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I am excited to announce that I am putting out my first children's book, titled "A Mile In my Shoes". We are now accepting preorders on Gumroad! I will be co authoring this with my wife Ashley. I have had the idea for this book in my notes since about 2021. Children's books are short in length, so it didn't take me quite long to jot down my thoughts. But there are some gems in my process that might help someone along their journey of putting out their own book that I wanted to highlight in a quick post.

The Inception

The problem is that when investing in a children's book, the images need to be top notch. If I was putting something out in the world it had to look really good, especially if I am putting my brand behind it. From my initial research on getting the book made, a good artist can cost about $30 per page. A typical children's book is 18 pages or less, depending on the reading level that you are trying to target. From the jump, that can be a hefty investment of $540, without accounting for the front and back cover design, along with other hidden fees of writing a book such as ISBN, trademarks, and etc.

Creating a book can be s steep investment for a project that might make little profit, so I shelved the idea and lived my life.

AI Generated Tools​
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Fast forward to January 2024, of this year ChatGPT has been in the wild and we are now in the AI era, I had been playing around with Midjourney and other AI tools. I randomly remembered that I had started writing a children's book and decided to see if I could create a character using one of these tools since I had the skeleton already and I was trying to keep costs low.

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I tried to start with using Midjourney. This is a prompt to image generator that is very popular in the AI community. Apart from Dalle by Open AI, this one is pretty top notch. I had been messing around with the tool for a bit with some other projects I had been working on and had the idea of trying to make a children's book with it.
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The main problem I ran into with Midjourney was that it wasn't great at consistently generating characters. Maybe if I invested more time in the platform I could figure it out, but after several attempts I threw in the towel. Second, I had stumbled upon Child Book AI. A tool that allows you to generate children's stories using a prompt.
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I had the idea of what I wanted the book to look like, so I took the pages I had in my notes and began to try and see if the tool can create a book for me.

To my surprise the book was able to be generated fairly quickly, but there were quite a few flaws that I saw in the book. Hands were clunky. The character didn't look consistent, and quite frankly to my original point, I wouldn't want to attach my name to something that didn't make a reader fall in love with the character at first glance.

Even though the AI generated tools didn't work in my favor, it gave me great prototype material, to give to a real illustrator to help me create the book.

Fiverr

Some people might have a love hate relationship with Fiverr, but I have gotten some awesome talent from the platform. I shopped around for a few illustrators and ultimately stumbled upon one named Tincho Schmidt. He produced multiple children's books and seem like the right person to fit the bill. I laid out some milestones, gave him the text I had for the book and we began to collaborate together. He would send me sample sketches of characters and I would go back and forth giving feedback and iterating. After we got to a good point, I reached out to friends and family who were my target demographic for the book and got feedback. Ultimately, helping me shape and iterate on the book.

Fin

The book is almost done and I am super excited to get it into readers hands. But for now I wanted to give you a snippet of the journey to creating a children's book. Thank you.

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