I’ve been a book cover design for over a decade, and in that time I’ve seen a lot happen. When I started, I was reasonably priced and decently skilled; book cover design took a lot of work, and you had to buy expensive software and fonts and stock images and know how to blend them together. I used to have to place hundreds of tiny dots around a character to cut them out from the background manually… now auto-background removal is easy and magic.
