Personalized children´s books - these factors will make them successful

Christoph Clermont

Successful children´s books are all about putting kids in the spotlight and making them the heroes of the story. That´s why highly sophisticated personalization is a must. Find out how the intelligent use of photos, variable text and even avatars will help you to create outstanding products and check out two impressive samples. In addition, we will show you how to exploit the benefits of licensed brand products.

When it comes to personalized gifts, children´s books are a relatively new market and undoubtedly among the most exciting. Actually, one of the leading vendors makes $30M annual revenue with children´s books alone. The main drivers for this market are of course parents. Parents love personalization! They are proud of their kids and seeing their little ones appear in a story will give them an especially good feeling. That´s why children´s books should be all about putting kids in the spotlight. Add to that stories with a motivational or educational message and cute designs and you´ll end up with a winning formula.

Currently personalized children´s books come in a broad variety. Vendors offer stories for different age groups from babies to teens, and books for special occasions such as birthdays, Christmas or first day at school. But there´s still a lot of room for innovation. What about a get-well-soon book? Or stories that celebrate individual achievements of a child like winning with their sports team or getting a prize at school? And why stop with the kids themselves when even their favorite toys or pets could become part of the story?

Kids become heroes with personalized text and photos

Including a kid´s name is obviously among the basics for a personalized book. But a name on the cover or in a headline is just the beginning. Once the name becomes part of the story there´s more: the text has to change according to gender using a “he”, “she”, or “they” which will also alter the text flow. And there are even trickier methods. The entire story and the layout may change depending on the kid´s name, so a John gets a different plot with different pictures than a Jack. By the way, one of the world´s bestselling personalized books does exactly this.

In a similar fashion, photos can become integral parts of the book´s story too. They can appear in different sizes, with different levels of distortion, with transparency effects, or merged into drawn layouts.

To see what´s possible you may simply check out what Printess user Signature Gifts from the UK has done in their amazing book “The Lost Photo”. It´s easy to imagine how impressed parents and children will be by effects like these.

Avatars - the high art of personalization

Going beyond names and photos, even the kids themselves can show up in a book. This will be achieved by using avatars. Avatars are drawn characters that resemble the looks of a person and can be individually configured by the shopper. The possibilities are indeed astonishing and go way beyond just choosing gender and hair color. An advanced avatar editor will let customers choose skin and eye colors, hair style, different shapes for face, mouth, or nose and much more, including glasses, or even beards and jewelry for adult characters. Provided your designers have supplied all these elements they can resemble the looks of a gift recipient in an amazingly realistic way.

What´s even more important, creating an avatar of a loved one is big fun for the shopper! Offering this option will greatly increase customer involvement and gives you a uniquely distinct feature compared to the competition. Once you have made parents stay for 15 minutes or more on your shop while designing for their child, there´s an exceptionally high chance that they will ultimately buy.

Of course, avatars work for a multitude of products. If you have the design elements in place nothing will stop you from using them for mugs, t-shirts and any other design. At least if you are using a solution that´s ready for this. With Printess you will get a fully-fledged avatar generator including predesigned elements.

>>Try out avatar creator

Exploiting the benefits of licensed products

Licensing content from brands such as Disney or Marvel offers huge potential for vendors of personalized children´s books. At the same time, it can be very demanding to meet the strict layout requirements of the licensors. This especially applies for text, as brands do not only care about their characters and stories but also provide unique layouts with their own characteristic fonts. You will have to make sure that these fonts look consistently the same, from display in the shop and configuration through to printing.

To achieve this, you can create all documents with a layout program such as InDesign. But there is one catch. You would also need a tool that makes these documents available for preview, once the shopper has personalized them. Having no previews will of course greatly diminish the shopping experience and scare off customers. Ultimately, the best way to succeed with brands is using a solution that can do two things at once: It gives you the ability to create refined layouts with any kind of font effect and at the same time the possibility to show a precise display of the design, whenever the customer needs to see it.

Samples included: The sample templates you can try out on this page are also part of the Printess license. You may use it as a basis to develop your own products, or as an inspiration for your designers.

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