Be Excellent To Each Other

Sort of.

See, last night the Grimlet forgot his reading book from school, so I knocked up a quick story and sent it to my Kindle for him to read.

It was rubbish, along the lines of etc.

Anyway, he loved the shit out of it, because it had him in it. So here comes my idea.

I'll make a website where you put the name of your kid in, and maybe some friends and a place, and it spits out a shit story to your Kindle (or you can print it out). For free, obviously.

Only I'm not very good at writing children's stories. Any volunteers?

What sort of age group are we talking about and how many stories do you need?
I'm happy to give one a go.

Hey! Something I'm good at!

How can we get it to make me money.

And who will draw the pictures?

If only we had numerous talented illustrators on a convenient internet forum...

Well, I figured you'd pick good old-fashioned sexist theme (pirate, princess, dinosaur, I dunno) and then it makes a story about it. I'm not sure about age ranges - I wrote the one for the Grimlet so he could read it himself, but that gets really hard really quick if they're only learning to read.

Books for little kids (that the parents could read them) really need pictures in, though, and I doubt older kids that can read will be that interested.

So, er... Dunno, mate.

Charge for "proper" books.

Most of the books for little kids have fuck all plot anyway.

"Peppa likes bubbles! And mud!"

One of my friends bought one of my kids a book with them (and other members of the family as secondary characters) as the hero.

So that service is already out there (for printed books) it might be out there for kindles too. I dunno.

Malc

here is one site that does it

http://www.putmeinthestory.com/

Malc

Sure, but look at the prices of the bastards!

Great idea.

If it was for money.

I'm not sure it would ever make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.

I know, I'm a graphic designer.

With a clever bit of Amazon Print on Demand stuff, you could set this up to pretty much run itself. You'd just need to have some impoverished authors to exploit for the raw copy, and then you could replace some placeholders with entered information pretty easily. Send the PDF off to Amazon and get it posted straight to the client.

Ooh, I didn't know they did that. Good one.

Dunno if they do the sort of fancy full colour thing you'd want for a kiddies book though. SOMEONE must do though.

They do indeed. I figure if you charged £1.50 on top of the Amazon book price and split the cash between the web hosting, the illustrator and the author for each book sold that would be pretty reasonable, right?

Then you could open up the site for submissions from anyone.

Probably! You'd want some sort of set up fee though, as there'd be some work in getting the book into the correct format initially, and fiddling with the placeholders etc.

I'm 99% sure I can automate all that. As long as you restrict the length of the placeholders' replacements then I think it will be fine.

In other news: uh-oh.

I can likely knock you up some simple stories to get started tomorrow, if ya like. Vague direction on themes, length etc are welcome.

That would be great, but it's pretty much a guessing game at the moment. The only thing it will need is at least one "user editable" name for the "hero", and maybe more for other characters. Maybe even places. Hmm.

I'll do it anyway. The alternative is studying.

The Missus got a copy of Pride and Prejudice with her name in it instead of Elizabeth Bennett once as a birthday present. It didn't really work.

You could, with a clever bit of colour fiddling, make the kid in the pics look like the target child. Hair and skin colour, eyes, etc.

You'd need some patient illustrators

I had a book like this when I were a lad with my name and the name of a few friends substituted into the story. I think it also mentioned the street I lived on and the name of my school or something. The story very quickly contrived a reason why 'I' had to dress up as a monster or something so that the pictures could show 'me' in action while being exactly the same for every copy printed.

Aha! Smart!

Also: http://www.kidstoria.com/?q=books&gclid ... tAodgx0Abg

I'm giving thought to letting people upload photos of their kids head's and slapping them into the pictures - the hard part would be getting the user to cut the head out well enough for it not to be gash (the point to insert them onto the picture would be as simple as requiring a pixel of a certain colour that didn't show up elsewhere on the page). Skin colour would be easy, the illustrators could just have the skintone in their images be transparent, and the user could colour-pick a section of the kids face. V2, methinks.

£15! Thieving gits.

You could run the uploaded pic through some sort of Photoshop filter*. Boom! Kid's in a cartoon, or a watercolour story book from olden times, or something equally awesome.

* Probably not a Photoshop filter, but you know what I mean.

I'll get to that straight after I achieve "words on a screen"

Your mum said that.

Kids like weird stuff. Onóra keeps asking me to make up stories about her and 'Kevin the snail'. Can't for the life of me figure out how Kevin the snail came to be.

Please can the protagonist be a nice kid and not one of those whiney brats who always get their way and aren't particularly nice to their friends (yes Peppa Pig, I'm looking at you).

It used to be really simple to knock up a drag and drop 'paper doll' maker in Flash. Basically user clicks a skin colour, face shape, eye shape and colour, hair style and colour and you have a little output table image. A bit like a very simple mii-maker. People used to put them on deviant art all the time. It'd give a uniform appearance to the illustrations and eliminate risk of badly cropped pics in low res.

Seriously? Hah! One time I couldn't find the books and made up a story about Kevin the Snail. She loved it!

A good source for story variables here is the Letter to Santa type thing. They'll ask you for a name, a pet, a favourite thing, a best friend, toy wanted etc.

We should use the Beex choose-your-own-adventure thingy to generate stories.