About to launch - personalised children's books

[Happyheart]

Update. It's been a while since I posted here.

We sent out free gift virtual cards to some people we know with small children to claim a free book for the purposes I outlined in my last post. It was interesting how we had to prod people to even bother to open the email. I suspect that for a large proportion of the public email is no longer their main communication point. I also wonder if the, 'Oh no, Leo and Amanda have written something, it'll be amateur junk I'll have to nice about', thing was at play here too. However, once people had used the card and received their book the reaction was genuine delight with offers to help, write glowing reviews, etc.

The most useful help we have received has been videos and photos of them opening the package and reading with their kids. This material has been invaluable for creating marketing assets providing social proof as they were not slick studio made but were genuine home produced reactions.

With Christmas fast approaching we had no social media reach at all and only a couple of 'proper' sales from people we didn't know. We decided to sink our last savings into Google Ads. We researched and researched and came to the realisation that we just couldn't handle this on our own. Google Ads are so complex and they seem to change and add new products daily. If we make even a small mistake we could be pouring our meagre savings down the drain. Of all the research we did we found the most compelling, up to date and genuine advice was being produced by a US ad agency called Solutions 8. As an agency they deal with big pocket accounts but as it happens they were just opening a low cost solution for small companies with limited budgets. To keep costs down they do not produce assets or do 'hand holding', instead they act more as advisors and guides. I think this is critical because every business has different marketing objectives and requirements and it's this advice specific to your business that is valuable and can't be found in general 'how to' books, videos and blogs.

We signed up! And as of today our ads are running at about £100 per day.

We had to do a ton of work to prepare the ad assets including videos, images, copy, etc. along with a bunch of other technical improvements to the website to fit Google's requirements. Some of the work was also beyond us so I employed a Fiverr to do things like speed up the website and harden it against hacking attacks. They were brilliant to work with and quick. Shout out to Kreativopro! The video ads were something, Amanda learnt Da Vinci Resolve from zero and nearly melted her old laptop producing them.

I have to say that so far it seems like the right decision this time to employ an agency. Solutions 8 have been so attentive and helpful guiding us through the process. I guess we'll only know with time if it pays off.

Check out one of our video ads I'd love to know what you think.

Love the video!
Your story is very interesting to me, because I am working on a similar project in a wholly different niche.
Your adaptable graphic is very nice! Good luck to you with the project!

 

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[Leo Hartas]

I don't have kids, but this sounds like a great concept that I would think would resonate with a lot of parents. The children's book space seems like a hard nut to crack, but I'm interested to see how you will fair, with your unique skew. Good luck, hope to hear some great results!

Thanks MJ. The harder the nut the sweeter fruit!

It's not an original concept but even with the established competition the market is potentially broad with space for a new entrant. We hope our skew in this particular market is better quality writing and illustration as the competition has been riding more on the gimmick of personalisation. The most established and largest competitor was started by tech people rather than children's book creators. We're the other way round.

Despite the competition having been very successful most people still haven't heard of the concept so a lot of our marketing has to be educating them to the idea.. still, it shows that the potential market is far from saturated.

 

[Leo Hartas]

I really appreciate everything that you and Amanda have developed in this endeavor. It is a project that has demanded a lot.

Videos are not my specialty, but I think Amanda made a nice video ads.

Great work!

Thanks Capito, Your continued encouragement is very much appreciated.

It's interesting with the video, as although Amanda made it for the ad campaign, we had done a lot of research into starting a YT channel to organically bring people in, but realised it would take so much work and attention to gain traction that we dropped the idea. Instead we are only going to concentrate on Pinterest and the Ads. I think you have to choose your battles carefully in social media or you end spread too thin.

 

[Leo Hartas]

Love the video!
Your story is very interesting to me, because I am working on a similar project in a wholly different niche.
Your adaptable graphic is very nice! Good luck to you with the project!

Thank you for your kind words Happyheart, and good luck with your project too. The adaptable graphics have been a massive amount of learning. We made many wrong turns but with each new book we're refining the production pipeline. For example just this morning I've been making the layers document for our latest book. This informs every component of the programming and print resolution collation system. We had no idea when we started that we even needed such planning and how important it would become.

 

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[liero1]

Thank you for your kind words Happyheart, and good luck with your project too. The adaptable graphics have been a massive amount of learning. We made many wrong turns but with each new book we're refining the production pipeline. For example just this morning I've been making the layers document for our latest book. This informs every component of the programming and print resolution collation system. We had no idea when we started that we even needed such planning and how important it would become.

View attachment 45183

any update on your business? would love to hear it. even if it is a negative (of course hope its a success!).

Thanks

 

[Leo Hartas]

Update. Thank you to liero1 for reminding me to post! It's been a while.

Our plan since the last update was to run Google ads through a digital advertising agency. The reasoning was that they would do it better than we could and frankly, although we did a load of research, the Google Ads advertiser back end was so confusing that we'd somewhat run out of steam to learn yet another complex system. Also we were unsure that we'd set everything up correctly. We had the ads running for about a couple of months but only saw 1 or 2 sales a day. I'm not sure, but later, when we looked into the back end, we found a couple of things were not linked up correctly and we could clearly see that agency had failed to do this.

Eventually we parted ways, with the agency citing that we were just too small with too little spend to gain any traction. We had blown a good chunk of our dwindling savings on those ads. It was difficult to blame the agency because they did warn us that they were at the mercy of Google switching to a new 'AI' driven system, and that they themselves were trying to figure out. We'd also grown sick of pouring money into the bulging coffers of Google. The agency suggested we'd have better luck on Facebook.

So off we went to pour the rest of our hard earned into another faceless evil corporation, running it ourselves. This worked better and we saw sales increase to about 5-8 sales a day. I know, it's hardly impressive, but at least it was a positive echo from the market. We were then hit with postal strikes in the UK, so people who ordered books in good time for Christmas weren't receiving them, and I had to write many emails explaining a situation we had no control over. Altogether we sold around 150 books up to Christmas. With these advertising costs we are still nowhere near breaking even.

With the Christmas 'rush' over we've dialled our advertising spend right back to just £20 a day. Sales dropped off in the new year, but not entirely, we get days when 4-5 books sell. To keep the home fire burning (increasingly expensive!), I've had to go back to freelance illustration. Fortunately I picked up a nice job illustrating for a local moorland restoration project that'll keep us going for the next few months.

A tale of woe! Not at all! We knew that we would loose money to get even a small foothold in the market. Despite our missteps there were many positive things we learnt.

1. We got to properly test our technology with real sales. On the whole everything worked. There were a few technical glitches which appeared which we were able to correct in the programming. One customer, correctly, discovered a subtle spelling mistake in the text of one of our books!

2. We realised our font, which I had designed by hand, made the website look a bit old fashioned so we modernised the whole site with a cleaner look.

3. We wrote and illustrated a new book and posted it on the site. This went so much smoother than before as we now better understood and optimised our production pipeline. Still room for improvement, but we can produce a new title much quicker than before.

4. I ran customer service during the postal strike and learnt so much more about our ecommerce back end systems.

5. Customers loved our books! We've had lovely encouraging emails and great reviews. I really enjoy interacting with customers, even the odd 'difficult' ones.

6. Just a 150 odd sales but we feel we're 'seeding' the books around the country. Time will tell, but those books will be in children's rooms, perhaps they'll be pestering their parents to read them again and again.. and perhaps those parents will tell others, etc. Word of mouth is the best!

Our big problem is social media marketing. It highlights our age. We are just not comfortable with it at all. Amanda isn't even on social media. Although we come up with ideas for posts, strategies, etc. we find it tiresome and draining. There is so much splintered and confusing advice. We would start in one area then switch to another and so never achieve any consistency. We *think* we may have a solution. In all our research we kept coming back to creating a You Tube channel as a main social media avenue. We both watch a lot of You Tube and we figured that a channel would give our marketing focus, a central 'column', with consistent fresh content to pump into other social media. But what could the channel be about? The obvious ones were reading our books, drawing tutorials, etc. but they seemed limited and looking at viewer numbers in these areas, they weren't very impressive. A vlog about our business? But there is much competition and we could hardly give advice to others when our own business was yet to see profit.

This is going to sound somewhat bizarre, but in the evenings I would return to my personal hobby of model making, which I've done since childhood. This is my 'zen' activity. I usually painted fantasy miniatures or made plastic kits, but for some reason I recently made a model car from just scrap cardboard and toothpicks. It turned out better than I expected, and I really enjoyed creating something from scratch with simple everyday materials. I'd looked up videos on You Tube from other, 'cardboard and trash', creators and was surprised to find not that many, but several of those that did exist had views in the millions, often with not so great production values. A channel about building cardboard models! It syncs perfectly with our books as being a wholesome activity for kids and, nerdy as it is, I love building models and telling people how they can make their own. It's also educational, children will learn all kinds of things about ideas, design, construction, etc. and the content would be, 'evergreen', and well inside the ever changing You Tube guidelines.

From our experience we were fully aware that it will take a lot of time and energy. We've pencilled in at least a year to build a productive channel, along with time to produce new books for Wow! That's Me. We've yet to properly start. Just now I'm learning about cameras, etc. and Amanda is learning editing. Our main goal is to use the channel to promote our books, but it would, of course, be very nice to make some dollar from You Tube itself. I can hear you now, 'don't get distracted with the next shiny thing', and that is excellent advice, but as a solely net based business we need an effective digital marketing avenue to get enough exposure. As always I'm interested to hear what you think of this idea.

From a business start up perspective I imagine a lot of readers of this thread will see our progress as far too slow, our timelines too long. We're in the 'autumn' of our years and it shows, we just don't have the energy of our youth. Long gone are the days of pulling all nighters! However, this is ok, because we are enjoying learning and the process itself. I remember talking to a book publisher many years ago about the business of publishing. He said selling books was a slow burn. They may not sell millions on launch like a video game, but stack 'em up and they can keep selling for years and years.

We're hardly Fastlaners.. more like bumpkins peddling bicycles along a country lane.. but we'll get there!

It's a bit late, but Happy New Year Fastlaners!

P.s. Pic of my card model car:

 

[Leo Hartas]

Update. Thank you to liero1 for reminding me to post! It's been a while.

Our plan since the last update was to run Google ads through a digital advertising agency. The reasoning was that they would do it better than we could and frankly, although we did a load of research, the Google Ads advertiser back end was so confusing that we'd somewhat run out of steam to learn yet another complex system. Also we were unsure that we'd set everything up correctly. We had the ads running for about a couple of months but only saw 1 or 2 sales a day. I'm not sure, but later, when we looked into the back end, we found a couple of things were not linked up correctly and we could clearly see that agency had failed to do this.

Eventually we parted ways, with the agency citing that we were just too small with too little spend to gain any traction. We had blown a good chunk of our dwindling savings on those ads. It was difficult to blame the agency because they did warn us that they were at the mercy of Google switching to a new 'AI' driven system, and that they themselves were trying to figure out. We'd also grown sick of pouring money into the bulging coffers of Google. The agency suggested we'd have better luck on Facebook.

So off we went to pour the rest of our hard earned into another faceless evil corporation, running it ourselves. This worked better and we saw sales increase to about 5-8 sales a day. I know, it's hardly impressive, but at least it was a positive echo from the market. We were then hit with postal strikes in the UK, so people who ordered books in good time for Christmas weren't receiving them, and I had to write many emails explaining a situation we had no control over. Altogether we sold around 150 books up to Christmas. With these advertising costs we are still nowhere near breaking even.

With the Christmas 'rush' over we've dialled our advertising spend right back to just £20 a day. Sales dropped off in the new year, but not entirely, we get days when 4-5 books sell. To keep the home fire burning (increasingly expensive!), I've had to go back to freelance illustration. Fortunately I picked up a nice job illustrating for a local moorland restoration project that'll keep us going for the next few months.

A tale of woe! Not at all! We knew that we would loose money to get even a small foothold in the market. Despite our missteps there were many positive things we learnt.

1. We got to properly test our technology with real sales. On the whole everything worked. There were a few technical glitches which appeared which we were able to correct in the programming. One customer, correctly, discovered a subtle spelling mistake in the text of one of our books!

2. We realised our font, which I had designed by hand, made the website look a bit old fashioned so we modernised the whole site with a cleaner look.

3. We wrote and illustrated a new book and posted it on the site. This went so much smoother than before as we now better understood and optimised our production pipeline. Still room for improvement, but we can produce a new title much quicker than before.

4. I ran customer service during the postal strike and learnt so much more about our ecommerce back end systems.

5. Customers loved our books! We've had lovely encouraging emails and great reviews. I really enjoy interacting with customers, even the odd 'difficult' ones.

6. Just a 150 odd sales but we feel we're 'seeding' the books around the country. Time will tell, but those books will be in children's rooms, perhaps they'll be pestering their parents to read them again and again.. and perhaps those parents will tell others, etc. Word of mouth is the best!

Our big problem is social media marketing. It highlights our age. We are just not comfortable with it at all. Amanda isn't even on social media. Although we come up with ideas for posts, strategies, etc. we find it tiresome and draining. There is so much splintered and confusing advice. We would start in one area then switch to another and so never achieve any consistency. We *think* we may have a solution. In all our research we kept coming back to creating a You Tube channel as a main social media avenue. We both watch a lot of You Tube and we figured that a channel would give our marketing focus, a central 'column', with consistent fresh content to pump into other social media. But what could the channel be about? The obvious ones were reading our books, drawing tutorials, etc. but they seemed limited and looking at viewer numbers in these areas, they weren't very impressive. A vlog about our business? But there is much competition and we could hardly give advice to others when our own business was yet to see profit.

This is going to sound somewhat bizarre, but in the evenings I would return to my personal hobby of model making, which I've done since childhood. This is my 'zen' activity. I usually painted fantasy miniatures or made plastic kits, but for some reason I recently made a model car from just scrap cardboard and toothpicks. It turned out better than I expected, and I really enjoyed creating something from scratch with simple everyday materials. I'd looked up videos on You Tube from other, 'cardboard and trash', creators and was surprised to find not that many, but several of those that did exist had views in the millions, often with not so great production values. A channel about building cardboard models! It syncs perfectly with our books as being a wholesome activity for kids and, nerdy as it is, I love building models and telling people how they can make their own. It's also educational, children will learn all kinds of things about ideas, design, construction, etc. and the content would be, 'evergreen', and well inside the ever changing You Tube guidelines.

From our experience we were fully aware that it will take a lot of time and energy. We've pencilled in at least a year to build a productive channel, along with time to produce new books for Wow! That's Me. We've yet to properly start. Just now I'm learning about cameras, etc. and Amanda is learning editing. Our main goal is to use the channel to promote our books, but it would, of course, be very nice to make some dollar from You Tube itself. I can hear you now, 'don't get distracted with the next shiny thing', and that is excellent advice, but as a solely net based business we need an effective digital marketing avenue to get enough exposure. As always I'm interested to hear what you think of this idea.

From a business start up perspective I imagine a lot of readers of this thread will see our progress as far too slow, our timelines too long. We're in the 'autumn' of our years and it shows, we just don't have the energy of our youth. Long gone are the days of pulling all nighters! However, this is ok, because we are enjoying learning and the process itself. I remember talking to a book publisher many years ago about the business of publishing. He said selling books was a slow burn. They may not sell millions on launch like a video game, but stack 'em up and they can keep selling for years and years.

We're hardly Fastlaners.. more like bumpkins peddling bicycles along a country lane.. but we'll get there!

It's a bit late, but Happy New Year Fastlaners!

P.s. Pic of my card model car:

View attachment 46855
View attachment 46856

Haha! I just read back through some of my earlier posts and noted that we'd thought of doing You Tube before but dropped the idea.. guess we picked it up again!!

 

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[Xavier X]

@Leo Hartas Great job in coming this far. I remember wanting to have something like this made for my godson and his sister, some years ago. At the time, I was going to write the short story, then have someone illustrate it (even though I could illustrate it myself). Then have two copies printed and sent to them. I never actually had it done though.

Anyway, this is one of those things you could do decent volumes of sales on, if you target the right groups of people, where they congregate. New parents are one of the most eager spenders on "kids stuff." While you clearly don't like social media,I think either you or your partner should go on Facebook and contact the Admins of the numerous "mommy" or parent groups. If they each give your product a shoutout on an engaged and sizeable group, there'll be a network effect.

I think Americans are more likely to go crazy about this kind of stuff. So expanding to the US sooner than later might be your best move.

Honestly, I don't think trying to do YouTube as your main social media presence is optimal. From the sound of things, you might be slightly burned out from the journey so far. So you're less likely to give a YouTube channel the incredibly energetic push it requires these days. Gone are the days when I would post videos on YouTube, 13-17 years ago, and many would get a bunch of views in a short time.

With all the controversies around kid-based channels on YouTube, maybe 4-7 years ago, it's even harder for content creators with kid-related content. Whether a kid appears in your video, or the videos are primarily made for kids, YouTube heavily regulates it. Meaning, in most cases, your comment section will be locked, leading to low engagement. Your monetization options might also be restricted. These things cripple channels.

With that said, I think instagram might be better for your type of content. Instagram is very image and visual-based. You're an illustrator, you will get much more traction there, with much less production effort than YouTube. The ROI makes sense. Sure, you can't directly monetize IG, like YouTube Adsense, but the focus should be on using IG to direct parents to order your books.

In the future, when your current iteration of the site and flow has gained some success, consider more precise customization of characters. This would obviously be challenging, but it's for the future, not now. I'm talking about something like Animaker's character customization tool. It allows you enough flexibility to make a true likeness of anyone and then create a 2D animation of the character. It's pretty good.

In the same way, if people could make a true likeness of themselves and their kids, they might be more compelled to dive in. All the best!

 

[Predator]

Won't it be more efficient and faster if you use AI art generation for pictures where people can use photographs of their childern for generating a "cartoonish" avatar of their children based on pre-made templates?

 

[liero1]

Update. Thank you to liero1 for reminding me to post! It's been a while.

Our plan since the last update was to run Google ads through a digital advertising agency. The reasoning was that they would do it better than we could and frankly, although we did a load of research, the Google Ads advertiser back end was so confusing that we'd somewhat run out of steam to learn yet another complex system. Also we were unsure that we'd set everything up correctly. We had the ads running for about a couple of months but only saw 1 or 2 sales a day. I'm not sure, but later, when we looked into the back end, we found a couple of things were not linked up correctly and we could clearly see that agency had failed to do this.

Eventually we parted ways, with the agency citing that we were just too small with too little spend to gain any traction. We had blown a good chunk of our dwindling savings on those ads. It was difficult to blame the agency because they did warn us that they were at the mercy of Google switching to a new 'AI' driven system, and that they themselves were trying to figure out. We'd also grown sick of pouring money into the bulging coffers of Google. The agency suggested we'd have better luck on Facebook.

So off we went to pour the rest of our hard earned into another faceless evil corporation, running it ourselves. This worked better and we saw sales increase to about 5-8 sales a day. I know, it's hardly impressive, but at least it was a positive echo from the market. We were then hit with postal strikes in the UK, so people who ordered books in good time for Christmas weren't receiving them, and I had to write many emails explaining a situation we had no control over. Altogether we sold around 150 books up to Christmas. With these advertising costs we are still nowhere near breaking even.

With the Christmas 'rush' over we've dialled our advertising spend right back to just £20 a day. Sales dropped off in the new year, but not entirely, we get days when 4-5 books sell. To keep the home fire burning (increasingly expensive!), I've had to go back to freelance illustration. Fortunately I picked up a nice job illustrating for a local moorland restoration project that'll keep us going for the next few months.

A tale of woe! Not at all! We knew that we would loose money to get even a small foothold in the market. Despite our missteps there were many positive things we learnt.

1. We got to properly test our technology with real sales. On the whole everything worked. There were a few technical glitches which appeared which we were able to correct in the programming. One customer, correctly, discovered a subtle spelling mistake in the text of one of our books!

2. We realised our font, which I had designed by hand, made the website look a bit old fashioned so we modernised the whole site with a cleaner look.

3. We wrote and illustrated a new book and posted it on the site. This went so much smoother than before as we now better understood and optimised our production pipeline. Still room for improvement, but we can produce a new title much quicker than before.

4. I ran customer service during the postal strike and learnt so much more about our ecommerce back end systems.

5. Customers loved our books! We've had lovely encouraging emails and great reviews. I really enjoy interacting with customers, even the odd 'difficult' ones.

6. Just a 150 odd sales but we feel we're 'seeding' the books around the country. Time will tell, but those books will be in children's rooms, perhaps they'll be pestering their parents to read them again and again.. and perhaps those parents will tell others, etc. Word of mouth is the best!

Our big problem is social media marketing. It highlights our age. We are just not comfortable with it at all. Amanda isn't even on social media. Although we come up with ideas for posts, strategies, etc. we find it tiresome and draining. There is so much splintered and confusing advice. We would start in one area then switch to another and so never achieve any consistency. We *think* we may have a solution. In all our research we kept coming back to creating a You Tube channel as a main social media avenue. We both watch a lot of You Tube and we figured that a channel would give our marketing focus, a central 'column', with consistent fresh content to pump into other social media. But what could the channel be about? The obvious ones were reading our books, drawing tutorials, etc. but they seemed limited and looking at viewer numbers in these areas, they weren't very impressive. A vlog about our business? But there is much competition and we could hardly give advice to others when our own business was yet to see profit.

This is going to sound somewhat bizarre, but in the evenings I would return to my personal hobby of model making, which I've done since childhood. This is my 'zen' activity. I usually painted fantasy miniatures or made plastic kits, but for some reason I recently made a model car from just scrap cardboard and toothpicks. It turned out better than I expected, and I really enjoyed creating something from scratch with simple everyday materials. I'd looked up videos on You Tube from other, 'cardboard and trash', creators and was surprised to find not that many, but several of those that did exist had views in the millions, often with not so great production values. A channel about building cardboard models! It syncs perfectly with our books as being a wholesome activity for kids and, nerdy as it is, I love building models and telling people how they can make their own. It's also educational, children will learn all kinds of things about ideas, design, construction, etc. and the content would be, 'evergreen', and well inside the ever changing You Tube guidelines.

From our experience we were fully aware that it will take a lot of time and energy. We've pencilled in at least a year to build a productive channel, along with time to produce new books for Wow! That's Me. We've yet to properly start. Just now I'm learning about cameras, etc. and Amanda is learning editing. Our main goal is to use the channel to promote our books, but it would, of course, be very nice to make some dollar from You Tube itself. I can hear you now, 'don't get distracted with the next shiny thing', and that is excellent advice, but as a solely net based business we need an effective digital marketing avenue to get enough exposure. As always I'm interested to hear what you think of this idea.

From a business start up perspective I imagine a lot of readers of this thread will see our progress as far too slow, our timelines too long. We're in the 'autumn' of our years and it shows, we just don't have the energy of our youth. Long gone are the days of pulling all nighters! However, this is ok, because we are enjoying learning and the process itself. I remember talking to a book publisher many years ago about the business of publishing. He said selling books was a slow burn. They may not sell millions on launch like a video game, but stack 'em up and they can keep selling for years and years.

We're hardly Fastlaners.. more like bumpkins peddling bicycles along a country lane.. but we'll get there!

It's a bit late, but Happy New Year Fastlaners!

P.s. Pic of my card model car:

View attachment 46855
View attachment 46856

thanks for the update, much appreciated!! very detailed and great bullet points.

I am sure there is a lot of different advice. Be careful with agencies in the end they just sell their service and how you pointed out before many are doing essential mistakes as well. I worked with many and even in the big ones that can happen. always need a bit of luck with the account manager.

Also not sure about youtube. Facebook ads normally work well especially with finding parents. keep the audience broad and let the pixel optimise, optimise campaign for sales. also have a lower budget traffic campaign optimising for clicks. this will fill the conversion funnel and get you more data to make that conversion campaign work.

look at tiktok, same strategy. use the pixel. and of course some cool videos for the campaigns.

that;s all i would focus on I think..

of course do the basics as email lists to retarget existing customers with offers, maybe for presents etc.

 

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[Leo Hartas]

@Leo Hartas Great job in coming this far. I remember wanting to have something like this made for my godson and his sister, some years ago. At the time, I was going to write the short story, then have someone illustrate it (even though I could illustrate it myself). Then have two copies printed and sent to them. I never actually had it done though.

Anyway, this is one of those things you could do decent volumes of sales on, if you target the right groups of people, where they congregate. New parents are one of the most eager spenders on "kids stuff." While you clearly don't like social media,I think either you or your partner should go on Facebook and contact the Admins of the numerous "mommy" or parent groups. If they each give your product a shoutout on an engaged and sizeable group, there'll be a network effect.

I think Americans are more likely to go crazy about this kind of stuff. So expanding to the US sooner than later might be your best move.

Honestly, I don't think trying to do YouTube as your main social media presence is optimal. From the sound of things, you might be slightly burned out from the journey so far. So you're less likely to give a YouTube channel the incredibly energetic push it requires these days. Gone are the days when I would post videos on YouTube, 13-17 years ago, and many would get a bunch of views in a short time.

With all the controversies around kid-based channels on YouTube, maybe 4-7 years ago, it's even harder for content creators with kid-related content. Whether a kid appears in your video, or the videos are primarily made for kids, YouTube heavily regulates it. Meaning, in most cases, your comment section will be locked, leading to low engagement. Your monetization options might also be restricted. These things cripple channels.

With that said, I think instagram might be better for your type of content. Instagram is very image and visual-based. You're an illustrator, you will get much more traction there, with much less production effort than YouTube. The ROI makes sense. Sure, you can't directly monetize IG, like YouTube Adsense, but the focus should be on using IG to direct parents to order your books.

In the future, when your current iteration of the site and flow has gained some success, consider more precise customization of characters. This would obviously be challenging, but it's for the future, not now. I'm talking about something like Animaker's character customization tool. It allows you enough flexibility to make a true likeness of anyone and then create a 2D animation of the character. It's pretty good.

In the same way, if people could make a true likeness of themselves and their kids, they might be more compelled to dive in. All the best!

Thanks for your comment Xavier X, the encouraging remarks and your advice.

I think you are right about targeting Facebook groups and Instagram from a ROI point of view. We're aware You Tube is a tricky one. At the moment we'll trial making a handful of videos and assess just how much work it turns out to be. If it's not too bad, I'm making the models anyway, we'll try running the channel. It's a good call on the FB, I'll look into it more and draw up a plan.

Yes, we would love to open in the US and we do plan to. Just on population size we could 5X our sales based on our current sales. We're stuck at the moment because our printer requires us to hit a minimum sales target in the UK first.. I don't know why.. but we've yet to get there.

More customisation of the characters comes up quite a lot. I think that most people who are more 'tech savvy' are used to this with games, etc. What we've found though is that are core audience, mothers, but more so, grandmothers and aunts, who are not used to games, already find our customisation system enough to get their head around. We spent ages reworking our interface to make it as gentle and easy to use as possible. People too, want to get in and out relatively quickly. We looked at our competitors in the space who are now offering even fewer customisations, while selling millions of books. It's something though that we'll continuously monitor and revise.

We have only four books and we thought one of them only would sell most. That seems to be the way with retail, 80-20. But to our surprise all the four titles are selling more or less equally. I don't know what this means but I'm not complaining!

 

[Leo Hartas]

Won't it be more efficient and faster if you use AI art generation for pictures where people can use photographs of their childern for generating a "cartoonish" avatar of their children based on pre-made templates?

An interesting thought.. I've been following the recent massive advances in AI and considered it myself. I've even seen whole illustrated picture books created in AI. Right now though I don't think it would be reliable enough.. I've seen images with messed up hands and spooky eyes, though this may well change. The other issue I can see is generating precise enough images that would require a perfect prompt, for every image throughout the book. At the moment we have complete control over what our automated system produces and we couldn't afford returns where little Jonny's arm is spouting out of his head on page 23!

Aside from that there are issues around who owns the AI systems. They're free now, but they demand a ton of processing power, which at the moment is being loaned to the developers by Microsoft. In fact just this week Microsoft have announced a multimillion dollar investment. Knowing BFC's (Big Evil Corporations) they're going to want a return at some point!

 

[Leo Hartas]

thanks for the update, much appreciated!! very detailed and great bullet points.

I am sure there is a lot of different advice. Be careful with agencies in the end they just sell their service and how you pointed out before many are doing essential mistakes as well. I worked with many and even in the big ones that can happen. always need a bit of luck with the account manager.

Also not sure about youtube. Facebook ads normally work well especially with finding parents. keep the audience broad and let the pixel optimise, optimise campaign for sales. also have a lower budget traffic campaign optimising for clicks. this will fill the conversion funnel and get you more data to make that conversion campaign work.

look at tiktok, same strategy. use the pixel. and of course some cool videos for the campaigns.

that;s all i would focus on I think..

of course do the basics as email lists to retarget existing customers with offers, maybe for presents etc.

Hi Liero 1, Thank you for your advice. I'm going to be very careful with agencies from now on.. we've been burnt twice. It's interesting that a few threads on this forum suggest people easy start an agency on the road to the fast lane. As my Dad would say, 'If you want a job doing well, do it yourself!'.

Good advice on Facebook. I'm going to really get my head down and sort out a strategy and stick to it. Tiktok too, though it gives me the creeps! Perhaps I'll run it on a 'burner' phone!!

As for You Tube.. we're going to 'suck it and see'. Make a handful and just see how much effort it turns out to be. I'm talking the practical side of making them, let alone the build a viewership. Anyway, it will be good to learn more about video production for shorts on other social media.

Yep, we have a mailing list with 40 or so subscribers so far and the odd newsletter already results in a few more sales. I must say, it's my favourite of all the marketing methods. Thinking of cute little gifts and offers for subscribers is fun.

I'm grateful to you for your interest in our journey and very much appreciate your advice.

 

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[Predator]

An interesting thought.. I've been following the recent massive advances in AI and considered it myself. I've even seen whole illustrated picture books created in AI. Right now though I don't think it would be reliable enough.. I've seen images with messed up hands and spooky eyes, though this may well change. The other issue I can see is generating precise enough images that would require a perfect prompt, for every image throughout the book. At the moment we have complete control over what our automated system produces and we couldn't afford returns where little Jonny's arm is spouting out of his head on page 23!

Aside from that there are issues around who owns the AI systems. They're free now, but they demand a ton of processing power, which at the moment is being loaned to the developers by Microsoft. In fact just this week Microsoft have announced a multimillion dollar investment. Knowing BFC's (Big Evil Corporations) they're going to want a return at some point!

I had watched a few videos where they showed using midjourney on existing images, so if you have a basic template of this replaceable character on which you will use the photograph of the child which then you can place on the background. You can experiment that stuff, maybe the scope of error would be reduced, though you will need some reliable sample size for that. Midjourney has paid plans for businesses, currently not very expensive depending upon how many drawings you need per month.