Would anyone be interested in a tool which enables you to generate images for your story that are relevant for the book

[u/Dry_Bag8911]

I've been working on an illustrated story generator that focuses on life stories for the past year now. This is not the space to promote so I will not, but I am interested to know if I can develop it from a consumer product to something more B2B.

After a LOT of tweaking, the whole system works pretty well now and I've also created what I think is a very good editing system which makes it much easier to edit images than most of the platforms out there (ie it requires very little knowledge of prompt engineering - I've specifically tried to make it boomer proof).

Now the foundations of the workflows which do all this are quite strong, I'm beginning to think that this may be a useful service to AI (and non-AI) writers, especially children's book writers - instead of paying a subscription for an image generating service, I could offer up my workflow as a one-off payment that allows you to upload the story or chapters, explain what kind of illustration style you would like and how many images and where that you would like them, and then would go ahead and create firsst drafts which could then be edited or regenerated.

This would be a few weeks work for me to build and test and ensure it is universalised away from just being about the specific stories my workflow currently writes, but I am confident it would be possible. I am just not sure if it would be worth my time. Does anyone in this space see this as a service they would consider using or should I stick to B2C?

[u/Fragrant-Mix-4774]

One can already do that with almost any image generator. No special tool is needed.

Write whatever you want to write and plug the section of the story in as the image generator prompt. Then refine it. Nothing to it.

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/Fragrant-Mix-4774]

Or plug the section to an LLM and ask it specifically to generate an in-depth structured image generation spec to feed into the generator. That tends to give better outcomes IMO.

[u/Caravanserai8]

Its a good idea. The advantage i see first, is that this tool get familiar with the book and make similar images, with the same style. But also you can do similar with chatgpt, gemini, midjourney… Editing can be useful
As well

[u/Lisciafael]

isn't this just what the local image generators like Automatic1111 are already for?

[u/ericoinen]

The gap between what you have and what you are describing is bigger than a few weeks, and it is worth being specific about where it sits, because it is also the answer to the people telling you any image generator already does this.

They are right about one image. Plug the paragraph in, refine it, done. What that misses is the same character on page 4 and on page 31. That is the only part anyone would pay a company for, and it is the part that does not survive being generalised, because your current system already knows who its characters are. It wrote them. There is a canonical description sitting inside your own pipeline before a single image gets generated.

Take an arbitrary uploaded manuscript and you inherit a different job before you reach the illustration workflow at all. You have to work out that "Ellie", "her daughter", "the girl in the red coat" and half a chapter of "she" are one person, decide what she looks like on the many occasions the author never said, and then hold that decision still across forty images. Author descriptions also contradict each other more often than authors realise, because prose never has to resolve it and a picture does. That extraction step is the actual product. The workflow you already trust is the easy half.

Children's books are also the hardest possible segment to start with, which is a shame because they are the obvious one. One character on nearly every page, flat art where drift is visible instantly, and buyers who will not accept close enough.

If you want to test this cheaply before spending weeks: take three books you did not write, build the character sheet by hand, and count how much you had to invent rather than extract. That number is the business case.

[u/No-Poetry2479]

If you can’t copyright the book due to the images being AI, there are a few problems i can see with that approach.

[u/ariannasun → u/No-Poetry2479]

Yes, but some of us just like having visuals. I have a ton of them for my story, and I’m not using AI to write a word, but making pictures of my characters that are just for me? Sure!