Can AI Write a Children’s Book?
“To survive, you must tell stories.” — Umberto Eco.
With the advent of AI technologies, I was looking for ways to make some passive income using state-of-the-art tools. That’s when I stumbled upon something interesting: writing a storybook for young kids.
Just so you know, I didn’t make any money from this and lost quite a few hours creating it. Why, you ask? It’s one thing to write the chapters of a storybook, but marketing and selling the book requires a separate set of skills that, sadly, I don’t possess.
Nevertheless, I will show you how I used ChatGPT to write the storybook, Midjourney to create illustrations, and Amazon to publish my book on the Kindle store. You can find the book here.
A brief outline of the steps:
- Generate a story idea
- Outline its chapters
- Make illustrations
- Combine story and illustrations
- Publish the book
Generating A Story Idea
I like the cosmos, stars, and astronauts so I wanted to create a book around this to inspire young kids about space exploration. I asked ChatGPT to suggest me few titles related to this. It generated a few:
- Finding Cosmos Palace: Noah’s Adventures in Space
- The Cosmic Adventures of Stella and Max: Journey to the Stars
- Into The Unknown: The Adventures of Nova and Max
I liked the last one…
Outline Its Chapters
Then, I asked ChatGPT to create a chapter page outline for the story.
Moving on, I asked it to write a rhythm story which is like a poem for Chapter 1.
One can go ahead and generate rhythm stories for all the chapters, and filter out a few verses they like from these chapters.
PS: You can also regenerate a new response for each of your inputs if you didn't like the previous one.
Make Illustrations
I used Midjourney AI to generate illustrations related to these rhythm stories:
Young kids studying books on space exploration
Kids fighting space pirates in a deserted planet
Combining Illustrations With Rhythm Stories
Superimpose all your rhythm stories text on top of matching illustrations.
Voila! Your book is ready.
Publishing The Book
The last step is to publish the book, and I used Amazon.com for this. To do this, you’ll need to create a Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) account, convert your book into pdf/epub/kpf format, design a book cover, and set a price, etc. You can find detailed instructions for these steps online if you decide to give it a go.
However, marketing and generating sales is a challenge that you’ll need to tackle on your own. Since I don’t have any sales experience, I will not be able to provide any help in this area.
You can find my book here. I shouldn’t say ‘my book’ — authors may come after me! I use Artificial Intelligence almost everywhere now. Haha!
But don’t let that stop you from making your own book! At least you’ll have bragging rights to say you’ve written a book. You don’t have to tell anyone that AI was involved.
