Pick a story, and it becomes about your child.

About six business days. Your book does not exist until you order it, so it has to be printed, bound and shipped, and we count the printing inside those six days. Ordering on a Thursday means it lands the week after, so leave room before a birthday. Shipping is $6.99 inside the US, and free on orders from $88.

For each person in the story, one clear shot of the face, looking roughly at the camera, in decent light. For a cat or dog, one daylight photo where their markings show. A phone photo is fine. A scan from an old album is fine too: the picture at the top of our home page is our founder in about 1992, scanned off film, and the character came straight from it.

Yes, in one story: The One Who Goes First is written for two children, both drawn from your photos. Sixteen of the others have one child, and eight of them add grown ups or your pet: I Love You, Mom; I Love You, Dad; The House That Remembers; The Cat Who Knew the Way; One More Hour; Come and Find Me; The Unfinished One; and My Hero. Nobody in a book costs extra.

That is the whole point of the free preview. Upload a photo and see your child drawn, then on the cover with their name, before you decide. No account, no card, nothing to cancel. One honest note: the preview is a first draft. Before anything is printed we check it page by page, and the printed book is sharper than what you see on screen.

Your child's face first: we draw them from your photo and keep that same face on the cover and all through the story, and anyone else in the book is drawn from their own photo. Their name goes under the title and into the verses, and the page after the story is yours to write, printed word for word. The story and the scenes around them are the same for everyone who picks this title, written and drawn before you arrive and approved page by page, so nothing strange can turn up in your child's book.

A name-only book shows every family the same drawn child and drops in a name. Here your child is drawn from your photo, the same face on the cover and all through the story, and anyone else in it from their own photo at no extra charge. It is a thirty-page hardcover printed to order in the USA, and you see your child drawn, on the cover with their name, before you pay anything.

A landscape hardcover, 11 by 8.3 inches (280 by 210 mm), thirty pages on 170gsm coated silk paper, matte laminated cover, glued binding. Printed in the United States.

Within one title, yes, and we think that is a feature. It means a real writer shaped the arc and a real person checked every page, instead of a machine improvising something odd about your family. What changes is who is in it.