Nosy Crow is a Mumpreneur UK awards finalist in the Best Start Up category - Nosy Crow Skip to content
Posted by Kate, August 6, 2011

Nosy Crow is a Mumpreneur UK awards finalist in the Best Start Up category

(After this blog post was written, Kate actually won Mumpreneur’s Inspirational Business Mum of the Year, Mumpreneur’s top award.)

We’re feeling pretty chuffed.

Nosy Crow has been selected as a finalist in the Mumpreneur Awards Best Start Up category.

This is one of a series of awards that are designed to celebrate the best of the UK’s parent-run businesses.

I blogged about the 2010 conference and awards last September, long before we’d launched.

I don’t think that it’s necessary to be a parent to write, illustrate or publish great books or apps for children, but I do think that those of us at Nosy Crow who are parents draw heavily on our experience as parents to inform our publishing decisions. We think of our own children’s fascinations and fears. We remember the point at which birthdays became meaningful; when the challenge of sharing was a particularly difficult one; when our children first lost a tooth; when our children first said, “I hate you!” to us (or, in my case, left a note on my pillow saying, “I hat you”); when they were ready to play in a field on their own. I am, at the moment, particularly attuned, because of the ages of my own children, to the differences between a top-end-of-primary-school child (an 11 year- old) and a bottom-end-of-secondary-school child (a 12 year-old), and I find that this is very much influencing my response to writing for children of 10+.

Of course, we have to resist extrapolating from our own parental experience too much. Children are different, and while one may be afraid of the dark, another may be completely unaffected; one child may love dinosaurs and know all their names, while another couldn’t care less about them. In fact, I would have to admit that I did some of my least successful publishing for little babies immediately after the birth of my first child: I think I was so wrapped up in that experience that I couldn’t imagine the preferences and perspective of any baby other than my own.

But having parents as part of the Nosy Crow team is valuable and important… and we go out of our way to accommodate parents’ needs to balance their work life with parenting (five of us work flexibly, or work particular hours, or work part-time, to accommodate childcare, and we welcome children into the office when things like offset days mean that normal arrangements don’t apply). Recently, Giselle was due to start work on the day of her son’s first birthday, but (though we were getting a bit desperate for design support!) we told her to stay at home and enjoy her day with him.

We know, too, that the buyers of most children’s books and apps are parents. Though our main aim is to produce books and apps that appeal to children themselves, we are also aware of the need to appeal to parents. That means that, at least at this stage in our development, there are certain books, and certain kinds of books, that we don’t choose to publish: gritty coming-of-age fiction for young adults, or books with explicit sex or violence, for example. (I’ve previously written on the sort-of related subject of the responsibilities of being a children’s publisher.) One of the great appeals for me of Small Blue Thing, the novel we’ve published that is oldest in terms of its target audience, for example, was that it was very innocent: I couldn’t imagine any parent (or teacher for that matter) taking exception to any of the content. It’s interesting to note that S C Ransom originally wrote the first book in the sequence for her own daughter’s twelfth birthday.

So being parents, and being part of a small, entrepreneurial child- and parent-focussed business are both essential to many of us at Nosy Crow.

Please wish us luck in the next stage of the selection process. There were 720 entrants, so being a finalist is a pretty great achievement in itself!

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