If you’re not a fan of Dragons’ Den, or the parent of an under-five, then you probably won’t have heard of last year’s bestselling picture book.
Lost My Name, a charming tale of a child on a quest to find their missing name, sold an astonishing 132,616 copies, knocking Julia Donaldson off the top spot for the first time in eight years.
Unofficially, that is: despite selling 20,000 more copies than Donaldson’s Superworm, the book is excluded from official charts as it doesn’t have an ISBN number.
It’s also impossible to buy from a bookshop. Lost My Name – which, as a single title from a company set up specifically to produce it, fits the definition of self-published – is available only from the publisher’s website, www.lostmy.name.
There, prospective buyers can order a bespoke, printed-on-demand copy of the book. Bespoke, because – literary purists look away now – Lost My Name is personalised fiction.
Fledgling publisher Asi Sharabi had been so dissatisfied with the personalised children’s books on the market that he decided to create his own. A team of three fathers and an uncle combined technical wizardry and imaginative flair to make a computer-generated book where the illustration and story change according to the letters in the child’s name.
Dragons’ Den investor Piers Linney was so impressed by the project – which was already enjoying word-of-mouth success – that he put in £100,000. A wise move: the company had a £6m turnover in its first year, selling 325,000 copies worldwide.
It’s hard not to be won over by the skill and passion, although the rhymes and pictures aren’t a patch on Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. I also hope the next book – due in April – will have characters with a mix of skin tones.
If only our editorial gatekeepers had as much digital nous as the Lost My Name team, we’d be on to something.
