I've been reading with great interest other contributors' ongoing tales of their fastlane business progress and thought I would put up my story so far. I can't say it could be described as 'fastlane', rather lost in the fog, traffic jams, breakdowns, collisions and we've yet to get on the slip road (onramp) to the motorway (freeway). Apologies for this being a mini novel in size.
From where we are now, I can say that had we known what were embarking on we would never have started, but perhaps not knowing was good. Because we did start and we have seen it through over the past two years and are now about to launch our business.
I'm 57 and my new partner, Amanda, is 56. I have worked all my life as a freelance illustrator and Amanda was a university lecturer. While freelancing has paid the bills over the years unless you have a very lucky breakout success it has a limited upper income level. Over the years I've tried various ventures to break away and create my own publishing system, from my pen directly to the customer. Amanda and I tried self publishing children's books on Amazon in 2017. Although we got it working it was difficult to get exposure on the platform, ads drained almost all of the profit and we had complaints about the shoddy print quality of the final product. A chance freelance job gave us another idea.
After Amazon, I went back to freelance illustration to bring some money in. Some of my work was illustrating 'vanity' books for private self publishing clients. We were amazed that one of my clients, a sweet grandmother, was willing to pay £2.5K for me to illustrate and print one book just for her grandchildren. And so we stumbled on the idea of personalised children's books, but only if we could figure out a way to automate and scale it.
The idea
Personalised children's books. A website where a user inputs their child's name, creates a visual illustration of the child (choosing skin and eye colour, hairstyle and colour), and then the book is printed with the child as the hero both in the illustrations and the text. A personalised print-on-demand system similar to T-shirt print on demand (POD), but for books. A quick web search revealed that there were already some established companies doing this and doing very well, in fact a couple of them had appeared on Dragon's Den and enthusiastically received funding.The market
At first we were disappointed. Others had had the idea already, nothing is new under the sun! However, as I have often read on these forums, it's all in the execution. We felt we could use our skills, Amanda is a writer, I'm an artist, to create original titles that would add to this burgeoning market. Also, unlike POD T-shirts, mugs, etc. the potential market is far from saturated. (we were to find out why! The 'E' in CENTS!) We did some further research and found that the market for personalised products at large is expanding. Add to that personalised books can be priced at 3-4 times that of regular books. After production costs this roughly equated to a 70% profit margin before marketing costs.
Ok, so how?
We needed a web front end where users could input their child's name, choose things like skin tone, hair style, clothing, etc. Rather like a 'dress the doll' system seen in RPG video games. Then generate a flickbook of the whole book for customers to review. On purchase their choices then need to be sent to a server where an automated system would compile a print resolution PDF of the book and send it to a POD print house. The print house then packages and posts it to the customer. Easy? Easyish? We searched about for some existing app or system that could do all this but couldn't find anything.
Ok, now how?
Amanda's son, Isaac, was half way through a computer science degree course and could take a year off 'in industry' to gain experience. We thought this would be perfect and he joined us in the venture. It was summer 2020 and we thought we could get the whole thing up and running with 5-6 books for the Christmas market. WE WERE COMPLETELY WRONG!
Realisation
It was dawning on us that we had bitten off way more than we could chew. I had only sketched a rough idea of how it could work but it was a way bigger project than we had imagined. The devil is in the detail. We were running on modest savings and could no way near afford to employ a whole team of professionals who would normally be expected to deliver a project of this size. I'd been playing around in my hobby time trying to learn game programming in a free open source app called GDevelop. I wondered if I could use it to get a prototype client side app running. The idea being to make something, anything, work as we'd already lost a year. In this time I'd been illustrating 3 titles and put a ton of work into drawing all the variations of the character as they appear on each page. Figuring out and managing the hundreds of layers and files was massive job in itself. I messed around in GDevelop and to my surprise managed to get an avatar (dress the doll) system running and a couple of pages of a book preview working.
In the cloud
The server side programming was the big issue. Isaac couldn't do it and was due to return to uni. We wondered about trying to learn it ourselves but knew now it would take us months if not years to become proficient enough. We wondered if we could find a freelance programmer who would consider taking it on. A couple of hours searching on the net and I found a hopeful candidate, Mike. To my amazement he was interested and considered our meagre funding would cover the work. Actually he thought we were mad trying to rubber band and sticky tape all these components in this way, but also thought it a clever and intriguing way to bootstrap such a large project.
More issues
We were back on the road, just. Mike was brilliant and has really put in a good deal more work than we could pay him for. (If this takes off we will reward him 10 fold!) Bit by bit he wired up the various components. In the meantime we had to make the full client side app. We realised that we had made a big error in that we had 3 books, each with different requirements on the go, resulting in the need for 3 separate apps. We should have just done one, got it working, then used that knowledge to do the others. Also one of the books had two characters that could be personalised, a father and child. Of course men can have beards, as well as hair, and in several styles. This resulted in over a thousand separate graphic files and combinations into the millions. It was so confusing!
Rocky path
At some point because I had so much work on the graphic files Amanda took over the programming with zero programming knowledge. Picture this, we work in our bedroom. Me on the desk and Amanda sitting in bed on a laptop, all day every day. We screwed up a giant white board covering the whole of one wall where we scrawl never ending to do lists. We weren't dealing with just figuring all this out but also how to work together and how our relationship works. I feared, and still fear, that I had dragged Amanda down a very rocky path, but in truth she and I have found a wonderful creative common purpose. Fortunately she is about 100 times more intelligent than me, enjoys puzzle solving and is a lot more of a perfectionist, all the attributes required in programming.
We didn't realise it, but designing the app has so many more things to account for than just the programming. The user interface went through countless changes, much optimising of graphic files to minimise the download, precise positioning of elements, on and on, and the big nasty one, mobile devices. There are no standards with mobile screen dimensions and users can turn the screen from portrait to landscape. We were still using the game making program which needed extra programming to handle responsiveness. Amanda struggled with this for ages eventually realising she could use the inbuilt way games work, with virtual targets and cameras. Still, it was complex, requiring many rewrites of hundreds of lines of instructions.
Goal?
We are nearly ready to launch. I feel that we are only just beginning our journey to the final goal. Just a minute, what is that goal? We talk about this a lot. We're both in our 50s, live modestly, happily and have no interest in the 'high life'. Aside from basic income security we want to build an automated publishing system that we fully own and control, and is direct to customer with no gate keepers. A system that we can use to publish our own original children's books, and we have so many ideas waiting this wings. Right now Amanda is sitting at her bed-desk writing a personalised novel for pre-teens where the reader is the hero, as far as we know a first and something no traditional publisher has done. Although building all this has been a massive two year mission we now have a complete system template to publish new titles with relative ease (hopefully!)
It is just the beginning, and we may get on the highway only to find we are travelling in the wrong direction, or our sticky tape and rubber band powered vehicle falls to bits. There are many uncertainties. A large corporate publisher with deep pockets to fund development may eye the personalised book business, but even so, in publishing there are many small thriving publishers. There is room. Much of this description has been about developing a system but that will be irrelevant to the kids reading their adventures in the books. That is where our mettle will be really tested in the quality of our stories and pictures.
Through trial and many errors we have effectively built a complete, customisable, scalable, publishing system from user to print with negligible overheads. We did it all ourselves, apps, website, writing, illustration, we even designed our own fonts from scratch.
Each time I say that we are almost ready to launch another unforeseen issue appears, but these are now whittled down to a few minor tweaks. We've seen the sign for the freeway and are ready to put our foot down.
You can see our website and play with customising the books at wowthatsme.com. The system is live, but we are still running final tests so please don't actually buy a book! I'll post on this thread when our 'doors' open, probably in a 2-3 weeks. At first we are only supplying to the UK but the system is scalable in that we can hook up to POD print houses easily in other territories when we are ready to expand.
I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts.
From where we are now, I can say that had we known what were embarking on we would never have started, but perhaps not knowing was good. Because we did start and we have seen it through over the past two years and are now about to launch our business.
I'm 57 and my new partner, Amanda, is 56. I have worked all my life as a freelance illustrator and Amanda was a university lecturer. While freelancing has paid the bills over the years unless you have a very lucky breakout success it has a limited upper income level. Over the years I've tried various ventures to break away and create my own publishing system, from my pen directly to the customer. Amanda and I tried self publishing children's books on Amazon in 2017. Although we got it working it was difficult to get exposure on the platform, ads drained almost all of the profit and we had complaints about the shoddy print quality of the final product. A chance freelance job gave us another idea.
After Amazon, I went back to freelance illustration to bring some money in. Some of my work was illustrating 'vanity' books for private self publishing clients. We were amazed that one of my clients, a sweet grandmother, was willing to pay £2.5K for me to illustrate and print one book just for her grandchildren. And so we stumbled on the idea of personalised children's books, but only if we could figure out a way to automate and scale it.
The idea
Personalised children's books. A website where a user inputs their child's name, creates a visual illustration of the child (choosing skin and eye colour, hairstyle and colour), and then the book is printed with the child as the hero both in the illustrations and the text. A personalised print-on-demand system similar to T-shirt print on demand (POD), but for books. A quick web search revealed that there were already some established companies doing this and doing very well, in fact a couple of them had appeared on Dragon's Den and enthusiastically received funding.The market
At first we were disappointed. Others had had the idea already, nothing is new under the sun! However, as I have often read on these forums, it's all in the execution. We felt we could use our skills, Amanda is a writer, I'm an artist, to create original titles that would add to this burgeoning market. Also, unlike POD T-shirts, mugs, etc. the potential market is far from saturated. (we were to find out why! The 'E' in CENTS!) We did some further research and found that the market for personalised products at large is expanding. Add to that personalised books can be priced at 3-4 times that of regular books. After production costs this roughly equated to a 70% profit margin before marketing costs.
Ok, so how?
We needed a web front end where users could input their child's name, choose things like skin tone, hair style, clothing, etc. Rather like a 'dress the doll' system seen in RPG video games. Then generate a flickbook of the whole book for customers to review. On purchase their choices then need to be sent to a server where an automated system would compile a print resolution PDF of the book and send it to a POD print house. The print house then packages and posts it to the customer. Easy? Easyish? We searched about for some existing app or system that could do all this but couldn't find anything.
Ok, now how?
Amanda's son, Isaac, was half way through a computer science degree course and could take a year off 'in industry' to gain experience. We thought this would be perfect and he joined us in the venture. It was summer 2020 and we thought we could get the whole thing up and running with 5-6 books for the Christmas market. WE WERE COMPLETELY WRONG!
Realisation
It was dawning on us that we had bitten off way more than we could chew. I had only sketched a rough idea of how it could work but it was a way bigger project than we had imagined. The devil is in the detail. We were running on modest savings and could no way near afford to employ a whole team of professionals who would normally be expected to deliver a project of this size. I'd been playing around in my hobby time trying to learn game programming in a free open source app called GDevelop. I wondered if I could use it to get a prototype client side app running. The idea being to make something, anything, work as we'd already lost a year. In this time I'd been illustrating 3 titles and put a ton of work into drawing all the variations of the character as they appear on each page. Figuring out and managing the hundreds of layers and files was massive job in itself. I messed around in GDevelop and to my surprise managed to get an avatar (dress the doll) system running and a couple of pages of a book preview working.
In the cloud
The server side programming was the big issue. Isaac couldn't do it and was due to return to uni. We wondered about trying to learn it ourselves but knew now it would take us months if not years to become proficient enough. We wondered if we could find a freelance programmer who would consider taking it on. A couple of hours searching on the net and I found a hopeful candidate, Mike. To my amazement he was interested and considered our meagre funding would cover the work. Actually he thought we were mad trying to rubber band and sticky tape all these components in this way, but also thought it a clever and intriguing way to bootstrap such a large project.
More issues
We were back on the road, just. Mike was brilliant and has really put in a good deal more work than we could pay him for. (If this takes off we will reward him 10 fold!) Bit by bit he wired up the various components. In the meantime we had to make the full client side app. We realised that we had made a big error in that we had 3 books, each with different requirements on the go, resulting in the need for 3 separate apps. We should have just done one, got it working, then used that knowledge to do the others. Also one of the books had two characters that could be personalised, a father and child. Of course men can have beards, as well as hair, and in several styles. This resulted in over a thousand separate graphic files and combinations into the millions. It was so confusing!
Rocky path
At some point because I had so much work on the graphic files Amanda took over the programming with zero programming knowledge. Picture this, we work in our bedroom. Me on the desk and Amanda sitting in bed on a laptop, all day every day. We screwed up a giant white board covering the whole of one wall where we scrawl never ending to do lists. We weren't dealing with just figuring all this out but also how to work together and how our relationship works. I feared, and still fear, that I had dragged Amanda down a very rocky path, but in truth she and I have found a wonderful creative common purpose. Fortunately she is about 100 times more intelligent than me, enjoys puzzle solving and is a lot more of a perfectionist, all the attributes required in programming.
We didn't realise it, but designing the app has so many more things to account for than just the programming. The user interface went through countless changes, much optimising of graphic files to minimise the download, precise positioning of elements, on and on, and the big nasty one, mobile devices. There are no standards with mobile screen dimensions and users can turn the screen from portrait to landscape. We were still using the game making program which needed extra programming to handle responsiveness. Amanda struggled with this for ages eventually realising she could use the inbuilt way games work, with virtual targets and cameras. Still, it was complex, requiring many rewrites of hundreds of lines of instructions.
Goal?
We are nearly ready to launch. I feel that we are only just beginning our journey to the final goal. Just a minute, what is that goal? We talk about this a lot. We're both in our 50s, live modestly, happily and have no interest in the 'high life'. Aside from basic income security we want to build an automated publishing system that we fully own and control, and is direct to customer with no gate keepers. A system that we can use to publish our own original children's books, and we have so many ideas waiting this wings. Right now Amanda is sitting at her bed-desk writing a personalised novel for pre-teens where the reader is the hero, as far as we know a first and something no traditional publisher has done. Although building all this has been a massive two year mission we now have a complete system template to publish new titles with relative ease (hopefully!)
It is just the beginning, and we may get on the highway only to find we are travelling in the wrong direction, or our sticky tape and rubber band powered vehicle falls to bits. There are many uncertainties. A large corporate publisher with deep pockets to fund development may eye the personalised book business, but even so, in publishing there are many small thriving publishers. There is room. Much of this description has been about developing a system but that will be irrelevant to the kids reading their adventures in the books. That is where our mettle will be really tested in the quality of our stories and pictures.
Through trial and many errors we have effectively built a complete, customisable, scalable, publishing system from user to print with negligible overheads. We did it all ourselves, apps, website, writing, illustration, we even designed our own fonts from scratch.
Each time I say that we are almost ready to launch another unforeseen issue appears, but these are now whittled down to a few minor tweaks. We've seen the sign for the freeway and are ready to put our foot down.
You can see our website and play with customising the books at wowthatsme.com. The system is live, but we are still running final tests so please don't actually buy a book! I'll post on this thread when our 'doors' open, probably in a 2-3 weeks. At first we are only supplying to the UK but the system is scalable in that we can hook up to POD print houses easily in other territories when we are ready to expand.
I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts.
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