The practical answer: sometimes, but not without checks Authors are understandably curious about AI-generated images. You can type a few words into a tool and suddenly you have a dramatic landscape, a symbolic portrait, a glowing object, a fantasy city, a soft abstract background, or something that feels close to the mood of your book. That can be exciting. It can also be misleading. An AI-generated image may be useful as a starting point for a book cover, but it is not automatically safe,...

Self-publishing your first book is exciting, but it can also feel strangely intimidating. You may have spent months or years writing your manuscript. You may have carried the idea for even longer. Then, just when the hardest creative part seems finished, a new world appears in front of you: editing, cover design, formatting, ISBNs, Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, proof copies, print files, categories, keywords and upload requirements. For clarity: an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a...

Publishing a book has never been easier. Standing out with one has never been harder. That is the reality authors are facing now. In the U.S. alone, the number of books published with ISBNs passed 4 million in 2025, up 32.5% from the year before. More than 3.5 million of those were self-published titles. The market is not simply active. It is crowded on a scale that would have sounded almost absurd a few years ago. For authors, this level of competition means that simply having a book is no...