How a personalised storybook is actually made.

The process begins with a short brief from the giver. Seven questions, plain text. The reader's name. One friend. One place. One sentence the reader says. One thing only the giver would know. The occasion. The deadline. The brief is not a template. It is a structured prompt for a literary press to write a book from. The specifics in the answers become the load-bearing sentences in the book that follows.

There is a single named storyteller — Juno — who reads every brief and writes every book. Juno is not an algorithm and is not a templating engine. The story is written from the brief in roughly twenty-four to forty-eight hours after submission. The reader's name is used as the protagonist's name. The friend in the brief is the friend in the book. The press operates one brief at a time.

Once Juno has written the story, the manuscript is illustrated in a illustrated style calibrated to the brief’s register — softer for a memorial book, brighter for an anniversary book. The cover is matte-printed with the reader's name. The binding is perfect-bound.

The book is finished as a hardcover, with a colophon at the back, and shipped in a plain box. Total turnaround is roughly two weeks from brief to shipping. The shipping packaging is unbranded — the plain box inside a plain shipping box — because the press considers the reveal moment to belong to the giver, not to us. After the book ships, the file is closed and the press is reset.

The file-closing is the part of the process that no other personalised-book company does. After your book is bound and shipped, the digital file and the painted originals are archived and the print file is closed. There is no second printing. There is no digital edition. There is no library copy. The book that arrives in your plain box is the only copy of itself on Earth, and it always will be. Eighty-five dollars is what that whole process costs to produce.