About Name It Me

Somewhere out there is a four-year-old who will sit still for exactly forty seconds — unless the hero of the book happens to share her name, in which case she will demand the same story nine nights running and correct you if you skip a page. We built Name It Me for that kid. (And, frankly, for the parent doing the ninth reading.)

The slightly worrying part

Here’s the thing we can’t shake. American kids are reading less and understanding less of what they do read. The National Center for Education Statistics found in 2024 that today’s 13-year-olds score significantly lower in literacy than their counterparts did just a decade ago. The NEA reports leisure reading has sunk to its lowest point since the 1980s, and as Sunil Iyengar put it that same year, fewer children are reading for the simple pleasure of it. That matters longer than it sounds — early literacy tracks forward into academic performance, economic opportunity, and whether a grown-up later feels equipped to take part in civic life. It is a big deal wearing the costume of a small one.

What a name does

Turns out the cheapest trick in the book is putting the child in the book. The UK’s National Literacy Trust (Picton, 2017) — echoed by Natalia Kucirkova in Scientific American (2021) — found that personalized books measurably increase reading enjoyment, vocabulary, and verbal confidence in children ages four to eight. It isn’t magic, it’s attention: a child’s own name is the one word that reliably cuts through the noise (psychologists have been calling it the “cocktail party effect” since Colin Cherry described it in 1953). Hand a kid a story where they are the brave one, the funny one, the one who saves the day, and reading stops being a chore and starts being a mirror they actually want to look into.

Why we’re built the way we’re built

Now the part we’re genuinely proud of. The people who write and illustrate these books are the whole reason any of this exists, and the industry has spent decades asking them to hand over the lion’s share of their royalties just for the privilege of reaching readers. We think that’s backwards. So we don’t take a cut of the author’s price — not a percentage, not a “platform share,” not a vanishing slice that somehow grows every quarter. Creators set their own price, decide exactly which stories they offer and how, and keep 100% of what they charge. Name It Me makes its money on one honest, flat customization fee for the work of weaving a child’s name into the words and the art — and that’s it.

Keep control, keep your royalties

An author should never have to choose between getting their work into the world and getting paid fairly for it. Here they don’t. The creator stays in charge, the creator keeps the money, and we stay in our lane — turning “a book” into your kid’s book.

Go meet a hero

That’s the whole pitch: better odds for small readers, a fair deal for the people who make the stories, and one over-loved book on a nightstand near you. Come browse the shelves — find a story, type a name, and watch a kid realize the adventure was about them all along.