Nosy Crow is shortlisted for five IPG Independent Publishing Awards! - Nosy Crow Skip to content
Posted by Kate, February 12, 2016

Nosy Crow is shortlisted for five IPG Independent Publishing Awards!

We are pleased and proud today.

We found out that we have been shortlisted for five 2016 IPG Independent Publishing Awards – more than any other publisher shortlisted.

We’ve been shortlisted for IPG Children’s Publisher of the Year. Barrington Stoke, Bloomsbury Publishing, and Quarto Publishing Group were also shortlisted. We admire every single one of them and have been watching them all year, so we’re not surprised. The IPG said, “Nosy Crow, winner of this Award in 2012 and 2013, grew its sales once more in 2015. As well as strong front and backlist sales, it promoted itself vigorously via apps, masterclasses and free children’s book groups. ‘Nosy Crow clearly has huge passion for its books, and it has been very good at building services around its publishing,’ judges said. They also admired its partnerships with the National Trust and British Museum, its care of staff and charitable work.”

We’ve been shortlisted for The Bookseller International Achievement Award together with Accent Press, Pavilion Books, and Walker Books. The IPG said, Nosy Crow, a two-time winner of this Award, had another year of intense international sales activity, wrapping up hundreds of coedition and rights deals and scouting out more new partners at book fairs. It hiked its export turnover too, and sold apps in translation. Non-UK markets now account for nearly half of the publisher’s turnover. ‘Nosy Crow is exceptionally good at building partnerships all over the place—international is at its core,’ judges said.”

We’ve been shortlisted for Ingram Content Group Digital Publishing Award. The others shortlisted were Bloomsbury Publishing and Faber & Faber – formidable competition. The IPG said, “Nosy Crow’s place on the shortlist is earned by its in-house apps and Stories Aloud project that uses digital audio to enhance print picture book content. It added more fairy tale apps and several dozen Stories Aloud streams in 2015, and grew its iBooks list too. ‘Stories Aloud has taken the much-maligned QR code and turned it into a very useful application,’ judges said. “Nosy Crow goes on pushing the boundaries and digital is having a big impact on sales.”

We’ve been shortlisted for Nielsen Digital Marketing Award, as were Accent Press, Faber & Faber and How2Become. The IPG said, “Nosy Crow is seeking to win this Award for the third year in a row. In 2015 it relaunched its website to provide ecommerce and mobile optimization, and harnessed all its digital marketing elements to generate big sales for a debut novel, My Brother is a Superhero. ‘Nosy Crow has been great at social media from the start, but it has taken its online activity a step further now. It engages its readers brilliantly and is totally professional in everything it does’, judges said.”

And last but far from least, because apart from being a well-deserved recognition for Ola herself, it’s a sort of indication of how much the whole Nosy Crow team contributes to our success, Ola Gotkowska, our rights manager has been shortlisted for IPG Young Independent Publisher of the Year, as have Joshua Brown from How2Become; Sam Richardson from SPCK, and Rachel Williams from Quarto Publishing Group. The IPG said, “Ola Gotkowska of Nosy Crow has risen up the ranks to rights manager over four years at the company, and has played a pivotal role in its burgeoning co-edition and rights business. She constantly unearths new publishing partners around the world and manages international activity with meticulous precision. ‘She finds an exceptional number of new customers and brings something unique and significant to Nosy Crow,’ the judges noted.” Tom Bonnick, our business development manager and commissioning editor, won last year.

So houpla! for Nosy Crow today. Wish us luck for the awards themselves, which will be announced on March 3 at the IPG conference dinner. We know that the competition is really stiff in every category, and the shortlists are, as always, a tribute to the vibrancy of the UK’s independent publishing community: membership of the IPG recently topped 600 companies.

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