Questions before you begin.

Four to eight weeks before the birthday is best. Two weeks is the minimum, or a few days more around bank holidays.

Tell us when the book needs to arrive and we’ll set the writing deadline about 12 days before it. That leaves time for you to read everything and order, and for us to print and post it.

Anyone who knows them: family, godparents, family friends, teachers, coaches or tutors, and their own friends and siblings, including anyone under 18. Up to 30 people can write.

Share one link in a WhatsApp group, by text or by email. Anyone who opens it gives their name and email, picks a topic and writes, with no account to set up. We email them their own link so they can come back to a draft.

If you’d like someone to write on a particular topic, add them by name and we’ll email their invitation.

Yes. The invitation and its link preview both say it’s a surprise and ask people not to tell them. Anyone the link is forwarded to can join, so don’t post it in a group chat they’re in.

You can turn the link off or replace it at any time, and it closes at the writing deadline.

They pick the topic they’d most like to write about, then answer whichever of its three questions suits them. Most questions ask for something the writer has actually learned, often told through a story from their own life. They can write as much or as little as they’d like.

Yes. We suggest six to start: ‘Money’, ‘Getting it wrong’, ‘Something to cook’, ‘Looking after yourself’, ‘Friendship’ and ‘Theo and me’. Or choose your own from 17, and reword any of their questions.

You can preview the page your contributors will see before you share the link. Once someone starts writing on a topic, its questions are fixed, so nobody’s answer ends up under a different question.

Every topic has a short, plain question for them: ‘What’s one thing you’ve learned about money? Say it the way you’d say it out loud.’ If they’d rather talk than type, sit with them and type it up on their link.

Yes, one each with a caption, printed on the page facing their words. Without one, that page has a small ornament.

You can see who’s joined and who’s written, and send a reminder to anyone yet to write. We email them their own link and the deadline.

Yes. You read the entries, ask contributors for changes or leave an entry out, and arrange the chapters. You can add a foreword and choose the cover details.

Once you pay and place the order, the book is locked. We check the print proof by hand before sending it to the printer.

A cloth-bound hardback, 156 × 234 mm, in a choice of five cloth colours, with a printed dust jacket carrying your title, and everyone’s names on its front flap. Inside, the words are typeset into chapters with space for optional colour photographs.

The cloth spine under the jacket is foil-stamped with text you choose – “For” and their name, unless you change it. On books of 100 pages or more, the jacket’s spine carries it too; on shorter books it’s too narrow to print on, so it’s left plain.

The book is £89, including UK postage, and each extra copy is £69. Nothing to pay until you order.

We deliver in the UK only for now. All copies are printed together and posted to one address.

Before you pay, we show whether the book will arrive by the date you gave us. If we say it will and it doesn’t, we’ll refund you in full, and you keep the book.

Those are the birthdays we’ve built it around, but any milestone birthday from 16 to 30 works: you choose which when you set it up. The questions are written for someone early in adult life, so the book is mostly advice, with a few stories from the people who know them.

No. People write every contribution. The questions give them a way in; we typeset their words for the book.