Creating a set of book images

Book images tend to come from four sources. Most authors choose between their own photographs, stock or Creative Commons libraries, charts and diagrams drawn for the book, or AI. Incredible illustrations can obviously also be commissioned, but this is not typically a viable option for self-publishers.

For many writers, words are enough to paint a thousand, vivid pictures. Not many books benefit from you filling them full of plain text, however. Nonfiction and reference books can easily feel dry and dense without images. Add a few well-designed diagrams, charts or photos, and their pages can come to life. Younger children's books too are as much about the gorgeous, absorbing illustrations as they are about the words. The two work in harmony and enhance the other.

Given that images are so powerful, it's all the more important to use them well. You'll need to choose them carefully and consider things like quality, originality, suitability, licensing and copyright. A book with predictable, fuzzy and pixelated images will only pull down the quality of the material rather than enhance it.

There's no one right way to use images, it'll all depend on the character and purpose of your book. Think about what your book needs images for and what you hope they will achieve. Once you've got that firmly in your mind, read on.

Should you take your own photos

If your book includes things that are easy for you to photograph, maybe members of your family, your hometown, local scenery and so on, you might want to take your own photos. Remember that you'll need to make sure that you're allowed to take the photos you want first.

Where to find images to use

Often people think that if an image is on Google, then it must be okay. But finding pictures on Google Images is not an indication they are freely available either. All Google has done is automatically index these images from websites. Copyright rules still protect them.

The Creative Commons service helps people share and find imagery with free, easy-to-use copyright licenses. You'll also need to be careful to attribute the images to their original author. If you decide to use them, it's also important to verify the validity and the terms of the CC license yourself by following the link. The Creative Commons site itself doesn't check, and there are different rules for different images.

Stock image sites are a great way for photographers to sell their images and show off their talent. Think of them as a photography marketplace. People visiting the site can buy the images shown and use them in books and on covers, as well as in newspapers, blogs, and advertising, both in print or online.

Preparing charts, diagrams and infographics

If you'd like your book to contain charts and diagrams, then you'll need to make sure these work together nicely as a consistent set. The styling should match, as well as the colors, the line weights, the axes, and the overall look and feel. You should also make sure that the graphics you use are line drawings or vector graphics. Unlike a photo, these aren't made up of lots of little pixels that can look fuzzy in print. They're made up of smooth lines and paths that will look crisp and sharp, no matter what size you print them at. This is especially important if your graphics include lots of small text on axes and labels.

Depending on your book and its contents, you might want to go a step further and display some information visually using infographics. Infographics are a great opportunity to inject some extra creativity and turn a boring graph into something much more compelling. How about statistics on fast food presented as a pizza pie chart?

Can you use AI in book images

And now a whole host of new AI tools have been added to every designer's kit. Programs like Photoshop have been getting smarter for years about the jobs they can help with. Content-Aware Fill is a good example. Before that came along, if you had the perfect photo with a whopping great big cloud sitting exactly where you wanted some text to go, you had to fix it manually. That meant painstakingly selecting bits of nearby empty sky and cloning them across, bit by bit, trying not to leave any obvious telltale repeating pattern behind.

Since then, the tools have only become more advanced and more varied. They can be extremely powerful. They can also do some extremely odd things to an image if you let them loose. We've all seen AI pictures where somebody has acquired an extra hand, but the mistakes can be much subtler than that. Ask a tool to alter part of a landscape and it may quietly change the skyline as well. So they still need to be used as tools, with somebody keeping a close eye on what they are doing. Used carefully, they can be an incredibly useful extension of the designer's toolkit.

It's hard to discuss AI imagery without touching on copyright and ownership. But the rules are continually changing and the line between editing and creating is not easy to define. So stick with common sense. Taking a piece of artwork that has been specially commissioned by somebody else, changing a few colors and calling it yours isn't sensible. Starting with an image you are entitled to use, then adapting and extending it, is a very different kettle of fish.

Getting your images right

And that brings us nicely onto our final point. The very best way to ensure perfect, cost-effective images for your book is to work closely with a designer. They'll help you choose your images well, make sure they're properly licensed, and tweak them to work together as a set. They'll also help make sure they have enough color depth and are the right resolution for printing.

Whatever you decide to use, it needs plenty of thought. Why not discuss it with one of our designers as part of your book formatting?