Recently I got into a bit of a snit about another designer who was disparaging those of us who use stock art in our covers. And when I get snitty, I get snoopy, so I decided to investigate this other designer, to see if she in fact could put her money where her rather opinionated mouth was.

Imagine my surprise when I founds this. Vindication is sweet.

Anyway, what irritated me the most was the implication that a stock art cover is simply a stock image with some text in front of it. While occasionally this simple style of design is warranted, most of my covers are much more detailed than that. To demonstrate I thought I’d show you the cover I did today:

Which derives from the below images:

As you can see there’s a lot more to it than simply placing text over a stock image. A cover like the above would cost you about $165.