Leonardo AI - a quick review.
Leonardo a great site for writers and creators on a budget
As an indie or self-published writer you have to wear many hats, writer, editor, promotor and often cover and promotion designer. While in a perfect world being a writer you would be rich and able to afford paying artists to make up all your art, the reality is that most indie authors make very little off their labors and need to save money. You will need to find ways to create cover art for next to nothing as well as art for book videos and promo pictures; as a result you might want to consider some of the AI art sites available. Today I am going to discuss some of the pros and cons of the site Leonardo (https://app.leonardo.ai/) for creating book covers, promo pictures and illustrations.
Leonardo like many AI art sites has a free to create option and a pay option. I use the free option, which gives you 150 tokens a day to play with, and depending on what are style you pick you will spend from 8 to 16 tokens a picture. The pay option allows you to make you images move as well as giving you more art and style options. If you need to make book tok videos then you might want to try a one month trial option to see if the movement option is something you could use.
Leonardo is very popular and there are hundreds of posts extolling its virtues and the prompts you can use and what they will give you. But as I wanted to demonstrate what it can do for a possible book cover, I used a simple prompt and ran it through the four legacy prompts, which are available on the free option. Leonardo uses styles or various creative engines to pick from and each one will give you a slightly different image. Depending on what you need or want you will have to spend time playing with them to get your perfect image. I used a very simple prompt of under 30 words, with no fancy light prompts or cinematic effects just so you can get the idea of what each style does. I used Kino XL, Lightening XL, Vision XL and AlbedoBase XL all with the same short prompt and attached two copies of each to this post.
As for the cons the only one I have is that it will share some of your posts with others on the site and the free option does not allow you to delete pics you don’t like. Also you can’t use words like “sexy”, “Naked” etc. which if you are a romance writer and trying to make hunky guys or girls for your cover you have to get creative. But as you can see from my images there are ways to still get sexy pics if that is what you need.
As Leonardo is free to play with I highly recommend creators of all kinds play with and see what it can do.
