Vivlore and the Lost Vikings: making a kids' book with AI, start to finish

This is the story of how a book called Vivlore and the Lost Vikings went from a five-minute idea to a printed hardback, using nothing but a laptop, an AI chat assistant, an AI image tool, and about an evening's worth of attention split over a week. It is a worked example, not a real family's book, but every step in it is exactly what you'd do with your own.

If you've ever thought "I'd love to make my child a book, but I can't write and I definitely can't draw," this series is for you. You don't need either skill anymore. You need an idea, some patience with prompts, and a place to put the finished thing. That last part is what Vivlore is for.

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The idea

It started with a name a toddler had given his toy longship in the bath: the Lost Vikings. That was the whole premise. A crew of small, brave, slightly hapless Vikings, lost somewhere they shouldn't be, trying to find their way home.

That is genuinely enough to start. A picture book doesn't need a plot twist or a moral. It needs a hero you like, a world you can picture, and a shape to the trouble they get into. The anatomy of a children's picture book is five parts: once upon a time, the world, the trouble, the turning point, and happily ever after. The Lost Vikings idea already had the first two for free. The rest came from asking an AI assistant good questions about it, which is Part 2 of this series.

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The three ingredients

Making an AI-assisted picture book leans on three things, each covered in its own part of this series:

A storyline, built with an AI chat assistant like Claude, shaped around the five-part arc, then cut down to one line per page, the way a real picture book reads. Covered in Part 2: writing a kids' book storyline with AI.

Illustrations, a cover, and a back cover, built with an AI image generator, kept visually consistent from page to page so it reads like one book and not twelve different ones. Covered in Part 3: AI illustrations and covers for a kids' book.

A place to build and print it, which is where Vivlore comes in. Nothing about AI-generated text or images automatically becomes a book. Someone still has to lay it out page by page, get the pacing right, and turn it into something a child can actually hold. That's the part Vivlore does for you.

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Why AI plus Vivlore, and not one or the other

An AI assistant is extraordinary at generating raw material fast, a plot, a page of dialogue, a dozen illustration options, and terrible at knowing when to stop. Left alone, it will happily write you three thousand words when a picture book wants sixty. It will generate a beautiful illustration that looks nothing like the one before it. It has no idea what a square hardback trim looks like, or where a spine sits, or that a three-year-old needs one clear image per page, not a busy spread.

Vivlore is the opposite. It knows the shape a picture book has to take, the kids' template is built on the same five-part arc mentioned above, page by page, one picture per page. It just doesn't write your story or draw your pictures for you.

Put together, the AI does the generating, and Vivlore does the shaping. You're the editor in the middle, picking the good lines, picking the images that match, deciding what actually goes on the page. That's less work than writing or illustrating a book yourself, and it produces something better than either half alone.

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What you'll end up with

By the end of this series you'll have a complete method: an AI-written storyline broken into pages, AI-generated illustrations for each one plus a front and back cover, and a real Vivlore book built from them, ready to read on screen or order as a printed hardback from £34.99.

The Lost Vikings never did find their way home in a hurry, that would have made for a very short book, but by the last page they did, and there is now a physical copy of that on a shelf. Yours can exist by next week.

Start with Part 2: writing a kids' book storyline with AI, or if you'd rather skip straight to building, start a kids' picture book for free and bring your pages in as you make them.