About us
Why Fable & Kin exists.
We're parents who wrote stories for our children, and then found there was no simple way to turn them into actual books. Fable & Kin makes it simple. Whether you have a fully written story, a rough draft or just a concept, your book gets written, illustrated and printed in one place.
Writing it turned out to be the easy part
The story came first, the way it usually does. What followed was a chain of problems, and every one of them stopped us.
The words needed a polish and there was nowhere obvious to get it. Illustration quotes ran into the thousands and took months, fairly, because a full picture book is weeks of skilled work. The self-publishing tools assumed we were designers, and they are built for people launching a title rather than for someone making one book for one child. Then there was the question of how you actually get a single copy printed and bound properly.
Every step in that chain is solvable on its own. None of it is solvable by a parent with a finished story, no budget and no design software.
We have since met a lot of parents with the same story sitting in a drawer, for the same reasons.
A children's book gets read to a grown-up as well
A picture book does not get read once. It gets read at bedtime, most nights, for a year or more, by an adult who is tired and who has read it forty times already.
Almost everything in this category is made for the child alone. The books that survive that year are the ones the adult is enjoying too, and that is much easier when the book is about something that actually happened to your family. You are back at the campsite while they are hearing it for the first time.
That is the book we are trying to help you make. Not a story with your child's name dropped into it, but the one only your family has.
How the books are made
You start with whatever you have. A finished story gets laid out and illustrated, and we do not rewrite a word of it without your say so. A rough draft gets one light edit pass. An idea gets a first draft written from it, for you to cut and change until it is yours. It is your story either way, and you can edit any word of it up to the moment you approve the book.
The illustrations are AI-generated. That is what makes a one-off illustrated picture book cost what it does rather than what a commission costs, and we would rather say so here than have you find out later. You choose the style, you see every page, and you can change the ones that are not right.
The finished book is 21 × 28 cm (8 × 11″) portrait, 28 pages, printed and shipped by our print partner in the region it is going to. Nothing reaches a printer until you have seen the whole book laid out exactly as it will bind, and approved it.
What we hold ourselves to
- Your story stays yours
- We never publish, sell or share your book, and we do not use your content to train our own models. Which outside services see what, and what we can and cannot promise about them, is set out in our privacy policy rather than glossed over here.
- Pay once you've got the story right
- Your story is the most important part of the book, and it costs nothing to get it right. Write it, edit it, read it back, and see your cover and opening pages illustrated, all before you pay anything.
- You pay when the words are where you want them and you are ready for the rest of the book to be illustrated. If you never get there, you never pay.
- Nothing is printed until you say so
- You see the finished book, as it will actually print, and approve it yourself. There is no version of this where a book turns up that you have not already read.
Start with the story
Writing is free and there is no deadline, so the whole thing can begin with one evening and an idea you have been carrying around.