Buyers back personalised picture book offering different pronouns

A personalised picture book offering buyers seven different pronouns, as well as different skin tones and hair colours, has exceeded its kickstarter funding target within 12 hours.

The Forgotten Forest allows buyers to personalise the character in the book by choosing from a list of pronouns that includes they, ve, ne, ey and ze as well as the usual she and he. There are eight skin tones, six eye colours, 12 hair styles and 25 hair colours available, as well as the option to add in glasses, a wheelchair, hearing aids and ear defenders.

The book is being published by Oh Zoe, a start-up founded by Katharine and Matt Harbord (pictured below), who said they want all children to see themselves star in the story, regardless of gender, race or disability.

“During our competitor research we noticed a curious trend - almost every competitor asks if the child is a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’, almost before asking anything else, and always in that order,” Matt Harbord told The Bookseller. “We just couldn’t understand the logic behind it - what options are they offering that aren’t applicable to girls if you chose ‘boy’?  What about the other way round?

“We decided that there was no need to tell us the sex of your child and that we couldn’t think of a single example of an option that should be available to one sex and not the other.  Once we realised the only reason for this question was to assign the pronoun it was fairly obvious that there was no reason to limit ourselves to ‘she’ or ‘he’. Every single book is created to order and if someone uses the prefered pronoun ‘they’ or ‘ve’, or anything else, how can we possibly say that’s not a valid choice?”

The company hired illustration team Sas and Yosh and held a competition to find an author, eventually choosing freelance journalist Victoria Richards to write the text.  

They launched the book on www.kickstarter.com/projects/ohzoe/a-diverse-and-inclusive-personalised-picture-book?ref=eofo65&utm_source=kickstart&utm_medium=link-share&utm_campaign=Press">Kickstarter yesterday (28th August) to fund initial printing costs but have already exceeded their £2,000 target; they have currently raised £2,535 from 83 backers, who have bid between £1 (for the online story) and £50 (for the book and a special print).

When researching the project the Harbords talked to the parenting community on Instagram, especially the Make Motherhood Diverse group, to help understand what was missing in the world of personalised picture books.

“These discussions are far from over, and we’re really hoping to engage further with our backers on Kickstarter to see what else we can do to improve,” he said. “There is an almost unlimited amount of personalisation we want to offer, but it’s only through proving that a market exists for our product that we can justify investing the time and effort to add all these options.”