[storystarling]

Similar experience. I posted a Show HN two days ago for a children's book generator - type a story idea, get a fully illustrated printed book shipped to you. Offered a free printed book including shipping to the HN community via voucher code. Got 7 points, 2 comments, and zero voucher redemptions. Nobody even ordered the free book.

One of those comments was genuinely useful feedback from Argentina about localization. That alone made it worth posting. But the post was gone from page 1 in what felt like minutes.

What's interesting is this isn't a weekend vibe-coded project - it involves actual physical production, printing, and shipping. But from the outside it probably looks like "another AI wrapper," which I think is the core problem: the flood of low-effort AI projects has made people reflexively skeptical of anything that mentions generation, even when there's real infrastructure behind it.

[johnfn]

If you don't mind some unsolicited and blunt feedback: I suspect the reason this didn't get a lot of traction is that it is unclear why customers would want this. Sorry, that's probably too harsh, but I find it difficult to imagine anyone buying this:

- Children's books, at least the well-reviewed ones, are pretty good

- This is AI generated, so I expect the quality to be significantly lower than a children's book. Flipping through the examples, I am not convinced that this will be higher quality than a children's book.

- At 20 euros for a paperback, this is also more expensive than most children's books

- Your value prop, as I take it, is that your product is better because it is a book generated for just one child, but I am not convinced that's a solid value prop. I mean, it is kind of an interesting gimmick, but the book being fully AI generated is a large negative, and the book being uniquely created for my kid is a relatively smaller positive.

Those are definitely the highiest-order bits you need to prove to me in order to get traction. A couple of smaller things you should fix as well:

- As an English speaker, almost all the examples are not in English. You should take a reasonable guess at my language and then show me examples in my language

- It's difficult to get started: "Create your own book" leads to a signup page and I don't want to go through that friction when I am already skeptical

[storystarling]

Thanks for the blunt feedback - genuinely appreciate it.

You're right that children's books can be excellent, and for generic topics a well-reviewed book from a skilled author and illustrator will beat what we generate. No argument there.

Where we see real value is in the gaps the publishing industry doesn't serve. Bilingual families who can't find books in Maltese/English or Estonian/German. A child with an insulin pump who wants to see a superhero like them. A kid processing their parents' divorce. A child with two dads, or being adopted, or starting at a new school in a country where they don't speak the language yet. No publisher will print a run of one for these families - but these are exactly the stories that matter most to them.

On the UX points - you're right on both. We should localize the showcase to your language, and the signup wall before trying is too much friction. Working on both.

[disiplus]

As a father of two boys, i can give you some feedback. The AI stories you will generate will probably be crap and not worth paying for. What my kids love is when i put them (like i take a picture of them, and then generate them in jungle or whatever setup it is with gemini banana) They want that i print them those out, i know it's temporary but its fun for us all. So you could combine those two things.

[storystarling]

yes - we do combine those both and you can upload photos to get your kids into the book.

[johnfn]

I have to be honest with you: I am the biggest AI booster alive, and even I would never buy a book fully written by AI. Maybe ask me again in 5 years, but I just don't think the quality is there.

That being said, I think you might be on to something with the bilingual book idea - it might be worth exploring there. But if you want to keep the AI angle, you'd have to come up with a pretty clever twist.

[storystarling]

Appreciate the honesty. On bilingual - that's actually our strongest use case already. A surprising number of our orders are from multilingual families who simply can't find children's books in their language combination. That's a gap no publisher will fill because the print runs are too small.

[lelanthran]

> I posted a Show HN two days ago for a children's book generator - type a story idea, get a fully illustrated printed book shipped to you. Offered a free printed book including shipping to the HN community via voucher code. Got 7 points, 2 comments, and zero voucher redemptions. Nobody even ordered the free book.

As someone who taught their kid to read using the DISTAR alphabet, and then moved on from there, your idea just doesn't sound like it has any value.

I wrote (without LLMs) about 2 dozen "books" for 3.5yo to 5yo; none of them had any pictures in them, so having them professionally printed is a waste of time and money.

When it comes to teaching kids to read, what you need is volume, not prettiness. Your idea is appealing to only to the people who teach reading the wrong way (schools, mostly). Kids learning to read from books with pictures in them learn slower.

[haute_cuisine]

Personally, I find AI generated text disengaging. A also heard some professional writers immediately notice disorganized storytelling patterns. Have you found a way to fix this? Is there any soul in generated texts?

[mathgladiator]

Not OP, but Opus 4.6 is crazy good at writing. I generated a 500 page book, and it took until around page 275 for things to... go off rails. My strategy was to leverage ralph and a bunch of personas, and it good my act structure, major points and was able to just GO. For the first part, it was, by far, the best sci-fi book I've read. The problem is that I can tell in the writing where context collapse happened. It's fixable, but I'm now realizing I have to rethink my entire approach to it.

[storystarling]

This matches our experience. For a 28-page children's book there's no context collapse - the entire story fits comfortably in context. The format actually plays to LLMs' strengths: short, structured, clear emotional arc. It's a very different problem than generating 500 pages.

[mathgladiator]

I believe. Im going to finish the book, but it was so good until the details got confused.

I will say that a skill is developing but it requires oversight and ... honestly, i should probably read the book before buying it on Amazon.

[storystarling]

Honestly, for children's books specifically - yes. A children's book is 28 pages, simple language, short sentences, clear emotional arc. That's a very different challenge than writing a novel. We've put a lot of work into the prompting and story structure, and the results are genuinely good for this format. Parents can also edit every page of text before approving for print if they want to tweak anything.

The soul comes less from the prose and more from the fact that this story exists for this child. A book about their specific fear, their favorite thing, their family situation — that's what makes a kid ask to read it again at bedtime.

[rjh29]

AI art is massively downvoted here and on Reddit, but boomers on facebook seem happy to share it. So I think you'll do better on other platforms. The opinion of AI generated creative work is just very low here. I personally agree, I've never seen an AI generated story that was interesting and I don't want to expose my children to it. I'd rather they get real stories written by real people.

[storystarling]

Fair perspective. But the parent isn't passive here — they're the creative director. They decide what the story is about, who the hero is, what happens. The AI does a lot of the writing, yes, but the parent is the editor: they review every page, rewrite lines, regenerate illustrations they don't like. It's closer to working with a ghostwriter than pushing a button.

Most AI content feels empty because it's made for nobody in particular. A StoryStarling book is the opposite - a parent shaping a story around their specific child's world. That's a real story. They just had help telling it.

[mathgladiator]

I'm no boomer, but I'm building a pipeline to produce books in a variety of genres.

This is one chapter of a book: https://nexivibe.com/writing/chapter_01.html

People that take it seriously, are going to focus on the architecture, universe building, characters, and arc flow and then let the writing be done in a way. The power tools of the cognitive era are arriving.

I'm reading a 500 page sci-fi book and evaluating it, the first 275 pages are fantastic until I can feel the context collapse and it craps the bed.

[cyberrock]

Are you sure it's not just the delivery? If I want a storybook I don't want to wait 2 business days for it to print, ship, and deliver, and I'm sure most parents/guardians don't think that far ahead. The physical delivery factor turns your product into a mental burden.

If you (or Disney or Hasbro) shipped ebooks that unfolded when you tell it a prompt (in the format of "bibbidi bobbity boop tell me a story about an elephant"), then I'm sure it would fly off the shelves this Christmas. It doesn't even have to be expensive hardware; I'm sure you can build it with a Pi Zero with 2 cheap screens paired to an app on the parent's phone. But perhaps that's not the business you had in mind.

[storystarling]

That's a fair point about friction, but we're intentionally focused on physical books - the whole idea is to get away from screens. Most parents we talk to have the opposite problem: too much digital content, not enough tangible things. A printed book that lives on the shelf, gets read at bedtime, gets dog-eared and carried around - that's the product. You're ordering it for a birthday, a holiday, a first day of school. It's not impulse content, it's a keepsake.

[cyberrock]

I'd be a little surprised that parents who want physical storybooks would actually buy AI generated ones, instead of hoping that you dig up lost manuscripts from Hans Christian Andersen or the Disney golden age. That just seems like a contradictory audience.