Temptation and the Gambler Cover Art Explanation

For my background, I needed an alleyway strewn with the bodies of a gang of thugs who'd just lost a street fight. But AI doesn't "get" "strewn." Look how neatly it organized the thugs. Or "thugs" really, these look more like crime victims than criminals. But at least it got "alley" down cold.

Since I had already published this story on Amazon, I already had a cover I could have used, but I didn't like it. Here it is:

Really, just a generic erotica cover based on an image from Deposit Photos. Doesn't really say anything about the characters at all. I did use GIMP to enhance the woman's butt. I'm not proud of that... or ashamed. It is what it is.

The artwork was just too generic, I wanted art that said something about the characters other than "horny." Nothing wrong with "horny" but it's kind of the ground floor for erotica. So I went to Civitai and found some Loras that were designed for creating superhero avatars, whcih was good enough for what I wanted (costumed crimefighters, no superpowers, like Batman. Unless you consider being a billionaire a superpower, which it definitely is). 

But I have been working with AI long enough to know its limitations, and one of its limitations is it doesn't do a good job of having avatars interact, unless you want one of the poses Loras are trained on, like blowjobs, fucking, doggie style, etc. 

Sometimes AI art programs will fuck things up even if you DO ask for a standardized sex position. Although to be fair, this one is based on an image-to-image original, rather than a text prompt. But I can ASSURE you that the original image looked NOTHING like what I got. The hilarious part is the way the woman's face came out PERFECT.

So in the interests of not spending days working on getting a romantic clench right for my cover (as I did for the cover of "The Taking of Shining Cloud")

Yeah, I had some issues with the cover of "Shining Cloud."

 I decided to make the superhero images seaparate images and layer them side by side on top of the background art. First I made the Temptation image. I was looking for an image of a Goth girl dressed for clubbing, as that was part of Temptation's crime fighting technique: she dressed like a sexy club kiddie who's been out clubbing and walked unsteadily through dark alleys in the bad part of town, luring rapists and gangs into attacking her, then dispatching them with her crime-fighting tools. Civitai's Lora had little or no problem handling this request, it came up with several usable images in just two or three iterations. Here's one of the better ones:

I also requested "curvy" in my prompt. Love the expression on this one. This is typical of the results I got.

Next I asked for images of The Gambler. Once again, plenty of images to work with from just a few iterations. Here's a nice one:

"Hi ladies! Anyone wanna check out the lucky shamrock in my fly?"

So I picked out two figures and mounted them in layers over my alleyway pic. This had the fortunate effect of blocking out the mass of the too-symettrically stacked bodies, so they suspicious symmentry was hidden. I reused the text from the original cover art because I think the subhead is fire. Here's what I came up with.

And so here we have it. Hopefully it will result in millions, perhaps billions, in sales. We shall see! You can get the book by clicking here, or on the pic.