Elsie Jones and the AI debate!

Hey everyone! There is some new and mixed information about the publication of the first book and series. The first three books are written and nearly done being edited (in fact the first twelve books are written), and I’ve been playing around with artwork for a while now.

Because these first three books are going to be different than the originals (the first book will have a completely different plot, the second book will have minor changes, and the third book will be completely re-edited for content and be much longer), I originally wanted to get some new artwork for them so everyone would be able to tell the two different editions apart.

I reached out to a few people, but the price was either going to be too high, or the job was going to be too encompassing. Kind of like signing on to a Marvel character knowing that you have to be involved for the next ten years of your life, the series is 15 books long and each book will require three to four pictures plus a color cover which is quite a bit of work. I can understand where someone would look at that and turn it down.

I then reached out to a friend of mine who is a little more techy than I am, and we decided to work together to try and get some AI artwork together to make the books come to life. I was never really thrilled about this prospect (the discussion of AI art is for a different blog, and is a much longer conversation), because I loved the funky feel of my original artist Jesse Velasquez’s drawings, and how they brought Elsie to life.

The concession I made was that each of the books has a different theme and each one of the books takes place in a different time period and space, so I thought it might be kind of interesting to have each book change slightly in it’s artwork; for example “Elsie Jones and the Captain’s Guard” takes place in “The Three Musketeers” so having a Baroque style art for that book, but when she travels to “The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes” the artwork would be Victorian in style.

Ultimately I wasn’t super happy with the results that we were getting because Elsie Jones is a character in my head and the AI generators that we were working with made the character look a little too much like a public figure, or she looked different in every picture (All the examples are spread throughout this post).

I got very close to including these pictures, but ultimately I just couldn’t do it, but that put me at a loss. All of a sudden, I was back to no artwork, but a bunch of incredible books, so I made a decision. I reached out to Jesse (the original artist) and asked him if he would mind me using the original art again for the new books. It wasn’t something I wanted, because the books are new and they deserve something new.

Luckily Jesse agreed and said he would get the art over to me so we could move forward and hit that August 1st publication date.

The wrinkle came this past week as we were talking and he asked me if I had any interest in getting new artwork for the books since they were going to be different. We talked back and forth about it, and came to the conclusion that we were going to do it. We were going to change the art and make this the new project that it deserves to be, and completely different from the original publications, August first publication date be damned (I mean, I’m self publishing them, so it’s a self-imposed date, but still).

So that’s both the bad news and the good news. We’re going to have to wait a little longer to get the books, but they are going to have some incredible new art work, from an incredible artist. I CAN NOT State how absolutely happy I am that Jesse is willing to stay on board, because the world needs to both read these books and see an incredible artist and not some computer generated pictures.