Are you looking for a
website where you can create your own children’s picture books in many languages,
have your name as the author of the book, and include images from award-winning
artists in your book? Then, check out the Pratham Books StoryWeaver website.
I first heard about the StoryWeaver website in 2015. But, got interest to explore the website only in September 2020. It has been a very interesting hobby and I have so far written 125+ children’s picture books – 40 original stories, 74 translations, and 12 re-levels.
To start with, you can register your details on the website and select a display name or user name. You can include a short profile of yourself if needed. Then you are ready to create stories in StoryWeaver.
Creating Stories: It is good to write down your story first in a Word document. You can plan the arrangement and sequence of screens. Then, you can create a new story in StoryWeaver in a horizontal or vertical format. There are many layouts available for the image and text arrangement for the pages of the book. You can choose the one that is most suitable for your story.
The website has more than 47165 images drawn by famous artists, cartoonists, amateurs, and professionals. So, you can select a suitable image for each screen of your story from the existing image bank. Alternatively, you can ask an illustrator you know to draw images based on the storyboard you write in Word. Sometimes, I have drawn images and also taken photographs for the story. You can upload your images in PNG or JPEG format.
Sometimes, you get ideas for a story when you look at the existing images. One method is to select an illustrator and look at all the images they have drawn. Then you can combine a set of similar images and make a new story. I created few stories like Mala and Nila, and Arun goes to the market like that.
Once you publish a story, it will appear under your name on the website and will also be seen under New Arrivals when you select Read stories. The books are from Level 1 to Level 4 based on the number of words and difficulty of concepts. A new level for emergent readers also has been introduced.
A few of my popular stories are Chef Meena makes vegetable salad, A Giving Christmas, What Colour is this? and New Year Resolutions. I have written two gamebooks and my friend's son played the games with her for few weeks.
Few of my stories have been translated by others into Hindi, Gujrathi, Spanish, Bahasa Indonesia, Korean, and Esperanto.
To read all my stories, click here.
Translations: You can translate stories. If a translation already exists, you will get a message that a translation exists. But, you can continue to create your version of the translation. To translate from English to Tamil, for example, you can use transliteration of changathi.com website. You can type the sound of the Tamil word in English and you get the actual Tamil word as the output. Alternatively, you can use Google Translate. But, in Google Translate sometimes there is confusion between he and she. The meanings of some words are wrong and do not fit the context of the story. So, you have to rework the text that you translate. There are in-built translation suggestions in StoryWeaver.
I have translated books from English to Tamil and Tamil to English. A few of my popular translations are Good Habits, Will a Lion Brush its Teeth, and Natural Foods.
To read all my translations, click here.
Re-Level: You can re-level an existing story to a higher or lower level. You can retain the essence of the original story. Or you can change the story when you re-level. You will be using the image sequence of the original story but will give your twist to each page/screen.
A few of my popular re-levels are Buttermilk or Nimbu Pani and Zoya’s First Letter.
To read all my re-levels, click here.
Audio-Visual format of my
stories: I have joined hands with Funtist Mani to make the audio-visual
versions of my stories. I’m one of the voice artists and another voice artist
is Archana Annampedu, a school student from the United States. You can view all the videos here.
Children’s Picture Book WhatsApp Group: I have a small whatsapp group for sharing my stories. I have joined hands with a few of the child illustrators in the group to create new stories. Two of the young illustrators are 9-year-old Julakanti Ishitha Sree and 8-year-old Aanya Guntupalli. The children were very enthusiastic and completed the drawings quickly and I was very happy working with them. The children have also gone on to create their own stories in StoryWeaver.
My Book in the BookSpring Website: My picture book, "Why you need a Job" has been featured in the BookSpring website of Austin, Texas, US for a weekly theme of 'When I Grow Up' for 6 to 8 year olds. So happy about it.
CC BY 4.0 License: The
stories and images created in StoryWeaver have the Creative Commons CC B Y 4.0
license. The license allows users to share, remix, transform, and re-distribute
even for commercial purposes. The attribution to the source from StoryWeaver
has to be mentioned. You get the attribution text when you download a story
from StoryWeaver.
The news of StoryWeaver has spread far and wide and my friends in Ireland Muthamizh Mandram are exploring the website to teach Tamil to Indian kids in Ireland. With 33380 stories, 11176568 reads, and 289 languages, StoryWeaver is no wonder going places.
I have few regular and eager
readers and that motivates me to continue creating new books. If you would like
to draw illustrations for my books, please send your samples to annieblogs74@gmail.com. I can send you
a storyboard that suits your style. Happy Reading!
Thank you so much Anitha. Dont know how to thank you enough!!
ReplyDeleteAs a mother of a toddler who keeps asking for new stories during meal times- u have got me something to lay my hands on.
And the blogger in me- is enthusiatic about contributing to Storyweaver. Really look fwd to this experience - just hoping i m able to manage my time for this!
Thanks a ton.