How I Produced a Children’s Book in 30 Minutes

Even though it only takes about 30 minutes to create one of these books, I spent a very long time sitting on this concept because I was continuously experimenting with different ideas and changes. Remembering that “perfect is the enemy of good,” I moved forward and unveiled my first book for my kids. After hearing their squeals of delight and having them jump on me and kiss me multiple times, I knew I had been delaying it for no reason. Four- and six-year-olds, it turns out, are not the most intense literary and art critics.

So, for some background, one of the critical elements of my homeschooling philosophy is the integration of technology into our learning from two perspectives: one, in terms of how we can utilize new technology to supplement learning and discovery in ways that perhaps a slower-moving organization might not be able to, and two, in terms of actually teaching my children about technology, with the belief that it is an integral part of the future.

This article focuses on the first point: how to use new technology to aid learning. It is not restricted to homeschoolers, as anyone can utilize it with minimal time.

First, some hopefully relatively uncontroversial thoughts on early education:

• Literacy is a crucial foundation of education. Attaining it requires significant amounts of repetition and effort.
• The ability to read reflects an inflection point in a child’s learning journey: from learning to read, they now can read to learn.
• Bonus: Learning a second language as a child brings many benefits. Click here for more info.

As you’re probably aware, Artificial Intelligence, like the generative AI ChatGPT, holds significant potential for changing so much of life as we know it. With such a broad scope, I focused its scope on helping my kids with their education.

In essence, I provide ChatGPT with a description of my children and ask for a story that stars them, primarily made up of words from the top 1000 most commonly used English words in about twenty sentences. I then ask for the Spanish translations to accompany each sentence. With the latest ChatGPT integration to DallE, I also get illustrations for each sentence.

Click here for my first pass at creating this bi-lingual book for them. It’s in a Google Presentations format and is best viewed in Slideshow mode. This is how I read it with my kids. They read the English sentences while I read the Spanish version. Soon, they will be reading the Spanish ones, too.

Creating Campaigns

I have so many different ideas for how to utilize this capability that I find myself getting scattered. In order to help me organize, I’ve decided on focusing my efforts and ideas into Campaigns. Here are some examples I have in mind:

• My son wants to be a builder/architect. I can create a series of stories, each focusing on one significant architectural construction, providing historical context around the piece, and discussing critical interrelated subjects, materials used, etc.
• Compile a custom Spirituality campaign that focuses solely on the words and message of Jesus in a child-friendly format. Thirty-one stories would allow me to do a nightly story for a month as a deep dive. Further topics can span Buddhism, Hinduism, and more. I can even ask ChatGPT to create a child-friendly interpretation of adult-focused books like The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, complete with supporting stories for each point.
• A campaign on emotions, where I get a short definition of an emotion, a story that demonstrates the emotion, an illustration of someone experiencing the emotion, and perhaps even tips on how to identify and experience the emotion healthily. One story per emotion.
• Holidays and Cultural experiences: As Americans of Indian descent living in Ecuador, I can focus on the significant events and celebrations to provide backgrounds, visuals, and stories that can help bring them closer to each culture.
• Spanish: I can work with the formatting to ensure that specific topics are focused on, such as spending some time on the past tense (comí, viví, hablé vs. he comido, he vivido, he hablado, or he comido, has comido, ha comido). I can also create topic-specific stories to boost vocabulary, such as a beach story to focus on beach vocabulary.
• This is a situation where my imagination is the limit. I can’t fully grasp the opportunity here, but anything I can think of can be put through this process. It could even be a nightly process of asking, “So what do you want to learn about tomorrow?” and spending some time preparing the story for the next day.

A Few Notes

• The images need to be more consistent. I’m okay with this for now, but there is undoubtedly much room for improvement in how I phrase the prompts and the technology’s ability to create consistent characters throughout a succession of images.
• The creation of the story takes only a moment. The images take a minute or two. Formatting them into the presentation takes another 10-15 minutes.
• A presentation is how I chose to do this one, but I formatted a previous draft in a Word document as an eBook and sent it to my Kindle. It worked nicely but took more work and couldn’t be sent to my kids’ Amazon Kids Fire tablets.
• Pro-Tip: You could look to print and bind (either personally or professionally) a story as a gift for someone you know and presumably love!

Steps to Create a Story Yourself

1. You will need a ChatGPT account (free) to create a story, but you will need Premium to have the capability to integrate pictures into the responses.
2. Modify the prompt below in the following sections:
   1. Characters should be described with as much detail as possible
   2. Change the length of the story to make it shorter or longer
   3. Change the last section to outline the kind of story you want to create
   4. Advanced: play around with the image description as desired. You can have the illustrations resemble Where the Wild Things Are, Peanuts characters, the Powerpuff Girls, etc… your imagination is the limit here. Note: The “Paper Sculpture” art type is quite beautiful (see image below).
   5. Modify anything else as you see fit to make the output custom to what you want.
3. Enter the prompt as a single entry into ChatGPT
4. It may truncate the response and provide you with just the first sentences and images, so you may have to ask it to give the rest.
5. Copy/Paste to export it to another application, like Google Slides (what I used above), Microsoft Word, or anything else suitable.

The Prompt for ChatGPT

I want to create a book that will help my four and six-year-olds practice learning to read. The words should be primarily drawn from the top 1000 most common English words, but also focus on simple words and sentence structures for a child to read. I want the story to be 20 sentences long. For each sentence, please include both the English sentence as well as its Spanish translation.

The descriptions of the main characters are as follows:

Maya is a four-year-old dark brown-skinned girl with black eyes, long, straight black hair, and black eyes wearing a solid purple dress and a silver tiara. She is 3.5 feet tall. 

Pax is a six-year-old dark brown-skinned boy with black eyes and short black hair on a chiseled face wearing a green dinosaur t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans who is 4 feet tall. 

Papa is a tall, middle-aged, dark brown-skinned man with all-white hair and black eyes. He’s dressed in white sorcerer robes and carries a wooden staff with a large green gemstone at the top.

Each sentence should be accompanied by an image of the sentence, which utilizes the exact character descriptions from the beginning of the prompt, including the clothes and accessories they have, in a chibi-style drawing.

The story should be about Pax and Maya meeting the mysterious Papa, who teaches them the power of magic, which they discover within themselves. They recite a cute rhyming spell that takes them on an adventure to the moon and back.

What I Will Continue to Work On

• Improving the prompt to generate better content and more consistent images
• Streamlining the process to take the content to a presentable format
• Remaining current with new technological advances and how they can be applied to our learning adventure.
• Harnessing this powerful technology with deeper creativity

Note: I will look to make some sort of online library of the (good) books I generate to help showcase some of the interesting topics we’re covering.

If you have any ideas or suggestions, please let me know!