About
A small publisher, not a print-on-demand funnel.
Two books, written properly, printed properly, and sold on one honest price. Everything below is checkable, including the parts where the honest answer is “we cannot claim that yet”.
MATVAN INC., trading as Mini Storyteller, registered in Delaware, United States.
Why the book comes before the money.
Every other shop in this category asks for a card and then shows you what you bought. We think that is backwards, and we think it is backwards for a commercial reason as well as a moral one: a personalised children’s book is only worth $40.00 if it is actually good, and the only way for you to know that is to read a real half of it first.
So the first half of the book is free to read, every page of it, with nothing withheld from those pages. The rest of the story comes with either keepsake: the file, or the hardcover for the parent who wants the object. If the first half does not earn that, we would rather you closed the tab than felt tricked into a purchase.
Nothing about a real child ever appears on this website, in an advertisement, or on social media. Every illustration you see here is from a house demo book about a made-up child.
Credits
Who and what makes your book.
A book with no named maker is a book nobody is answerable for. Here is the whole production chain, including the machine.
- Stories
- Written in-house by the Mini Storyteller studio. Every word of both worlds is hand-authored prose — there is no language model anywhere in the story engine, which is why nothing your child reads was invented on the fly and two children given the same story get exactly the same words.
- Illustration
- Every illustration in your book is generated by an AI image model from the photograph you upload, then checked page by page against your child’s character sheet so the same child appears in every scene.
- Art direction
- The house style — soft, hand-modelled, warm-lit, the hero small in a large world — is fixed by us, and every generated plate is checked against it and against your child’s character sheet before you see the book.
- Typefaces
- Fraunces, by Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi at Undercase Type, for everything read aloud. DM Sans, by Colophon Foundry, for everything functional. Both are open-licensed and served from our own servers, so no font company is told which pages you read.
- Printing and binding
- Lulu, on a premium colour press, 7 × 10 inch casewrap. Manufacturing in three to five business days, then a tracked carrier.
- Payments and tax
- Stripe, including sales-tax calculation. We never see a card number.
Not yet
4 things a buyer should be able to check, and cannot.
These are not decisions, they are gaps. A reviewer comparing us with anyone else in this category would find them, so we would rather list them than be caught holding them.
- A named author
- The stories are written in-house and no individual is credited by name yet. A book with an unnamed author is a book nobody is answerable for, and we hold the benchmark to that standard, so we hold ourselves to it: the byline is coming, and it will appear in the printed colophon as well as here.
- A named illustrator
- The illustrations are generated by an AI image model under our art direction. We say that plainly everywhere art appears, but we do not yet name the model or the art director, and both are nameable facts rather than secrets.
- A postal address
- We publish the operating company and the jurisdiction it is registered in, and not a street address. There is nothing at ours for a customer to walk into, which is a reason not to invite you and not a reason to withhold it.
- A support channel that is not e-mail
- One address, answered by a person within one business day, is the whole of our support. A telephone number nobody staffs would be worse than no number, so the honest position is that this is a staffing decision we have not taken yet.
And the numbers, which we have not counted.
- Books printed
- We have not published a count of books printed, because we have not built the aggregate that would count them and we will not estimate one. It is the number a shopper most wants and the easiest number in this category to inflate.
- Families who have read one
- Also uncounted. In the meantime the check is better than a number: a complete finished book is public on this site, so you can verify the product yourself instead of taking a stranger’s word for it.
- Reviews
- None, anywhere, deliberately. We have no third-party review profile, and self-hosted stars with a “verified” tick and no verification are the thing we are trying not to be. When there is a profile you can audit independently, we will link it and not before.
Deliberate absences
4 things we have decided not to have.
No public gallery of other people’s children
It is the obvious growth loop in this category and we will not have it. A gallery requires collecting children’s likenesses in order to display them, and nothing about a real child is ever going to appear on a public surface of ours.
No press logos
We have no press coverage, so there is no row of network logos on this site. When there is coverage, each logo will link to the article it refers to.
No star ratings yet
We have no reviews, so we show none. When we do collect them, they will live on a platform we do not control, with a public profile you can check, rather than as numbers typed into our own database.
No countdown timers, scarcity or exit popups
The book either earns its place after you have read the first half for free, or it does not. Pressure would only be useful if the product were not.
Read one and judge for yourself.
It is the whole argument of the company, and it costs nothing to test.
Reaching a person is one address: hello@ministoryteller.com. More ways to get hold of us are on the contact page.