How a book written for one reader actually gets made

"Personalised" is a word that has been worn down almost to nothing. It usually means your first name pasted into a template. So it is worth setting out exactly what happens here, step by step, including the parts that are less flattering to describe.

1. Twenty-one scenes

You choose a subject and answer twenty-one imagined scenes. Twelve are asked of every reader and describe how you move in general; nine belong to the subject you picked. It takes about eight minutes and needs no account.

Your answers stay in your browser while you do this. Nothing reaches us until you order, which is also why closing the tab halfway through loses them.

2. A reading, not a score

Each answer carries weight across several axes at once. Add them up and you get six shared axes — push, tempo, focus, company, exposure, horizon — plus two that belong to the subject. Money has its own two; technology has different ones.

You see this reading immediately, before paying. You also see your contents page, which is generated from it: an opening, your four strongest axes turned into chapters, and two closings. Seven chapters. If the reading does not sound like you, this is the point to leave.

3. Your name and your year

If you go ahead, we ask for your name and your year of birth. The name is because the book addresses you and is printed on the cover. The year is context for the writing — what the world was doing while you were growing up — and it has no effect on the reading itself. You must be 18 or over.

4. What the writing system is given

The book is written by an AI writing system, directed by a brief we assemble from your reading. It is worth being exact about what is in that brief and what is not.

• It receives: your first name, your year of birth, your axes and which end of each you sit on, the subject you chose, your contents page and your language.
• It does not receive: your surname, your email address, your order, your payment details, or anything about other readers.

The structure is not improvised either. Every title has an editorial skeleton we wrote — what a chapter owes the reader, what has to be concrete, where the exercise goes. The reading decides which chapters exist, in what order, with which examples and which failure modes. The skeleton keeps it a book rather than a long answer.

5. Chapters, then a PDF

Your book appears in your account as it is written, chapter by chapter, so you can start reading before the last one lands. Each chapter ends with a single move — one thing to actually do, chosen for your tempo rather than the average reader's.

When the last chapter is written the whole thing is typeset as a PDF with your name on the cover and a mark drawn from your own axes, which means no two covers are identical. It stays in your account. Nothing expires, and there is no subscription attached to it.

What this means for two readers

Two people can buy the same title on the same afternoon and receive genuinely different books: different chapter order, different examples, different exercises, different warnings. Not different padding around a shared core — the core is what changes.

It also means something more awkward, which we would rather say out loud: a book made to order for one reader cannot be returned once it has been written. If it never arrives, stops opening, or plainly was not written to the contents page you were shown, write to us and we will fix it or refund it. That is the deal, and it is the honest consequence of the thing being made for you rather than picked off a shelf.

The method underneath all of this is in What is kokology. What the axes mean, one by one, is in a field guide to how you move.