Posted by Kate on Sep 04, 2010
Sorry, folks: this is as much a note-to-self as it is a post for you.
Just over six months after its launch, this website’s had over 27,000 visits from 8,300 visitors (130,000 page-views) from 108 countries.
@nosycrow has 850 Twitter followers and a lively Facebook presence that’s liked by 256 people.
Ours is an interesting position to be in: unlike most publishers, we’re able to build our identity before we’ve published anything. We’ve been able, over the last 6 months, to talk about apps and electronic publishing as well as about classic books published by “rival” publishers (it’s fun to be generous), and throughout we have tried to keep some kind of record of being a start-up that we hope gives you some kind of insight into our values and our lives.
Once again, we’re grateful to those of you who have taken an interest in us and who choose – regularly or occasionally – to join us on the ride.
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Posted by Kate on Sep 02, 2010
This evening, Kate went to the Book Trust Early Years Awards ceremony.
It’s far too early for Nosy Crow (which, let’s remember, hasn’t published a book yet) to be submitting books to awards, but Kate loves books for babies and pre-schoolers.
Once, many years before she had babies herself (and so many, many years ago), Kate went to Wigan.
She went to Wigan because Wigan Council (forgive her: she thinks this is right, but her memory is a bit hazy as to the exact body), was excited by the results coming out of the early Bookstart research. They wanted to give books to every baby in Wigan, because they believed that early exposure to books made children:
- more successful at school
- more ready to start school
- more likely to read and talk about books
- more likely to visit libraries and borrow books from libraries
- more likely to have books bought for them and read to them
Kate had just acquired independent publisher Campbell Books from its founder Rod Campbell (whose Goodnight Buster was shortlisted for the Baby Book Award this evening) for Macmillan, the company she then worked for. She’d always been interested in baby books, but Campbell Books was really all about babies and toddlers. She said to Wigan Council that she’d give them some books to give to Wigan babies, and they invited her to come to a Sainsbury’s in Wigan to recruit babies and their parents for the Wigan Bookstart scheme. She’ll never forget approaching parents of a toddler to ask if they’d be interested in joining the scheme, and being looked at as if she were mad: “He can’t read! He’s only two years-old!”. Or being photographed with a baby who stiffened in astonishment when she opened a book – a child who’d perhaps never seen pages turned before, and whose mother acknowledged that there were no books in the house.
At one point, when the National Bookstart Programme ran out of money, just before the government committed to supporting it, Campbell Books donated over 600,000 books to the programme to help keep it going.
So Nosy Crow will publish books for babies because if you don’t start at the very beginning, how can you expect to engage readers later.
This evening, three awards were made by children’s book expert Wendy Cooling on behalf of Booktrust.
The first was for the Best Book For Babies, and went to I Love My Mummy by Giles Andreae, illustrated by Emma Dodd. The book was, as it happens, designed by Steph Amster, who’s joining the Nosy Crow team on 13 September.
The second was for the Best Picture Book (for children under five), and went to evolution tale, One Smart Fish by Chris Wormell. Kate was especially pleased to see two books from the Alison Green Books list on the shortlist, one of them written by Alison herself: Alison was a colleague of Kate’s for 17 years.
The third was for the Best Emerging Illustrator and went to Levi Pinfold for The Django, for his detailed, painterly and highly sophisticated picture book artwork. The book’s published by Templar, who share with Nosy Crow Bounce! as their UK and export trade sales agency.
Worthwhile awards. Nice people. Fun evening.
Oh, and Kate tweeted the awards (so apologies if this is all old news). In the course of the event someone asked her to recommend books for a one year-old. Off the cuff, these were her suggestions:
- Each Peach Pear Plum
- We’re Going on a Bear Hunt
- Goodnight Moon
- Dear Zoo
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar
- The Big Book of Beautiful Babies
What books would you suggest? Let us know by commenting on the post.
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Posted by Kate on Aug 31, 2010
While we’ve been working throughout the summer, today was the first day in a while that Imogen, Kate, Camilla and Adrian have convened in the office, and, though Deb: wasn’t with us as she’s on holiday, and Steph and Kate B have yet to start (they join us on 13 September), it did feel like the beginning of a new phase, as we rev up to publication of our first app in October 2010 and our first print publication in January 2011.
This feeling was reinforced by the arrival today of bound proofs of Mega Mash-up: Romans v Dinosaurs on Mars They were very, very handsome. We’d set out to create a unique package combining fiction with doodling, in a fiction-friendly paperback format and with two-colour illustration throughout. They’re novels, but they invite even the most reluctant reader in by suggesting that they complete the illustrations. What’s more, they’re funny in a scatalogical boy way (funnier even than a book has any right to be whose central premise is that dinosaurs and Romans will have to work together to save their Martian colony from an asteroid by firing hardened dinosaur dung from catapults). And they look great!
Here’s Imogen, fast becoming our book production as well as our admin supremo, looking through one of the proofs. We need them to check that we haven’t made any mistakes (so we have sent them to Kirsty, their editor, and Nikalas and Tim, who created them. We also need them so that Nosy Crow and Bounce! can show them to booksellers, some of whom have already told us they like them: Waterstones will be promoting Mega Mash-up: Romans v Dinosaurs on Mars in stores on publication in February 2011. We’ll also be taking them to the Frankfurt book fair, to sell translation rights.
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