Its creators call it Click Lit and you can see the appeal. In the new rom-com Find Me I’m Yours from RosettaBooks, 24-year-old Mags works for an online bridal magazine and has just discovered her lug of a boyfriend is cheating on her. Into her life drops a mysterious hunk, aka Mr. WTF, looking for love and leaving clues all over LA. “Find me … I’m yours,” he breathes.
CNN has called Find Me I’m Yours “the book of the future,” and Today.com said, “A new way to read… [Find Me I’m Yours] is not merely a book — its characters inhabit an entire universe that includes nearly three dozen standalone websites, online video series, real-world magazines and more.”
You get to help Mags search for her hunkalicious soul mate via links to several interactive custom-designed narrative platforms that augment the storyline and invite readers to post their own images, art, videos, and stories. These incorporate 33 websites (including a functioning site for Mags’ employer Bridalville and Freak4MyPet.com, where her ex is posting pix of Mags’ dogs and you can pop in your pooch, too), Instagram accounts, ten videos of Mr. WTF’s clues, and more.
Created, written, and designed by award-winning author and digital innovator Hillary Carlip, and co-created, directed, and produced by Golden Globe-winning and Emmy-nominated TV comedy triple-hyphenate Maxine Lapiduss, Find Me I’m Yours was designed to be a page-turner novel, multimedia click fest, and as noted by Alexandra Alter in the New York Times, “a vehicle for content sponsored by companies.”
It’s not Vespa or Red Bull, two brands mentioned in Find Me I’m Yours, but the makers of Sweet’N Low, Cumberland Packing Corp, that jumped in first. Steven Eisenstadt, chief executive of Cumberland, told the Times he was excited about his company’s products being part of the story, rather than delivering the message through an outright ad.
Alter writes, “If it succeeds, it could usher in a new business model for publishers, one that blurs the lines between art and commerce in ways that are routine in TV shows and movies but rare in books.”