I have added new, original cover art to my posted works.
As you might guess, I had a heavy assist from AI. But what I learned is that describing and defining what you want the AI to produce in an image is its own art form. And I'm almost as bad at writing graphic "prompts" as I am at creating graphics personally. So, naturally, I sought AI assistance in writing the prompts for the graphics AI.
And NO, I do mot let AI write my stories. I tried that once, a few years back, just a couple paragraphs to see what would come of it. The product was laughably over-embellished and yet was still simplistic and shallow, like a nine-year old writing an amicus brief for the Supreme Court on the subject of anime copyright. Besides, I write for fun, and it's not like you can appoint someone else to have fun for you.
But for writing graphics prompts? You betcha I had help. I ended up telling one AI what I wanted, that AI wrote the prompt in the precise descriptive diction that the graphics AI understood. But even then it can come out wrong — over and over again.
Consider the cover for Game Trail. I could not get the AI to place the pond and the water tower on the far side of the train. When it did move the water tower, it placed it in the far background, nowhere near the train. When it finally, after a literal dozen images, moved the water tower on the other side of the train, I decided to fix the other issues myself.
I used MS Paint to move the pond from the foreground to the other side of the train. The figure standing on the tender by the water tower was originally standing next to the tender and was as tall as the locomotive. I shrunk him and moved him. Every hilltop in the background was capped with a clump of tall rocks, looking like a collection of breasts with turgid nipples. The headlamp on the locomotive was enormous. And the fill-pipe on the water tower came off the side and appeared to be dumping a heavy stream of water onto the ground. Paint is not the most advanced app, but it does allow pixel-by-pixel work and I've learned a few tricks over the years. In any event, I've made heavy modifications to every cover graphic, save for the Coldwater County series. Other than adding the title text, the most I did was crop the Coldwater Keys image.
All just part of the fun.