littlelore

Coming soon — not on sale yet

Your child is the hero of a real hardcover book

Tell us who they are and what they love, and we write and illustrate a picture book made only for them. Photograph their scruffy panda, your blue front door or the dog, and we draw those things onto the pages.

A square hardcover picture book, its cover a watercolour of a girl sitting on a beach at sunset, holding a jam jar of sea glass up to the light.

Wren and the Wishing Tide

The art is real: it comes from a book we wrote for a five-year-old who collects sea glass in a jam jar. The printed hardcover is the part we are still building.

Join the list now and we will send you 50% off your first hardcover when it goes on sale.

Join the list

Joining costs nothing and we only ask for your email address. There is nothing to buy today — we will email you the moment the books are ready.

How it works

You answer a few questions and add a few photos. We do the rest, and the finished hardcover will be posted to you.

  1. Tell us about your child

    Their name, their age, and a line or two about what they are into at the moment. That line is what the story gets built from, and something as small as “collects sea glass in a jam jar” is plenty to go on.

  2. Photograph up to three of their favourite things

    The scruffy panda, your blue front door, the dog. We draw those things into the pictures, so the book looks like their world instead of a generic one. We ask for photos of things rather than of people.

  3. We write and illustrate the whole book

    A story with your child as the hero of it, and a painting for every page, both made to match what you told us. It is not a name dropped into a story that already existed.

    A watercolour of a girl sitting on wet sand at sunset, holding a jam jar of sea glass up towards the light.A watercolour of the same girl underwater, laughing among bubbles, with a hermit crab watching from the seabed.

    These are two real pages from Wren’s book. Nothing here is stock art, and she is recognisably the same child on every page.

  4. A hardcover will be printed and posted to you

    It will be a proper hardcover, made to be read at bedtime and kept on the shelf afterwards. We are still setting up the printing, so we are not going to guess at a date — join the list and we will email you the moment it is ready.

You do not have to be the parent to give one

Grandparents, aunts, uncles, godparents and family friends will be able to order a book for a child just as easily as a parent can. You answer the same few questions about them, and the book arrives as a hardcover you can wrap.

If the child is not yours, it helps to borrow a couple of details from whoever knows them best: the toy that goes everywhere, the dog’s name, the thing they are currently obsessed with. That is the part that makes the book theirs rather than generic.

  • A birthday

    They open a book with their own name on the cover and their own cat in the pictures.

  • Christmas

    It is still being read in March, rather than sitting in a drawer by Boxing Day.

  • A new baby brother or sister

    The older one gets a story of their own, in the week when everyone is looking at the baby.

  • Starting school

    It is a story about being brave, and the hero is the child who has to be brave on Monday.

Most presents at this age get outgrown. A book does not have to be: it will be a hardcover with their own name on the front, and that is the kind of thing families keep in a box in the loft and hand back when the child is thirty.

Nothing is on sale yet, so there is nothing to buy today. Join the list and we will send you a code for half off your first hardcover the moment we open orders.

This is where your discount code will go, so use the address you actually read.

Who would the book be for?
Is there an occasion in mind?

The books are not on sale yet. Joining costs nothing, and we will tell you the moment they are ready.

Questions

Can I buy one today?
No. The printed books are not made yet — this page exists so we can find out how many people want one before we commit to printing. Joining the list is free, and it does not commit you to buying anything later.
What is the 50% off, exactly?
Everyone on this list gets half off their first hardcover when we open orders. We will email you a discount code at that point, and you are under no obligation to use it.
How does the personalisation work?
You answer a handful of questions — what the child is called, what they look like, what they are into, and a sentence or two about the story you want. You can also add up to three photos of their things, and we draw those into the pictures. It is not a template with a name dropped in: the story is written for the answers you give.
Do you want photos of my child?
No. We never ask for a photo of a child, and the character is built from options you tap — hair, skin tone, glasses, and so on. The photos are for things: the battered panda, the dog, the blue front door, the wellies. We ask you to keep people out of those pictures.
What ages is it for?
The stories are written for children of roughly two to eight. Younger ones like hearing their own name and spotting their own toys; older ones enjoy being the hero of a story they helped invent.
Where will you post to?
We expect to start with the UK, the US, Canada and Australia, but we have not signed a printer yet, so that list is not final. Postage costs and any other countries will be confirmed before anyone is asked to pay, so nobody ends up buying a book we cannot get to them.
What will it cost?
We are still working that out — it depends on the printing, the paper and the postage, and we would rather tell you the real number than invent one now. Whatever the price turns out to be, the list gets half off the first one.
How long will it take to arrive?
We are not going to guess at a number we cannot yet stand behind. Making the book will take a little while, and then it has to be printed and posted. We will tell you how long that takes before you order anything.