The cover was proving difficult.
They had Paint in this reality too — I was starting to wonder if it wasn’t Bing that was all-powerful but the entirety of Microsoft’s product catalogue — and I tried drawing a rough initial sketch of my character, equipped with his staff and sword, and fighting a poison dragon.
It didn’t come out quite like I’d imagined it in my head, though perhaps part of that was never having touched a piece of art software before in my life. I tried at it, slowly improving it here and there, making the dragon look more like a dragon and the protagonist look more like a human being, and slowly I was starting to convince myself that actually it looked alright after all.
It was only after another few hundred words of writing that I returned to the cover I’d drawn and found myself blurting out, ‘And what the [BLEEP] is that?’ This compulsive reaction answered the age-old question: should I, an aspiring author with no visual artistic sensibilities, create a book cover for my work in Paint. The answer being ‘no’, naturally.
So I took this information on board, processed it, and decided that the component of the question that was causing the issue was the ‘in Paint’ bit. Some Bing searches later, I’d learned that another book cover option was to use stock images, and ‘manipulate’ them together into a ‘composition’ that I wanted. Now, this all sounded fancy and complicated to me, but I was me, and I could do anything, so I gave it a go.
I downloaded three images from the stock photo site I’d found, and—
-30 Class XP
Oh, right, that was a bit annoying. If I was going to pay for these things in XP — even the tiniest amounts — I wasn’t sure I wanted them. In the end, I decided I would just have to be careful with what I downloaded.
I pulled these three images into a browser-based photo editing software which was clearly ripped off from a more established brand I knew from my own reality, and I got to work.
No matter how hard I tried, I didn’t seem to get anywhere. What’s more, I didn’t seem to be unlocking any new skills; I’d thought I’d get Book Cover Design or something as a skill I could turn into a specialism. But there was nothing. I could only assume that the skills available to me were limited to my System-assigned class. But that revelation didn’t exactly help me in the moment.
OK, so maybe the ‘in Paint’ part of that question hadn’t been the issue. But I couldn’t quite decide which bit was the issue. After all, I definitely needed to create a book cover and I knew with complete certainty in my heart that I was the one to do it — I didn’t need to bring a trained artist into this or anything, that would have been overkill.
So I continued searching the internet for possible tools and trying them out, and I was still doing so an hour or so later when Daemon appeared back in the room with a pop. This time, the noise didn’t make me jump out of my skin. Progress.
“I tried it, but I couldn’t get it to output anything to do with my story.”
Daemon shrugged. “But that’s the neat part — it doesn’t matter! As long as you have some cool-looking guy standing against a confusing red background, your readers will eat that [BLEEP] up for breakfast.”
“Oh, right, well in that case I have literally thousands of options. Like, how could I not? They all take about two minutes each. So I’ll just… slap one of these up, then?”
Daemon nodded. “You could slap some typography on if you want. Nothing fancy, just your title in white text, maybe a black outline around it.”
“I don’t know anything about fonts, though.”
“Nobody does, and if someone tells you they do, you write down a little reminder for future reference that they’re a filthy liar. If in doubt, just use Cinzel or some fancy script font, alright?”
“Alright, yeah, I can do that,” I said, demonstrating on an old cover attempt. “Just like… this?”
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“Beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. You’re gonna do alright, kid.”
“...Thank you?”
“No problem. How’s it going otherwise? No notifications stuck behind your ear this time, I notice.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I’ve cracked that one, now. I’ve cracked the whole System, I reckon, if I’m honest.”
“Better men than you have tried.”
“What’s that?”
Daemon shook his head. “Nothing. Alright, sorry, buddy, I gotta go.”
I groaned. “You just got here! It’s not doing me any good being locked up in here by myself for so long at a time, with nobody to talk to. I’d never thought I’d say it, but having a talking mouse around is important for my sanity. What is it this time? Someone who’s scared of blood get reincarnated as surgeon?”
The mouse looked at me like I was crazy, if such a thing were possible — the ‘mice having expressions’ bit, I meant, not the ‘me being crazy bit’, because I knew that wasn’t possible. “No, it’s my lunch break.”
“What are you having?”
“None of your business,” the employee of the System replied, as though I’d asked a deeply personal question, and then popped away from my cramped apartment once more.
And so it was that I, alone once more, began to delve into the world of AI image generation. There was a small learning curve, sure — knowing how to get it to give me the right dimensions, or to give me the right style, or to get it to actually make a sword rather than a strange scythe-like weapon it kept giving me, all of that was a little difficult — but beyond that it was easy as pie. Soon enough, I had an image I was happy with.
Were there issues with it? Sure. The weapon still was only vaguely sword-like. The main character’s arms were slightly too long. There was the hint of a second person in the background, but only one limb. And when you zoomed in, everything seemed to lose cohesion entirely. But, according to Daemon, it was enough. All I needed to do now was slap on some text and I’d have a cover I could be… well, not proud of, but it’d certainly do. It was certainly an image it definitely had my title on it.
Satisfied enough, I uploaded it to the story submission form, and was left with only one box to fill in: the blurb. This one was easy, though. After all, I knew what my story was about, didn’t I? So I wrote in two hundred words about my world as a dense, detailed paragraph and added a little information about my character, but gave nothing away as to the plot. I wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone, naturally; they can read my story and find out.
With that, I clicked submit.
Story submitted!
Please allow 24 hours for confirmation.
+1,000 Class XP
Class leveled up!
You are now Class: Level 9 LitRPG Author
Class leveled up!
You are now Class: Level 10 LitRPG Author
At level 10, you unlock:
(1) Specialist skill slot
Yes! There we had it: exactly what I’d been looking for — another way of boosting my abilities, and, essentially, the speed of my output.
Class: Level 10 LitRPG Author
Titles: Speedy Fingers
Specialisms: Worldbuilding (Level 3), Character Depth (Level 5), [Slot Available]
Would you like to assign a specialist skill now? (Y / N)
Please select skill from list below:
- Market Research (Level 6)
- Writing Speed (Level 2)
- Writing Quality (Level 1)
The choice was obvious. I selected Writing Speed without a moment of hesitation; it was all very well writing a high quality piece, but if you were doing it slowly then what was the point?
Class: Level 10 LitRPG Author
Titles: Speedy Fingers
Specialisms: Worldbuilding (Level 3), Character Depth (Level 5), Writing Speed (Level 2)
Once again, the knowledge washed over me, and I bathed in it, having slowly learnt to enjoy the sensation and ignore the less pleasant parts.
Title unlocked: Fully Specialised
+20% boost to specialisms
And there it was — another title. Though, this time I was a little irritated by the connotation; would there really only be three slots I ever got? I supposed them increasing indefinitely would eliminate the opportunity cost after a while, so it made sense, but… I don’t know, I felt a bit hard done by. I’d kinda been hoping I could eventually specialise in everything known to man.
Well, at least it was a good one. And maybe there would be more title slots I could get in future, too; the maxing out of specialisms didn’t need to be a hard cap on my ability… Smiling to myself, I traded out the Speedy Fingers title for my new one, ready to give it a spin…