JUST DON’T CALL THEM PERSONALISED BOOKS
Lost My Name’s search for a better description of what it is we actually do
First, an acknowledgement. Most personalised books aren’t very good. They’re cheap, they’re gimmicky, and they most certainly do not represent an exciting, game-changing narrative genre. Because of that, I’d like to argue that at Lost My Name, we don’t make personalised books.
Then what exactly is it that we’re doing? Well, I’ll tell you.
We are pioneering a new, thoroughly postmodern literary genre, rejecting certainty, embracing contingency, and jettisoning the traditional, fixed notions of authorship in favour of a plurality of voices, meanings and narrative outcomes.
That, right there, is what we’re doing.
METAFICTION
One of the things that we specifically do (for anybody who found the above statement a teeny bit woolly, pompous, highfalutin’, or just downright incomprehensible) is make metafiction. Oh yes indeed.
Here’s one of the common devices of metafiction: A story in which the reader of the story forces the author to change the story.
Now, depending on the child the book is for, I am forced to change the story. No two of our books are the same. A Simon gets a very different story to a Lucinda. Depending on the reader, on their name, gender, address, interests, favourite food, depending on many different variables, our stories change, and change significantly. Metafiction? You betcha.
Here’s another of metafiction’s common devices: A story in which the characters are aware that they are in a story.
We make personalised books. The whole point of them, fundamentally, is that the reader features as a character within them. And if they’re not aware that they’re in the story, then frankly we’ve done a pretty poor job of personalisation. So yes. We definitely make metafiction.
CO-AUTHORSHIP
At Lost My Name, we create stories for children. But our stories have one key difference to your conventional kid’s tale. Our stories don’t have a central character. Instead, they have a space, which can be filled with an almost infinite number of potential candidates. Basically, they’re unfinished, missing a vital component.
That component is provided by a second author. Our books require one author (e.g. me) and a second author (somebody who I don’t know, but who has knowledge of the child the book is for). The first author writes the narrative, but also leaves a space within that narrative. That space is then filled by the second author.
Effectively, I need to create the framework of a narrative, but rather than finishing it, thus rendering it a monolithic, hermetic narrative, I need to leave an uncertain space within it, to allow for another author’s input.
Okay, so in our first book, all this second author has to do is actually write the child’s name, choose their gender and appearance, and job done. Nothing too onerous there. Yet they have created that all-important missing character.
In our second book, my co-author has to provide name, gender, appearance, and address. And in our third, the co-author has to provide name, gender, appearance, favourite interest and favourite food. Now things are getting interesting. Because now, that second author is creating the character, along with that character’s motivations.
In our books, the central character has no fixed identity. That identity is entirely relative, based on a number of choices which are unknown to the first author. We cannot say, with any certainty, what our books contain, or how exactly they end. Only the second author knows. That narrative uncertainty strikes us as a very postmodern outcome. Kablammo!
DATA
‘The arguments about contingency that animated poststructuralism, literary theory, feminist theory, and the postcolonial were each in their own way a declaration that the way we received, stored, and analyzed data was ignorant of and insufficient for entire sections of cultural production.’
Michael Pepi, The Postmodernity of Big Data
Too much information, which brought with it huge uncertainty, effectively ushered in the postmodern period, or at least it did in some people’s view. All-encompassing, monolithic knowledge systems weren’t cool anymore, because the facts didn’t back them up.
Now, we use a LOT of data. A whole heap of data, from a huge range of sources.
We mine as many areas as we can. Online behaviour. Qualitative and quantitive surveys. Ethnographic interviews. Customer data, split across age, geography, gender, time of year, time of day, you name it. We have vast amounts of data, none of it coming from any central location or based on any fundamental assumptions.
And if that data tells us that something could be better, or that something just isn’t working, or that customers hate the word ‘hate’ (they do), then we can do something about it.
Nothing is fixed, or certain, not even data. Everything we do is uncertain, fluid. And we make no assumptions.
ITERATION
This uncertainty, or contingency, is carried over into our production process. Because every book is co-authored and we don’t know the outcome, we have to print every book on demand.
We’ve printed over 2 million books on demand. Holy dooley, that’s a lot of ink. And paper.
But this has further implications. In traditional publishing, a print run of several thousand is made. So the text must be fixed, definitively, before the book is sent to print. At Lost My Name, we can use data accumulated after our books have been released, and change those books based on this data.
For example, in our Fox story, it pulls a pot plant from its sack of items to be upcycled. In the UK, a pot plant is a plant in a pot. In the US, we soon learned, it’s something very different. ITERATE!
Data told us that the front cover of our second title appealed far more to boys than girls. ITERATE!
Customer data told us that some people believe that our story about an Imp is one of Satan’s schemes. Um… DON’T ITERATE!
We don’t do monolithic, fixed narratives. We deal in uncertainty, and when necessary, we iterate. After all, it’s print on demand, so why the heck not?
DIVERSITY
Which takes me to the final area I wanted to talk about, and perhaps, at least for me, the most exciting area we’re working in.
We’re working on a product right now, a story in which your family is turned into bears. There’s a bear for every member of your family. Granddad, grandma, mum, dad, aunt, uncle, cousin, brother, sister. Anyone.
In fact, it would be fair to say that we don’t care what your family is like. We really don’t. It doesn’t matter.
And this, I believe, is potentially momentous.
Because we make no assumptions or prejudgements. It doesn’t matter to us if you have no siblings. Or if you’re brought up by your grandparents. It doesn’t matter if you have two mothers and no father. It simply makes no difference to us.
Not on a moral level. Not on a technical level. And not on a commercial level, either.
Our audience is children. Children with any name. Children who live anywhere. Boys who like ice cream, or girls who like dinosaurs. And children who have any family structure.
A postmodern view of family would posit that it can no longer be reduced to a predictable structure. Societal fragmentation, a loosening of gender roles, greater economic equality, and rapid social change have pretty well put paid to the nuclear family.
Children’s literature has nobly tried to deal with this change. Books like ‘My Two Dads’ tackle diversity. But they tend to be outliers, and so somewhat uncomfortably ‘other’, placed on their own special shelf. Which kind of defeats the object of normalising difference.
What’s wonderful about what we do is that the entire issue is bypassed. There’s a user interface, which asks a series of dispassionate questions, and your family is reproduced (in bear form). No assumptions, no special shelf, no social stigma. Oh, isn’t it marvellous?
END BIT
So, that’s what we do at Lost My Name. It’s new and it’s different and we don’t think anybody else in the whole wide world is doing it, certainly not to the level of sophistication that we are.
That sounded a bit like showing off, didn’t it? Oh well.
And we think it’s exciting. Exciting enough that we don’t think we’ve explored even a fraction of what is possible. And exciting enough that we don’t think the term ‘Personalised books’ does it justice.
Perhaps ‘Data-Driven Iterative Radically-Inclusive Multi-Threaded Co-Authored Metafiction’ is a better term. Oh, ‘For Children.’
Though it is, I’m willing to accept, a bit of a mouthful.
