Story Crafters - Book Making Kit for Kids - with Custom Printed Hardcover Storybook - Write Draw a Storybook - Gift for Creative Kids - Novel Writing Starter - Book Maker Drawing Kit - Boys Girls Art

I purchased this item as a gift for a very talented 9-year-old who has some amazing drawing skills and an even more amazing imagination. He gets so excited about his creativity that he often has "demonstrations" to share the cartoon strips he creates. I thought he would love the opportunity to "publish" his book and I was correct. He received this gift as a Christmas present from us, and his mom said it was the best present he got! He was so excited himself and wanted to get to creating a story for his very own book. What a gift to encourage and support such a bright young mind with so much imagination and talent!

Great kit, good customer service, convenience of using app. Final product is good, could be a little better. Overall the experience was great to good.

My son's book is amazing. This is so encouraging to middleschool story teller. They reached out to me when they noticed some of the pages were blurry, so the result would be beautiful.

EDITED TO ADD that below is my original review giving it 2 stars but immediately after posting it, customer service reached out to me to apologize and offer to remedy it. In addition to that they gave us a couple extra copies and an additional kit. The revised version was obviously done by a real person who could accurately review the text on the handwritten version and transform that into a hardcover book that looks more like a “real” book. I appreciate the detail that went into making the second version as my son he written it.4 stars only because of the original. If it had come in the first time correctly it would have been 5 stars.Original review - My 10 year old was so excited to have his book made into a hardcover “real” book. He loves creating books so I always buy him blank books to make his own typically. My son took one of his books and spent days transferring it to the story crafters pages. When he was finally done we uploaded all the pages and submitted it. However when we got the final copy (digital and hard copy) all of the text was centered. It’s a chapter book so it it should be left align. He was sad it didn’t turn out looking like a real chapter book. But he shook off his disappointment and read through all the pages of his story. He now has about 20 sticky notes on pages where there are typos and being the perfectionist he is, wants to try to white-out all the mistakes and fix them so the book is the way he wrote it. I told him we can try to get Illustory instead to see if their final product looks better than this one. What a disappointment. I got Story Crafters because it also offered the pdf version in addition to the hard copy. I won’t recommend this kit to anyone.

My daughter loves this set. It has guidelines, papers, and writing and illustrating implements to help you create your own story. I was holding off writing a review in hopes of actually including our experience submitting it for your published story, but she's a perfectionist and I don't know how long it will take, lol. Even if we never end up with an actual finished copy, it's been great for her creativity, brainstorming, and learning about editing and proofreading as she wants each page to be perfect, she drafts it and has me check it before putting it on the sheet itself. It's been great for us!

This is a fun story kit. My daughter has loved putting together the story. I can't vouch for the printed book because we haven't sent ours in yet, but she has had fun creating.

The Story Crafters - Make Your Own Book Making Kit is a fun, long-term, crafting project for the whole family. The kit includes a decent set of colored pencils and markers, an instructional booklet, and blank template pages for use in crafting the final book.The instructional booklet is actually one of the best parts of the kit. It attempts to help a young, budding, author formulate their ideas and refine their stories to maximum effect. Anyone with a young child can pretty much expect the level of "story" that might come out of their little heads, but the guidance in the booklet can help to slow the process down and really get them to start thinking about the concepts such as climax, ending, character development, and most importantly, consistency. We did skip around a little bit as one section is dedicated to coming up with several story ideas whereas our child knew right away what she wanted to focus on, but the other sections certainly helped her focus on the individual ideas and join them together in a more unified and coherent manner. Overall, the development of the story itself was a really fun family activity and we found that the guided story development introduced some critical thinking concepts and helped our child better tie her ideas together.Personally, I would consider this kit something best done in the family setting as it was a bit of a challenge to get a young child to focus on the individual writing tasks without jumping all over the place, but the structure laid out in the instructions and help from parents can keep them on track and actually combine a fun activity with a learning experience. Unfortunately, our child lost interest in the book along the way. After developing the plot, artistic ideas, and complete writing outline, she started groaning when we suggested the activity. I suppose in our case, we don't have a writer in the house. We have kept the kit around in case she decides to finish her book, or decides to start a new one now that she's older. We hope to see the final bound version of something in the future, even if that something is a collection of her childhood drawings.Overall, I personally found a lot of value in this kit. As a fun activity for the whole family to participate in, a learning experience and a craft, it was a wonderful experience even if one that wasn't completed.