I Created A Children's Book Version of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"

It's Available Now on Amazon

As most of you know, my wife and I have eight children. The oldest is married with two kids of her own, and the youngest, Eli, is a couple months shy of three years old.

Something happens when you’ve been parenting for over 20 years, especially when you have a surprise baby at the tail end who is six years younger than the next youngest: stuff you take for granted that your kids all know may in fact be something you forgot to teach them because you’ve done it so many times you didn’t realize you missed it.

I had this realization the other night, when I took an upset and overtired little Eli outside at night to calm down (he loves being outside) and have a look up at the stars.

I started talking to him about Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. I asked him if he knew the song, which of course, all of our other kids know.

He did not.

And rather than just teach him in that moment, when he was overtired, I had the idea to make him a bedtime story where he could learn the rhyme by associating it with beautiful pictures.

Now, I am personally a middling artist. I can make some decent-ish drawings, and I’m not a terrible sculptor if I’m making fun little sci-fi stuff with clay. But I have tried and failed in the past to illustrate a children’s book, and because of my own ineptitude, I never finished the last attempt, which I started over a decade ago.

But now, I have access to Midjourney. I can illustrate a children’s book by simply putting in the prompts until I get the images I have in my head — or something close enough to make it work.

As it turns out, the original poem for Twinkle, Twinkle was written in the 1800s and is now in the public domain, so using the words wasn’t an issue. So I spent a few days generating images, finding the right fonts, laying everything out in Photoshop and Bookbolt and finally getting it uploaded to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing store (which does offer print-on-demand physical books as well, like the Atomic Robot coloring book I made last year.)

This time, because it’s a full-color illustrated book, I made both a physical and an e-book version. Amazon still hasn’t finished rendering the product previews and the “look inside” images — this takes up to ten days — but I wanted to share it with you in case any of you are interested in having this for your own kids. I still need to order my own copy to read to Eli, which I’ll be doing later today.

Here are some of the images so you can get a sense of what it looks like:

You get the idea.

If you’re interested, you can grab the print version of the book right here, or the electronic version right here.

Interestingly, because of the cost of the paper, the full color, the glossy finish, etc., the print version is more expensive but has a smaller profit margin than the e-book. I think I make about $1.73 per print copy, whereas on the e-book I get between $2-$4, just in case you were wondering about how the author side of such things works. (Amazon is kind of unclear about the specifics of the e-book commissions, and I’d still personally rather have the print version, because I’m old-fashioned about bedtime stories, but I’ll still be getting both.)

I’m using these children’s books as trial runs to understand how these things are put together and uploaded for sale in preparation for my plans to publish novels and other works for adults.

If you do purchase one of these books, it would be a huge help if you could also leave a review, no matter how brief. It helps others to make the decision to purchase.

I hope you’ll check them out!