I’m swimming-with-mermaids delighted to reveal the cover of my next solarpunk mystery novel, Missing Mermaid. Right now I’m deciding how best to arrange the text on the cover. Do you recommend option one (author name on her tail) or option two (author name and title both up in the sky)?
The illustration is by Nell Fallcard. You can order the ebook, internationally, on the indie site Smashwords after its release on May 24th. You can preorder the book on Amazon. The paperback will come later on Barnes and Noble.
None of you caught it, but apparently AI stole art to make this image. My intention was to hire and fairly pay an illustrator. I sourced Nell Fallcard through Art Station, searching for mermaids, filtering out AI art. She met those criteria. However, I do see that recently she has used AI. Her bio's did not mention AI art, and on her recent pieces I saw that she had used blender, photoshop, and I was less familiar with AI apps and did not spot those. Reddit users voiced concerns that the art was stolen by AI. I hired an independent artist to look the piece over. She determined it was likely AI. To see her analysis, follow this link.
Even given her explanation, I find it unlikely I would be detect similar AI thefts. I will have to be more careful in hiring illustrators in future. My graphic designer also used AI art to make a back cover. I caught that and had him redo it. The front cover was not obvious to me. There are few things less solarpunk that stealing work from artists. I will not be publishing my novel with AI art, which means the release date for Missing Mermaid will be postponed. If you know illustrators who would be excited to work on a solarpunk piece featuring mermaids, do tell.
I really appreciate you doing a lot of work to make sure it's not AI made, automating art is antithetical to the solarpunk philosophy.