There have been personalised children’s books available for years. Twenty years ago when my kids were young and I wrote my first children’s books, you could order hardcopy books with Disney characters,  customised with your child’s name, hair colour and best friend’s name.

After sitting on my stories for twenty years, I decided it was time to do something and jumped straight into this project, building the website before I had finished working out the intricacies of digital publishing. Let alone doing some decent research on the topic. I had just started writing this page when I thought I’d have a quick look. And was mightily impressed by LittleHeroes.com, Storybird.com and bookbyyou.com
(Note – I tried  ePubBud – but didn’t receive my book and then found http://www.rwa.org/p/bl/et/blogaid=155. Sigh.)

A shout out to non-personalised audio ebooks at meegenius.com – an awesome concept. A single app, a low monthly subscription, and over 700 children’s books. Ditto Smashwords.com. It’s not personalised, but it’s a simple way of publishing your own ebooks.

It’s a little hard to compete with LittleHeroes, Storybird and BookByYou (I really like that you can upload a photo and get the book straight away), but I had always intended my point of difference to be personalised audio. The problem is currently finding an ebook reader that correctly handles audio.

The plan is to allow people to send me an MP3 file of them reading one of my books. I”ll cut the audio and republish the book with their voiceover. It’s labour-intensive, so there would be a cost involved, but maybe we could come to an agreement involving champagne picolos 🙂 until I get the GST thing worked out.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your child could have a personalised book, and hear your voice reading to them, whenever they wanted? What a great memory/legacy!

It’s a work in progress, but that’s the idea behind this site.