AI + Insomnia = My Cover Redesign

I didn’t plan to design a book cover in the middle of the night—but apparently, that’s when my creativity shows up, even if the rest of me is running on fumes.

This latest cover came together during one of those late-night stretches where sleep refused to come. I decided this was as good a time as any to explore Canva’s AI tools. I knew full well I’d be in for a bit of a learning curve, but I'd been meaning to redesign my cover anyway.

At first, the results were… a little strange. I don't think Canva AI knows what a romance heroine should look like. In one version, Alexandra looked more like a street sweeper than anything else. In another, she was staring off at a building—or possibly just into space, like she’d wandered away from her caregiver. I gave more explicit instructions with each iteration, but every time Canva made the changes the tool also created me an entirely new person. I learned not to get too attached.

Eventually, I brought in Perplexity to help me refine the prompt I was feeding into Canva. I told Perplexity to interview me about the cover like a book designer would. That helped a lot. With a clearer direction, the images started getting closer to what I envisioned—but even then, it wasn’t a one-and-done process. I still made countless adjustments, nudging details, refining the composition, and, most importantly, trying to get her expression just right.

That turned out to be the hardest part. Romance novels are all about emotion, and finding that exact look—the one that tells the right story without saying a word—took patience and more than a little trial and error. I was going for determined, but Alexandra went through every thing from bored to angry.

In the end, though, I got there. AI didn’t replace the creative work—it amplified it, challenged it, and sometimes complicated it—but it also made something possible that I could not have achieved otherwise.