At My Current Royalty Rate, I Can Afford a Real Illustrator in the Year 2109

Let me open the books for you, because transparency is a value and also because the numbers are genuinely funny.

Ideogram, the AI image tool I use to make my covers, costs me about 29 dollars a month.

My Amazon royalties last month were 1 dollar and 87 cents.

I want to give that a moment to breathe. One dollar. Eighty-seven cents. That is not a typo and it is not a rounding error. That is a full month of a working author’s earnings, and it would not cover the tip on a sandwich.

Now, I did get real quotes for a full set of professional illustrations for the Laid Pipe universe, from actual human artists. The quotes were fair. The work would have been gorgeous. The number came to a little under two thousand dollars, which for a full illustrated set is honestly reasonable, and I have zero notes for the artists.

Here is the math. At 1.87 a month, saving every cent and spending nothing else, ever, it would take me roughly one thousand months to afford that set. One thousand months is about eighty-three years. So I could commission those illustrations sometime around the year 2109. I will be dead. The artist will be dead. My readers will be dead. The heat death of my checking account arrives well before the art does.

Hence, Ideogram.

I want to be honest about this, because I always disclose the AI, right there in the post, every time. I am not pretending a person painted these. I am a broke indie author who wants to make books now, this decade, while I am alive to enjoy it, and 29 dollars a month is the difference between having covers and having a Google Doc with big dreams. That is the real choice in front of me. It is not art versus AI. It is AI versus nothing.

And for the record, I do not just mash a button and accept the slop. I fight these tools for hours. I rewrote one prompt so many times that Ideogram, out of what I can only describe as spite, started forging fake artist signatures onto my space battle. I finally told it that if it was going to insist on signing my work, it could at least sign it “Gwen.” It did. Go look at it. It is the hero art on the Rings of Almanidus page, and that one beautiful signed image represents somewhere around 50 prompts and several hours of my one and only life that I am never getting back. Worth it. Mostly worth it. I have made peace with it.

So here is my sincere offer. If you are an anti-AI-slop activist, and you have gazed upon my covers and felt a great disturbance in your soul, I hear you. I would genuinely love to pay a real human artist. I have the artists picked out. I have the quotes sitting in an email. The only thing standing between me and a fully hand-illustrated Laid Pipe is one dollar and eighty-seven cents a month and the crushing weight of linear time.

Forward me the cash and I will hand it straight to an illustrator, gladly, on camera, with tears in my eyes. Venmo is open. Cash App works. A carrier pigeon stuffed with twenties will be received with full military honors.

Until then, it is me and the robot and a signature that says Gwen.