Bo Bennett On AI Book Covers That Actually Work

HOST: It's good to have you back, Bo. Last time we got into some fascinating discussions, and today I want to pick up on what you and I've talked about before—the 95% rule, specifically for bookcovers.pro. You mentioned it before, and I've been waiting to talk about this. The site says it generates a spine width dynamically from page count and paper stock in real time. That sounds deceptively simple, but KDP and IngramSpark have different bleed and safety-zone specs. What's actually happening in the template engine when that changes? GUEST: Well, the engine knows exactly the templates for KDP and Ingram, the requirements for both. So, in one shot, it creates both templates. Perfectly, according to the dimensions. And it uses the exact number of pages in the book, the exact dimensions of the book, the thickness of the page, based on if it's it's cream or if it's white, because that's actually a different thickness. So, it does all of those calculations to output the perfect templates. HOST: So it's not just automating the visual design, but doing all that pre-flight compliance work so authors don't have to worry about getting their covers rejected. Now, the site explicitly tells users when *not* to use AI, like for custom illustrations or genre conventions like romance lockups. You actually refer them to a competitor, GetCovers. What does that five percent look like, and aren't you worried about losing customers that way? GUEST: Well, no. And the uh like when not to use AI, I don't think we have any specifics there. Um if I do have it listed on the page, I have to revisit that. But usually the only reason people would not want to use AI is if they have some kind of um some kind of book cover in mind and they want it exactly that way. They're not open to any uh variance. Like they have an exact picture in their mind and that's what they want. Um I mean, you could really you could get incredibly close with AI because you could upload reference images. So, for example, in the the uh demonstration that I used for the website, I used a picture of my daughter and I just told I told AI to make her playing pool, and it created that image. So, you could you could get extremely specific. Uh but again, it's not like you could just keep on talking to it over and over and over and telling it exactly what you want like a dozen times like you could do with a human um graphic designer. So, I I use that number 95% conservatively. I would say it's probably closer to 99% in practice. But let's stick with 95%. Um and no, I'm not worried about uh losing customers to um competitors or uh get covers. Get covers. I've been using them for years. They do a fantastic job. Um I have a good relationship with them, and I'm happy to refer business to them when needed. HOST: Well, that makes sense, differentiating between someone who wants something highly specific versus being open to options. So, we've now mapped the pipeline from BookBud writing the book BookEditor polishing it, AuthorVoices recording it, BookReelz making the trailer, PitchBud pitching it to press and Promoto running the ads. In episode six, you said BookEditor.io was one of the pieces, not the missing piece. Is BookCovers.pro the missing part of that pipeline between writing and distributing? GUEST: No, it it's it fits in the same category. There's no missing piece. There are so many pieces that that make up this puzzle if you want to call it that. And it's not I I don't know if the puzzle analogy is the best because if you have one missing piece, it's not a big deal. It's um you could have many missing pieces and you could have many extra pieces. It's basically how thorough you want to be in the whole process. But, having said that, covers is like creating covers is a required piece of the puzzle. Um unlike many other pieces that are technically optional. So, yes, this was a very important part and one of the uh one of the first things we actually started with in this process. HOST: So with professional cover designers charging anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars and you're at just nineteen dollars for a single cover, or under ten at volume, you're competing not just with freelancers but with Canva templates. What does BookCovers.pro do that a Canva template can't, and what's the workflow difference that makes a three to seven minute turnaround meaningful compared to a few hours of DIY? GUEST: Yeah, well it's it's not uh it's not template and I think that's a huge difference. We're we're not picking from a bunch of templates and having a generic cover. With AI, it's custom. It It's different for everybody. Nobody in the world will have a cover that looks like yours uh with AI. So, that's that's a a huge pro right there. But, it's also time. Uh designing covers with self-service with Canva or other similar services, that's a lot of effort. Uh there's some a good amount of technical know-how involved in that as well. Um all of that is just unnecessary now, and we just bypass all that, make it incredibly simple, incredibly fast, and incredibly customized. And, as you mentioned, incredibly cheap. HOST: So no template, more customized, and much faster. The pricing model is "free to design, pay only to download," with unlimited revisions before you spend a credit. You've applied similar low-risk logic before, like BookBud letting you generate the first couple of chapters free. Is this a pattern intentional behavioral design? And do you see users iterating heavily before downloading? GUEST: We don't have enough data to know if this will be abused. If it does, we'll put safeguards in place to make sure people aren't like just creating dozens and dozens of iterations and maybe they have no intention of downloading or even if they do, it'd end up ending up costing us money rather than making us money. So we do have to be careful. But uh we monitor all that and for the time being, everything is going smoothly. So uh we we like to offer as much as possible before asking people to pay. HOST: That's a generous approach to building trust. Now, there's a persistent argument in author communities that a cheap cover signals a cheap book and that readers can spot AI art from a mile away. Your pricing is under ten dollars at volume. How do you answer that belief? GUEST: I would agree with them in the first aspect that cheap covers signals a cheap book and that's one of the worst things you could do is have just a really crappy looking or cheap cover. I would completely disagree that that readers can spot AI art from a mile away. Maybe that was the case early on. But um with with the way that AI has progressed. It it's I I guess you could probably say yes, this is AI art because it looks so fantastic and no self-published author would otherwise commission a multi-thousand dollar piece of artwork that uh in further book cover. So you assume that it's AI. Um maybe that's the only argument that could be made. But if somebody's worried about it looking too good, well, you could always tone it down a little bit. Ask ask AI to do it a little bit more plain. Um but that's not a that's not a big concern. HOST: So we've now traced the pipeline from BookBud writing the book, BookEditor polishing it, AuthorVoices recording it, BookReelz making the trailer, PitchBud pitching it to press and Promoto running the ads. And now BookCovers.pro is the piece that makes the physical book look like it belongs on a shelf next to traditionally published titles. If someone builds a book in BookBud, edits it in BookEditor, records it in AuthorVoices, and now wraps it with a cover from BookCovers.pro—what's the one thing in that pipeline, as it stands, that still has the most room to fail, and what are you building to close that gap? GUEST: The only failure, I would say, is producing a wonderful book that looks fantastic and doesn't get any sales. So, it's not just one thing that we're building, it's multiple things. And those multiple things are more and more marketing sites. So, people have the opportunity at either free or very inexpensively to continue to market and push their books.only failure I would say is producing a wonderful book that looks fantastic and doesn't get any sales. So it's not just one thing that we're building, it's multiple things and those multiple things are more and more marketing sites. So people have the opportunity at either free or very inexpensively to continue to market and push their books. HOST: So, solving that profitability problem by tackling marketing next. Before we go—for listeners who want to follow up on what we covered, where can they find you and the work you're doing? GUEST: You can find my work at archieboy.com. That's all of our websites and specifically for the site we are talking about, it's bookcovers.pro. HOST: It was good having you on, Bo. I'm thinking about what you said about designing with no template and how that significantly cuts down time and technical know-how for authors. Let's get you back on soon—we've still got roughly twenty-five sites on that list, and I want to hear what happens when all these pieces are truly running together for a single author from day zero to launch day. And thank you for spending part of your day with us. Looking forward to the next one—that's a wrap.