Generated by Midjourney
I have been exploring passive income options. There have been countless articles, videos, and reels about generating passive income using AI, and I thought why not try it out?
I wanted to explore Children’s book illustration using ChatGPT, Midjourney and Amazon KDP but it is a lot of effort. First, the generated stories need to be edited so that it is easy to understand. Second, it takes a few different prompts to create a scene. I have seen Midjourney Artists who create a singular prompt with characters and background, but often the generated is not too great, especially with hands. In the end, photo editing and manipulation are needed to make it look polished. Third, Amazon KDP has new requirements regarding AI-generated content, which threw the spanner in the works.
With these challenges, I decided to go back to the drawing board. I researched again on low-content books and journals are one of them. I am quite reflective in nature, and I thought that I could try it out since I love writing and drawing using prompts. While I was happy to try something different, I had some doubts. How am I going to put myself and the product out there with so much competition? I am not a psychologist, how are people going to trust me if I created this journal with the help of AI?
1. Getting the idea
I dug deep into myself and I realised there was no reflective journal for postgraduate students. Most of the books are centred on writing and managing your time, writing, and physical health as a postgraduate student but not on mental health.
I wished I had that journal for myself and I hope maybe I could help others with it. With the goal of creating something specific for researchers in mind, I decided to generate some prompts.
2. Generating journal prompts using ChatGPT
I started with this prompt, “Write a few journal reflection prompts for postgraduate student facing struggles in their studies.”
ChatGPT generated a few prompts with descriptions. While the first round was decent, I generated some more to see different variations. Some of the prompts were similar but worded similarly, and I had to categorise and edit them. I put some of the prompts into Quillbot to rephrase some of the sentences. After rephrasing the sentences, I put them into Grammarly to make sure they are grammatically correct.
3. Generating titles using ChatGPT
After generating the journal prompts, I prompted ChatGPT to generate titles out of the journal prompts that I created earlier. Some titles were hit-and-miss, and I had to select a title that was closest to the product that I wanted to sell. Some of the generated titles had suggested imagery, but I felt it was too generic.
4. Generating book cover using Midjourney
The concept I had in mind was messiness with papers and books. Some of us do go through the mess in life without processing it. Instead, we numbed our emotions and just shoulder through the struggles of research. I decided to generate a collage illustration image with geometric patterns with books and papers. Since I was going to the journal in both A4 and letter, I generated the image with the code –ar 5:7, which is a vertical image with the ratio of 5:7. It fits very well as an A4 template and just minor tweaks for a letter version.
5. Putting them all of them together with Affinity Publisher
I was a UI/UX designer in the past, which means I hardly touched Adobe Indesign or Affinity Publisher. However, the pages in the journal are repeated, and I wanted to maintain consistency in the font sizes, spacing and margins. I had to learn Affinity Publisher from scratch and made many mistakes. Once I got the hang of it, everything worked really fast, especially after creating the master pages.
6. Uploading on Gumroad
My husband suggested that I upload it on Gumroad because it was good for selling digital products compared to Etsy. I personally felt Etsy barrier of entry was harder because I had to key in a lot of shipping details before I could sell my product. At this point, I am not making any sales on Gumroad yet and I need to start marketing my product.
Conclusion
Here is some of my experiences creating a journal using ChatGPT and Midjourney. It was an interesting process and I know it can always be better, but if I do not post up my first product, how am I going to improve and learn from my mistakes.
And if you want to support me, you can buy the Reflective Journal for postgraduate researchers on Gumroad. Thank you!
