Creating Value in a Niche Market Using Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In business, it is essential to create value in a niche market that satisfies a need, prompting customers to pay for solutions to their problems. I have been pondering this principle for the past week, exploring various niches. Many experts advise focusing on a niche that you are passionate about, as you are already familiar with the market, which could position yourself as an expert. In my case, I have worked with children for a decade in different educational settings, and I am passionate about reading, writing, art, and music.
After starting this personal website to document my process of building an online business empire, I realized that I love writing. My college professors would commend my writing in front of entire lecture halls and their feedback on my papers would suggest that I become a writer. So, I've always wished to make a living from writing. Furthermore, my university degrees instilled in me a commitment to social justice and decolonization in North America after learning about historical atrocities based on policies of genocide and racism. I believe much work needs to be done to decolonize our society so that Indigenization can happen without barriers, ultimately leading to reconciliation.
Decolonization is everyone's job, while Indigenization is the job of Indigenous peoples. However, Indigenous peoples cannot carry out their work properly with colonizing forces still present. This inspired me to create content that helps to decolonize our children, the next generation and society's future.
This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. In my previous post, I mentioned ChatGPT and DALL-E, two AIs created by OpenAI. Using my knowledge of working with children in educational settings, I decided to create a children's picture book about decolonization using these two AI services. I asked ChatGPT to generate a 500-word children's story about invaders and how Indigenous animals defended the land. The story will feature only animals, not humans, but it was easy to generate a script for the book.
The next step, generating images for the story, proved much harder. DALL-E does not permit consistent image creation, meaning each picture has to be prompted and produced from scratch each time. As a result, my animal characters may appear different from one page to the next. Designing a book cover also involved significant image and design editing using Canva, which is yet another online service in addition to AI, taking me more time than anticipated. Given that a typical children's picture book is 24 pages, I really need to expedite the image generation and design process next time to produce a book per week.
Once I am done with creating the content for my book, my plan is to use Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform to sell it as an e-book and print-on-demand, allowing it to be sold digitally and in print. However, figuring out the KDP publishing software and understanding the page dimensions and margins is taking me some time as well. I am sure that these learning curves will flatten once I get more into the process, and I am glad that I still find it interesting and fun after spending all morning working on it. I hope to fully publish my book to be sold on Amazon by the end of the month, so that I can order a print copy for myself and celebrate my first published book.
I anticipate copyright and licensing hurdles too when publishing this book, as well as business licensing and payments handling. But for now, I am in the creative process and enjoying it, even though my eyes are becoming sore. After completing this process, I will streamline it for the next book and so on.
In conclusion, identifying a niche market and creating value for customers is a foundational rule in business. Focusing on a niche that aligns with one's passion and expertise can position you as an expert in that field. My passion for writing, work experience with children, and commitment to social justice and decolonization inspired me to create a children's picture book about decolonization using AI. While the image generation process is presenting some challenges, this experience is teaching me valuable lessons about the self-publishing process and will help me streamline the process for future content creation in for form of books.
If you were to create children's picture books, what would your first book be about?