Stunjelly was asked to create a Facebook application that would enabled the client to allow fans of the well known author Terry Pratchett to add their profile picture to the cover, and names to the inside cover, of a special edition hardback of Pratchett’s latest novel “I Shall Wear Midnight”.

The application was a success filling all 2223 spaces on the cover within 8 hours, being added by over 8000 fans in the first 24 hours, and countless comments and Facebook “likes”.

The Special edition was available on pre-order and the first print was completely sold out within X hours (http://www.amazon.co.uk/midnight).

It proved and extremely successful campaign and was well received by fans and the media. A similar concept was also used a year later by Warner Bros. with the release of the latest Harry Potter movie.

Some of the challenges that faced the development included security, server loads, privacy and abuse. We initially built the platform to scale so that it wouldn’t matter if 100 or 100,000 users were using the system, this allowed us to run simulations to test analytic reports as well as real time abuse detection and management. We developed a fully functional back end admin panel secured with authentication by Facebook. By adding their image to the book users were also fast tracked to pre-ordering their copy of the printed book.

Once all the spaces where complete the system build a Photoshop PDF in CMYK with the exact specifications to the printing cover, this then allowed the publisher to perform final tweaks to the inside cover before going to print.

We found the project exciting and very rewarding and look forward to working on similar projects in the future. If you’re interested in purchasing a licence or would like to get in touch, send us a message!

Check out the video below to watch a time lapse of the application in action!
I Shall Wear Midnight