After I put pictures on every chapter, a reader wrote to me about them:
Great idea but not my visuals at all! Mine is obviously slanted based on first hand knowledge. What you’ve got could go with Bosch or any Noire crime story. I guess that’s why you don’t see illustrations. The reader creates his own visual in his mind. Like reading the book and then seeing the movie.
These particular pictures aren’t his. He is envisioning the world of this book in his head, using his own creativity. I gave him images that were orange-and-black noir - the kind of thing that could be the front cover of any crime paperback in an airport. And, since he’s creating his own visuals from the writing, I’m painting over what he’s imagining.
That’s why so many novels have no illustrations at all - the blank page is a feature. Read the book, then see the movie, and feel the small betrayal when the movie doesn’t match what is in your head. I just had this experience with Project Hail Mary.
My first instinct was to make a better picture. Fix the noir, sharpen the town, get it closer to the one in his head. But that doesn’t work because a better single style is still my single style.
So Phin came up with a different approach. We iterated on a dozen styles and chose five. The reader now gets five choices: minimalism, art deco, brutalism, pop art, and a full 1960s psychedelic. And if you want the blank page, there’s a sixth choice that turns the art off completely.
One of the things I’m doing with this project is to build a comprehensive system for keeping everything consistent that also improves with every chapter. While Claude Code is the engine beneath everything (along with OpenAI for the images), the machine is mine and Phin’s. We are systematically building out different layers on top of the engine with the goal of making them generalizable so anyone can use them to write a book. And, we are integrating all the pieces into AuthorMagic with a component called AuthorOS that either works in the web app or in Claude Code.
Oh - and the monitors in Chapter 1. Each time I looked at that image, I felt like the screens showed nonsense. So, they now are relevant to what Samantha is working on. They show quantum circuits, a Bloch sphere, a blockchain, a Bitcoin chart, a map of datacenters - things that someone like her would actually pay attention to that now follow the storyline.
Go read Chapter 1 and change the style under the picture. Or browse all thirteen and try the whole book in one style at a time. Or turn the art off and keep the version in your head.