A couple of weeks ago, we published The Secret Hen House Theatre by debut author, Helen Peters.
Helen, who, though brought up on a farm in Sussex now lives in North London, had a little launch party at The Children’s Bookshop, Muswell Hill, an award-winning, specialist, independent bookshop, run by Kate Agnew who also reviews children’s books and writes about them for The Guardian.
I wasn’t able to be there: I had a London Book Fair thing that evening. But Kirsty, Dom and Nicola, who designed the cover (I wrote about the photoshoot here), were at the party, and reported back that a Good Time Was Had By All.
The picture above is of the window display in the shop.
Meanwhile, Waterstones in Cheltenham drew attention to the book with a very sweet little hand-made display, labelled “a fabulous book… our favourite this month”:
Angela Williams, of Bounce, who sell our books, emailed the following message when she sent me the picture:
“Off to Cheltenham Waterstone’s this morning to see children’s bookseller extraordinaire, Barbara, to tell her about all the wonderful new titles coming from our publishers this summer. After a quick catch-up, she said, “Oooh have you seen our Secret Hen House?” and she took me over to an amazing home-made mini-theatre, complete with hens and a gingham curtain, that they are using to display their favourite read of the moment. Don’t you just love passionate, inventive booksellers like Barbara?”
And we do love passionate, inventive booksellers.
The book’s doing very nicely indeed. And we’ve had some very nice reviews (you’ll find them in the Media Mentions section of this page), and we’ve sold rights, so far, to Gallimard in France.
