño, also in the north. After that, when I was 14, my family and I moved to southern Spain, to a village near Murcia, close to the beach. When I was about 16, my sister got a camera and I loved it — whenever I could, I borrowed it and went outside to take pictures. After saving for a couple of years, I bought my own camera, and since I was about 18 I've had a camera in my hands and have always tried to earn at least something from the pictures I take.
Howard Lovy: And you finally gave the camera back to your sister though, right?
Pablo Yáñez: Yes, exactly. In fact, if Be Your Cover exists, if I've been taking pictures for 15 years, it's thanks to my sister. I will always be happy about that.
Howard Lovy: So what led you to go from photography to cover design?
Pablo Yáñez: Since I was 18 and got my first camera, I always tried to find ways to make some profit from my hobby. Photography is an expensive hobby. I tried everything — microstock photography, helping friends with events, weddings, whatever. That's how I started earning some money. Then I professionalized a bit and started taking microstock seriously.
For anyone who doesn't know, a microstock agency is like a marketplace: photographers upload their images, companies buy them, and the photographer receives cents per download while the agency charges companies considerably more. I professionalized through that route. A few years later I discovered macrostock photography — more or less the same model, but for more artistic images. The amount of downloads is usually lower, but the pay per download is higher.
Howard Lovy: What kind of pictures did you take for stock photography?
Pablo Yáñez: I tried every kind of genre — urban photography, landscape, weddings, everything. But when I started with microstock, I focused specifically on book cover photography. That's important because for book covers, images have to be very specific. You cannot just upload anything. The genre conventions are strict: landscape, portrait, historical imagery — very particular requirements. In microstock photography generally you might get a 95 percent acceptance rate if you're a decent photographer. At the book cover agencies I worked with, the acceptance rate was around 10 percent. The images had to be that specifically designed for book covers.
Howard Lovy: So cover designers — or authors — would hire you for the image on the cover?
Pablo Yáñez: Exactly. That was one side of my work. The other was that I worked for an agency specializing in book cover photography. So I had two sources of clients: direct work with designers for book covers, and the agency, which sold my images to publishers, designers, or whoever needed specific photography for book covers.
Discovering AI: DALL-E and the Shift
Howard Lovy: This all sounds like a nice, respectable way to make a living. So how did you fall into the dark side and get into artificial intelligence?
Pablo Yáñez: After a few years collaborating with human designers and with the agency, I discovered DALL-E — one of the first AI image models, developed by OpenAI, the same company that created ChatGPT. At that time it wasn't great, but it blew my mind, because even though the images weren't perfect, given just a couple of instructions they were pretty good.
Howard Lovy: I remember experimenting with that — people would have six fingers on each hand and strange faces.
Pablo Yáñez: Yes, it was hard to achieve exactly what you wanted. I would say it was hard to get 40 percent of what you expected. But I could see it was the beginning of something. I discussed this with my fellow photographers and told them: I know this might be controversial, but the way we work may be very different in a couple of years. My father also had a camera 30 years ago and used film — he had to go to a specific studio to get images developed. Now I can store 5,000 images and take 50 per second. The way we work evolves constantly.
Howard Lovy: So you see it as just the next evolution. I remember the transition from film to digital at newspapers — photographers were saying, ‘Digital will never beat the quality of film, it's never going to get there.' And now my son just graduated as a film major and is going back entirely analog, doing everything old school.
Pablo Yáñez: Exactly. It's just a new way of working. I still do classical photography. I still have my film camera. For product photography, for commercial photography — you may like it or not, but the client wants a good job, a cheap job, and a fast job. If you can achieve that with film, fine. But that would be difficult. AI is just another technology to make things easier, faster, and cheaper. We could talk about the ethical consequences, of course, but that's what it is.
Howard Lovy: Does that make you a photographer or someone who types in prompts, or a combination?
Pablo Yáñez: Right now, for me, a photographer is a person who takes pictures with a camera — that's my definition. But there can be artists who type prompts. An artist doesn't need a brush or a camera. An artist needs taste and a tool to transform their thoughts into art. So a person who creates a book cover with AI is, for me, an artist. We can discuss whether the result is good or bad, whether they're a good or bad artist. But if that person is transforming artistic ideas into a picture, that is an artist.
How Be Your Cover Works: Genre Conventions and the Algorithm
Howard Lovy: Tell me about your process. If a designer or an author comes to you and says, ‘I want you to design my cover,' what information do you need from them?
Pablo Yáñez: There are multiple ways of creating a book cover with AI. You have generic tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or similar — you can create images with those, but because they're generic, they're not ready to create book covers. Book covers require very specific images and very specific genre conventions. This is more or less the same issue as with stock photography agencies: the acceptance rate was very low because the images had to be specifically designed for book covers.
For a specific tool like Be Your Cover, you need the title, author name, genre, subtitle if you have one, and some information about the book — the main trope, a brief summary, a few words about the characters. Based on that, the Be Your Cover algorithm identifies the best genre conventions for your book: which fonts to use, which main elements, background colors, tones, moods, number of elements, which elements to use based on metaphors that can be extracted from your summary and book data. The image is generated based on all of that. You can enter this data in a minute or two, and your images will be ready in 40 to 50 seconds.
Howard Lovy: So it takes into account the genre and everything you plug into it. The more you describe the book and the characters, the more it has to go on. From my experience with book covers, it also takes a human to give it a more artistic quality rather than something literal — if you describe the characters, you don't necessarily want those exact characters on the cover.
Pablo Yáñez: Yes, yes. You might not want to disclose certain things — maybe the main revelation involves a cabin in the woods and you don't want to put a cabin on the cover because it would spoil too much. And you want to convey mood rather than plot detail. That's exactly what you mean.
Howard Lovy: Some book covers are more literal than others. Some convey a mood rather than displaying the exact story. What is the difference right now between an AI-produced cover and a human-produced cover — can you still tell?
Pablo Yáñez: That's difficult because it depends on the cover. Some book covers are easier to produce with AI and some are more difficult. I always say the same thing: if you have the budget for a good human designer, I would suggest going with a good human designer. One reason is that if you as an author have very specific preferences for the cover — a very specific font, a character in a red dress from the '90s in a specific location — that's still where AI struggles. With AI you can get, I would say, a good 90 percent of a professional book cover. But the last 10 percent, when you want very specific things, is still difficult for AI to achieve.
And that's where the human designer excels. But I'm talking about a good human designer — we often say AI produces AI slop and tend to assume all humans produce masterpieces. That's not the case. There are good writers and bad writers, good photographers and bad photographers, good designers and bad designers. That's life.
Howard Lovy: With AI writing you can often tell — it uses a certain rhythm, certain word choices, a certain cadence. Is there a visual equivalent with book covers?
Pablo Yáñez: Yes. With generic AI image models, that's the case. With specific tools — and I mention Be Your Cover because I'm the founder, but anyone is free to use any specific book cover tool and compare — our goal is to move away from those easily identifiable AI tells. Our tool focuses on creating artistic images, because book covers require artistic images. This is why I keep coming back to my time working with the book cover agency: that agency accepted images that were very different from general microstock, because those images needed to be artistic and specifically designed for book covers. Be Your Cover replicates the genre conventions, the framing, the composition.
Would you identify some covers made with Be Your Cover as AI-generated? Some, probably. Others, maybe not. But what is your goal with writing? Maybe you love what you do, you want to create stories that make someone think differently or produce feelings in your readers that AI would never generate. That's completely valid — that's why you want to be a human writer. But there may be writers who say, ‘What I want is to sell as many books as possible with as little effort as possible.' They might use AI tools. What's the goal with book covers? Authors using Be Your Cover usually either don't have a cover yet, or have one they created themselves without any design training, and it doesn't have good quality. What they want is to create, on a tight budget, a professional book cover that will generate more sales than before.
If your goal is a professional book cover that drives sales, on a tight budget, AI is there to help with that. If your goal is a cover you love, created by a human, containing exactly what you want, with a human designer whose specific artistic taste you admire and with whom you enjoy the iterating process — go with a human designer. Both are valid.
Howard Lovy: Is cost a big motivator? A good human designer probably runs between $1,000 and $2,000 for a good cover. Is it considerably less with your process?
Pablo Yáñez: Yes, considerably less. We have two plans, both one-time payments — not a subscription. For $19 you can create up to 50 covers; for $39, the higher tier. As you can see, that's very far from the price of a good human designer. And pricing isn't the only reason authors use Be Your Cover. Some tell me they've worked with human designers in the past but don't enjoy the iterating process — trying to explain what they want takes too long — and they want to do it quickly themselves. That's another valid reason.
Many authors also use Be Your Cover to create a draft and then show it to a human designer: ‘This is roughly what I expected — can you approach this but with a different font, a different mood?' So they use it as a rough draft and hand it to a designer. And designers themselves sometimes create first drafts with Be Your Cover, showing clients five or ten different iterations: ‘Which of these is closest to what you expected? That's where we start.' It helps the designer work faster when words alone aren't quite enough to communicate the vision.
The Ethics of AI Cover Design and the Technology Behind Be Your Cover
Howard Lovy: I guess that'll appeal to indie authors who like to do everything themselves. Do you use your own proprietary software or something that's already out there?
Pablo Yáñez: We use existing AI image models — a combination of several, because not all models are good for book cover photography, and not all are good for specific genres. We combine what exists to create the best book cover from that combination. We also train our internal algorithm, our internal LLM, to produce the best prompts possible to generate those images, based on my experience as a book cover photographer.
Howard Lovy: How long has Be Your Cover been in business?
Pablo Yáñez: It launched last year in May, so just over a year. We've reached over 10,000 authors who have already tried the tool.
Howard Lovy: Wow, really.
Pablo Yáñez: Yes. We're extremely happy — the amount of good feedback has been amazing. Of course, I receive some hostile messages every other day. But I'm just a photographer trying to pay the bills. I used to work as a photographer, I saw this coming, and I tried to adapt. Sometimes that's hard. Two days ago I received an email accusing me of stealing other people's work — the usual arguments. I understand that AI feels unethical to some people. But people don't always realize that using a human designer, or using generic tools without AI, also has layers that may not be as ethical as they think. When I worked with microstock agencies, I received cents for my pictures while the company earned considerably more. Is that ethical? Well, I agreed to upload those images, so I'd say yes. But remember that not everything is exactly as it looks.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, it's not black and white. That's why ALLi doesn't have an official yes or no answer to AI — it's more complicated than that. It's a matter of using it ethically.
Closing
Howard Lovy: This has been really fascinating, Pablo. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about this.
Pablo Yáñez: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I'm always happy to discuss AI ethics, how Be Your Cover works, and all of this. I love the indie community, I love photography, I love art and design, so it's a pleasure to have this discussion with you.
Howard Lovy: Wonderful. Thank you, Pablo.
Pablo Yáñez: Thank you very much.
Howard Lovy: Bye.
