Sda Children 39;s Books

[Edco Haglund]

Mosthashtag campaigns go nowhere, but Oh managed to harness the momentum. We Need Diverse Books is now a nonprofit that offers awards, grants, and mentorships for authors, internships aimed at making the industry more inclusive, and tools for promoting diverse books. Among the first batch of grant recipients was A.C. Thomas, a former teen rapper who sold her young-adult Black Lives Matter narrative in a 13-house auction. (A feature film is already in the works.)

This puts intense pressure on authors to get it exactly right, even though nobody can quite agree what that means. Over the past year, the creators of two picture books were harshly criticized for their failure to convey the grim brutality of slavery. A Fine Dessert, written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Sophie Blackall, both white, showed the same dessert (blackberry fool) being made at different times in history. The book received standout reviews, but after it was eviscerated on social media for its portrayal of a slave woman and her daughter serving the dessert on a South Carolina plantation, a contrite Jenkins donated her writing fee to We Need Diverse Books. (Blackall stood by her work.)

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Let me address the elephant in the room. In the interactions with a fellow author on twitter we stumbled upon this question of AI taking over the creation process. I remarked upon a good way to look at this new technology like other previously revolutionary tech from the past. It is a great tool designed to augment and enhance the human creativity process and we should consider it as such. In my experience, it is also not at a stage where AI can guide the creative process. it still needs the human element. I address it some of the sections below.

I wanted to write children's books that focused on STEM related content and also some that spoke about how to handle emotions related topics. I wanted these books to be fun for both the adults and the kids reading them. For the 3rd book, I wanted to create a book that is both engaging to do activities on for the adult and also the kids.

I chose Midjourney and Dall-E as they had a comprehensive set of features, offer multiple image formats and provide an easy-to-use API. I could not choose between the 2 so I chose them both and split their use between 2 books. This way I will be able to offer a good comparison between the 2.

Once you have chosen your tool, you need to come up with the general idea for a book. I have found that relying on the generators to generate an idea for a book is produced rather uninspiring results. See below some of the rejected ideas that ChatGPT generated that clearly warrant writing a whole book about. Remember that these tools are trained on already written works and hence will find it really difficult to come up with a completely original never done before concept. Their best quality is to assist you in producing content once you have the idea. This is the secret sauce of producing good content.

Once i had a general idea, I sent the prompts over to ChatGPT and produced content. This took a lot of tries to get the prompting right. Below are a few examples of the prompts that I used successfully and some that I had to reject.

You can see a pattern building here. Its subtle and cannot be explained but prompting is an art form on its own. See below for a good breakdown of a successful prompt both for a text generator and one for an image generator.

Once you get the hang of it, I found that the speed with which I was able to produce quality prompts got faster. At this point the whole story was just that a big blob of story content. This is where the human element comes in. I took the story and applied basic principles of splitting the story up into chunks based on experience (I have a 3 and a 4-year-old to whom I read these kinds of books daily so I have a hang of what good page structure needs to look like). For people that are unfamiliar with the process. There are great resources on Upwork and Fiverr that you can hire for a quick turnaround.

Once you have gone about splitting your story. The artistic side of you is now on call! The first step here is to storyboard the story. This is important because it gives you a good idea of page structure. The prompts you need for the art generator (more on that below) and the size of the book (Click here for my recommendations on size and structure of the book). Below is an example of my storyboards. As you can see there are a lot of edits to page structure and how it needs to be laid out. Storyboarding is also where you can create a rough sketch of what you want illustrated. Now in the past this would have been a challenging step for people that have a tough time illustrating or sketching. Not anymore! you can just write in text what you want your sketch to look like and then use the image prompters to either sketch it or fully illustrate it for you.

Once you are done storyboarding, the next step is to start illustrating with the help of image prompters. This is the toughest part of the whole process. Before we get started let me do my rant on this subject.

Image prompters or Text-to-Image generators are the most inconsistent of all the generative AI tools out there. No matter how good your prompting is they have major drawbacks. Some of these are the limited choices of stock art, the lack of color and detail, the inconsistent results they generate, and their inability to provide any sort of coherent results from one prompt to another. They also do NOT do well with faces.

Secondly, try to separate your image into background, foreground and characters. This allows the AI engine to produce more consistent images. For example, In my books, i wanted to do a burning city as a background with robots in it. The first thing I did was generate the city by itself. This allowed me to get a lot more background images of burning city since the AI did not have to account for robots or characters. It kept the results consistent as well. Create your foreground or character images separately. I will talk about how you can put all of this together in below sections.

lastly, try to save your prompts and use the parameters. Parameters like aspect ratio, stylize greatly enhance your experience. In the Dall-E engine use the image editor to its most potent capacity.

In my experience I ended up using Dall-E for more artistic work. It was really good at producing art type images that looked like art and not computer generated. It did struggle with detail though. Midjourney on the other hand was able to generate good detailed illustrations and images but you could easily tell that it was a digital type art or AI generated. It lacked the finesse and the layering that real art would have.

Before we get into this section, i am going to sidebar here and ask you to go through my book size section here. Come back once you have finished reading that, understanding book guidelines is key to produce quality content.

Back? alright so now that you have your text and your images. It's time to put it all together. There are lots of great options for this part of the journey that are not AI tools. Some examples are.

My favorite of all of the above was Canva. It's simple web interface and good feature set made it the perfect choice for projects like mine. It allowed me to quickly and easily create professional looking book layouts. It also allows me to take my work from my laptop to my tablet and even my mobile phone.

The publishing process simplified is in 2 categories, publish with a publisher or self-publish. What no-one tells you is that self-publishing is so easy even the most novice, rookie, new to this whole thing person like me was able to do it in 1 day. There are some gotchas though and I will cover them below.

While generative AI tools can be incredibly helpful, there are a few pitfalls you should be aware of. One of the biggest challenges is that the AI algorithms are not always perfect and can sometimes produce unexpected results. You may find that some of your text is misinterpreted or that the illustrations are not exactly what you had in mind.

Another important issue to consider is licensing. Some of these generative AI tools come with restrictions on how you can use the content you create. For example, depending on whether you paid for the service you may only be allowed to use the book for personal use and not for commercial purposes. It is essential to understand the licensing agreements for the tool you choose to ensure that you are using it legally.

Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader, from picture books for the very young to young adult fiction.

Children's literature can be traced to traditional stories like fairy tales, that have only been identified as children's literature in the eighteenth century, and songs, part of a wider oral tradition, that adults shared with children before publishing existed. The development of early children's literature, before printing was invented, is difficult to trace. Even after printing became widespread, many classic "children's" tales were originally created for adults and later adapted for a younger audience. Since the fifteenth century much literature has been aimed specifically at children, often with a moral or religious message. Children's literature has been shaped by religious sources, like Puritan traditions, or by more philosophical and scientific standpoints with the influences of Charles Darwin and John Locke.[2] The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are known as the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" because many classic children's books were published then.

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