Your family’s true story, as a picture book.

We draft the text with AI from your answers and make the pictures with AI image tools from written descriptions. A person at Family Books looks over every book before you get the link, and you approve it before it is printed. No photograph of anyone is given to an AI. How it’s made has the detail on what that person looks at.

They follow your description as closely as we can make them: hair, glasses, clothes, how someone stands. They are illustrations, not portraits, and we can’t promise a likeness. You see every page before it’s printed. If a picture isn’t right, send the book back with notes.

It doesn’t expect any shape. You tell us who is in the story as your child knows them: names, how each person is related to your child and what your child calls them.

No. It can be your child’s own story, or a family story told to them: how you met, a grandparent’s childhood, where your family comes from, someone you miss. It’s still written for your child, ages 4 to 8, and your child is in it: in a family story, on the first and last pages, hearing it.

Yes. The form asks who you are to the child, and asks you to confirm that you’re the child’s parent or guardian, or that you have their permission to make the book.

The first page of your book, with its text and its picture, and who’s in your book and how we plan to draw them. We email you a private link to it. You don’t pay, and you don’t have to order.

Yes. On the longer questions you can tap Record and talk, up to 10 minutes each and three recordings in all. A recording stays in your browser until you press Send. We turn it into text on our own computer; it never goes to an outside AI service. The privacy page has the detail.

On the story form’s first question, press Get a code and call the number it shows. An AI voice asks the questions, and each answer you confirm appears on your form, for you to check and send. The call goes through Retell, an outside phone service, with Anthropic’s Claude. The privacy page says how calls are handled.

If you decide to order, with the Order button on your first page. The book is $129 for two hardcover copies of the same book, US shipping included. Stripe asks for your shipping address when you pay.

Only a few books can. Send the form by the end of November 20 and tick the Christmas box near the end. The rest is under For Christmas, in How it works. When the places are full, or if it turns out there isn’t time, we close the option and say so on this page. If a delay on our side puts a Christmas book at risk, we pay for faster shipping.

Not this year. The Christmas places are closed. Books started now follow our usual timing: the first page usually within an hour, then about two to three weeks from your order to your door.

Not this year. We’re not taking new books right now.

Nothing is printed until you approve the book. Until then, you can change the text yourself as often as you like.

For anything else, send it back with your notes, and a person at Family Books fixes it and sends it back to you. You can send it back twice, and if it still isn’t right, or we can’t fix it, you get a full refund. If you don’t approve the book or send it back within 60 days of it being ready, we refund you in full and don’t print it.

If a copy arrives damaged or misprinted, or doesn’t arrive, use the link in our shipping email and we’ll send a free replacement. It works once, for 60 days after delivery.

Your answers are stored on our own server, only to make your book. Ask us at any time and we delete them. If you don’t order within 60 days of your free first page, we delete them and the first page anyway. The privacy page says who else sees them and how long we keep a finished book’s files.

Family Books is part of HermesWrite, a company that makes writing software. This is the first run of the books, so we take a few at a time. Write to admin@hermeswrite.com with any question.