[storystarling]

StoryStarling - Turn your story idea into a printed children's book

https://storystarling.com

Working on a platform where you describe a story concept and it becomes a real, illustrated picture book - professionally printed and shipped to your door.

The key difference from "personalized" book companies: this isn't template stories with a name swapped in. You bring an idea - maybe a book about a kid with a cochlear implant going to their first day of school, or a bilingual German-Turkish story about visiting grandma's village - and it generates a complete original narrative with consistent illustrations throughout.

You can upload reference photos so characters actually look like your child. Supports 30+ languages including bilingual editions on the same page.

Currently refining the showcase features and adding RTL language support.

[6ak74rfy]

I too was thinking about something like this a few months ago. There were couple of reasons I didn't pursue the idea. One, the image generation AI wasn't reliable enough. Like, I couldn't get it to generate 2 images where the characters looked consistent, let alone a book worth of images. Two, the margins were quite small, so didn't seem like a viable business.

Wondering if you've thought about such things and your perspective.

[storystarling]

Character consistency was the hardest problem, and honestly what took the longest to get right. We use reference images as style anchors, run multiple generation passes, and have an LLM "critic" that checks for visual inconsistencies and triggers regeneration when needed. It's not perfect but it's gotten to the point where parents are happy with the results.

On margins - tight but workable.

[skyberrys]

What do you mean by RTL because all I can come up with is Verilog or VHDL and I'm certain that's not your meaning. I'll try it out. I have a children's book story I've been trying to image generate for 3 years now and it's not yet worked out. I think the primary reason it fails is that the scenery I request is lifelike yet extremely rare to actually see, although, I did see it, and that's what inspires the story.

[storystarling]

RTL = Right-to-Left languages - Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu. The text rendering and page layout needs to flip for these, and it gets especially tricky with bilingual books where one language is RTL and the other is LTR.

What's the scenery? Happy to try it on our system if you want to share.

[YPCrumble]

This is really cool. I wish the example stories let me see the entire book and purchase them if I like them.

I’m skeptical about the stories being good quality so seeing the full stories might mitigate that.

[storystarling]

The story synopsis next to the preview gives you the full narrative arc before you commit. But fair point on wanting to see more.

You can edit or regenerate pages if something isn't working - it's iterative, not one-shot. Happy to help you try it out without payment - drop me an email.