AI Masterpiece
#1 Amazon New Release with AI-Written & Illustrated Children's Book
I was wondering if AI could help me create a toddler book that I could sell on Amazon. Long story short, it can.
When my daughter Olive was 7 months old, I took parental bonding leave in 2022 and began creating a book for her called "Olive you!"
Despite many sleepless nights, I was hyper-focused and designed the book faster than ever (Still took a long time). The end result was a book I'm incredibly proud of, -this story isn't about that book.
Now 2023, amid the AI revolution, I wondered if AI could help me create something similar to my previous book without as much effort. My goal was to achieve "good enough" results that wouldn't reveal the AI-assisted creation, even to the likes of Alan Turing. To accomplish this, I turned to Chat GPT for text and knowledge-based tasks, and Midjourney as my go-to artist.
I’ll spare more backstory, let's dive into the prompts that I asked both services and some preliminary results that they produced and what I ultimately ended up using.
Prompt:
Give me a list of toddler faith-based book ideas along with a description of what the book would have. Book should be for parents to read newborns up to 2-year-olds to sleep
I went with the first one! I figure a “colorful world” would be great imagery to catch the eye of a newborn or 1-year-old.
Next prompt:
Write me 12 pages of the book you gave me in #1 and it should contain 1 - 2 sentences that are short, simple yet understandable. Also, provide me a description of the illustration that should be showing on each page. Make the last page bedtime related
Now…at the moment I have already published the book on Amazon, so I won’t give it all away here! But here is what the Chat GPT results looked like:
Page 1:
Text: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
Description of Illustration: “Bright sun shining in a blue sky with fluffy white clouds, lush green landscape”
Page 2:
Text: “God made the seas so vast and blue!”
Description of Illustration: “A serene ocean with different types of fish swimming. Barnacles and seaweed floating”
….You get the point! It was great. Next up, Midjourney. I had to tweak the prompts for Midjourney, many times abandoning what ChatGPT provided altogether, but keeping the same idea in my own words.
bright sun shining in a blue sky with fluffy white clouds, lush green landscape, playful cartoon --ar 16:9
A serene ocean scene with gentle waves, and various cute fish swimming underwater, playful cartoon flat --ar 16:9 --v 5 --q 2
I did not like this one at all. Let’s try again:
beautiful underwater ocean, seaweed, fishes, playful cartoon --ar 16:9 --q 2
Now we’re getting somewhere.
I did this for all 12 pages. I slapped a good font that matches the vibe, cut each picture to the sizes that Amazon’s KDP program requires me to, did all that boring but necessary stuff. I’d say me doing all that work accounted for probably 25% of this whole project.
The AI-generated images were impressive, but there were still imperfections where weird animals looked like memes or the next Pokémon. Additionally, some images had pixelated or blurry areas that made the pages inconsistent. I wanted the book to have an intentionally crafted look, and consistency was crucial. Despite searching for images with similar colors and textures, the AI's imperfections made me hesitant to publish the book.
So I went to good ol’ photoshop and ran every picture through the super old “oil paint” feature that I could never see myself finding a legitimate use-case for true client deliverables.
It worked wonders. The brush strokes perfectly align with the angles and lines of the original images, giving them an authentic hand-painted look. Plus, the smudging effect blends the original generated image with the strokes, creating a whole new piece of art.
By now, I had already started working on my next book idea, and I realized that choosing an art medium that naturally produces imperfect results, like brush strokes, watercolor, and pencil art, was the key to creating top-notch images that wouldn't raise any "ai" eyebrows.
I tried another book idea from Chat GPT and told Midjourney to give me “Watercolor” style art, and the results were truly, truly, amazing. Many times I’d use the generated images from the first attempt. It was that good!
A baby bunny sleeping in forrest, playful cartoon, watercolor --ar 2:1 --q 2 --s 250
I mean, just look at this! Flawless.
So that was going to be my trick -my “angle”. That’s the nugget that I mined from this process, and I encourage you to give it a try! Choose an art medium with natural imperfections, or add "Van Gogh style" to your prompts. Despite that style being a bit of a cliché, the many strokes will give your artwork an authentic, handmade feel.
So, that is it! I've already published two books using this technique - God's Colorful World: A Bedtime Story for Little Ones and Little Prayers for Every Day, with breathtaking watercolor illustrations like this one:
