Nosy Crow tag

London Book Fair - a (slightly) late update

Posted by Kate on Apr 17, 2011

Last week was the week of the London Book Fair.

This is a picture by Axel Scheffler, which he donated and which was sold to an anonymous buyer in aid of the National Literacy Trust. It shows the Gruffalo (and Mouse) with Pip and Posy going to the London Book Fair.

The London Book Fair, which has less of a rights focus and more of an export focus and is a general (as opposed to a children’s books) book fair, is very much secondary in importance to the Bologna Book Fair for Nosy Crow. It was particularly tough to focus on it this year as it came so hard on the heels of the Bologna Book Fair. It’s a fair at which, this year and last, we haven’t taken a stand, though I think we may have to rethink that for next year, given the number of messages left for us with the kind people of the Independent Publishers Guild stand.

On Monday, Deb presented our The Three Little Pigs app to a crowd of people in the children’s innovation space.

On Tuesday and on Wednesday (when Axel was, with Julia Donaldson, combined “author of the day”), Kate had a series of rights appointments. Some were with publishers who, for one reason or another, we were unable to see at Bologna, and some were follow-ups to Bologna apointments. We also had the chance to meet up with a few UK bookshop and other buyers.

Nosy Crow had been invited to participate in a Publishers Association presentation of key titles for the second half of the year to independent booksellers. We were the last of 12 publishers, and, the session was, perhaps inevitably, a bit of a “death-by-powerpoint” kind of thing, so we entirely abandoned our powerpoint, and spoke about just four things we’re publishing in the second half of this year, which I felt (on the hoof) gave some sense of the age-range and kind of books we cover: Pip and Posy: The Scary Monster ; Mega Mash-ups: Pirates and Ancient Egyptians in a Haunted Museum ; Olivia Flies High ; and our Christmas picture book, Just Right. Realistically, after seeing 70-odd titles, I thought that there wasn’t a chance of anyone remembering much about individual books, but I hoped that, by taking the less conventional approach, the independent booksellers would remember Nosy Crow, so that, when their Bounce! rep came calling, they’d feel positively disposed towards the books.

I also did a talk as part of the Oxford Brookes University “Publishing Round The World” series, with an editor from Samokat and a founder of Milly Molly. Here’s me expounding Nosy Crow’s digital marketing thinking:

The photo above, which is as unflattering as it is grainy, was taken by Tom Bonnick, who’s interning with us. We wanted to check that his standards of photography are on the same level as our own if he is to continue to intern for us, and I am happy to say that they are! He did just take it with a phone, though, and from a long way away.

But all in all, a worthwhile few days.

Tagged with axel scheffler, bounce!, children's apps, children's books, children's publishers, conferences, digital, just right, london book fair, lyn gardner, mega-mash-up, national literacy trust, nikalas catlow and tim wesson, olivia, pip and posy

Nosy Crow announces a partnership with Candlewick Press in the US for illustrated books

Posted by Imogen on Mar 10, 2011

Kate writes:

For those of you who’ve been following the Nosy Crow story – and thank you if you have – you’ll know that we first entered into an agreement with Bounce! to sell our books in the UK and Ireland and in most export markets. Then we announced that our partners for Australian and New Zealand distribution were Allen and Unwin. Now we are really pleased to be able to say that we’ve entered into a partnership with Candlewick Press, who are the US’s best-known independent US children’s publisher. Boston-based Candlewick Press will co-publish the majority of Nosy Crow’s full-colour and illustrated titles in the US and Canada and Nosy Crow will become a new imprint of Candlewick Press.

Candlewick Press will publish ten Nosy Crow titles in 2011.
Candlewick Press is an independent, employee-owned publisher based in Somerville, Massachusetts. Candlewick publishes outstanding children’s books for readers of all ages, including books by award-winning authors and illustrators such as M. T. Anderson, Kate DiCamillo, Laura Amy Schlitz, and David Ezra Stein; the widely acclaimed Judy Moody, Mercy Watson, and the -‘Ology_ series; and favorites such as Guess How Much I Love You, Where’s Waldo?, and the Maisy books. Candlewick’s parent company is London-based Walker Books Ltd.

Choosing a US partner is a huge step for our fledgling company, but the match between Nosy Crow and Candlewick on illustrated publishing felt right from the start of our discussions. Though our lists are complementary, we share the culture and liberties of independent publishers, and we share our exclusive focus on – and passion for – creating great things for children to read. As someone who began their career selling rights in UK books to US publishers, I’ve known and respected Karen Lotz, who’s the president and publisher of Candlewick Press, for many years, so I have watched Candlewick grow and prosper with huge admiration. We’re very proud to be associated with Candlewick.

Karen, said very nice things about – ahem – me and about Nosy Crow: “Kate Wilson’s exceptional depth of experience in global children’s publishing and her innovative vision for our industry’s future both shine through the launch of Nosy Crow. At Candlewick, we are thrilled to be able to offer these fantastic books for young children to the US and Canadian audiences through our joint imprint.”

The photo above shows the Candlewick team with Karen on the left and with me standing when they visited the Nosy Crow offices very recently.

If you want to know more about this from Nosy Crow’s perspective, email me on kate@nosycrow.com

If you want to know more about this from Candlewick’s perspective, you could email laura.rivas@candlewick.com

Tagged with allen & unwin, bounce!, candlewick, children's books, children's publishers, publishing

Imogen gets promoted

Posted by Kate on Jan 06, 2011

Imogen got promoted today. She’s now Head of Operations. She will do exactly what she does now, but the thing is that this title felt like a much better description of what she’s ended up doing.

She’s just nipped off to see Bounce! so we can’t get a quote from her, but we know that Imogen would say that this has been the most extraordinary year in which her role has changed and grown very significantly. She’s runs all of Nosy Crow’s book production, liaising with Clays and with Imago. She is our main point of connection with Bounce!, with Allen and Unwin and with Grantham Book Services. She reminds us of all the things we haven’t done, and of all the things we haven’t yet realised we have to do.

Actually, she does loads more stuff even than that, and we don’t even know what all of it is.

But she’s not grand about it. At lunchtime, she picked up a copy of Bliss, because there’s a “This month we’re reading…” feature in it for Small Blue Thing.

We think we’ve achieved a lot in the last 10 months since we launched. It would have been impossible without Imogen.

Tagged with allen & unwin, bounce!, clays, gbs, imago, small blue thing

Apps and conferences

Posted by Kate on Dec 15, 2010

Yesterday, Kate met up with Neal Hoskins (pictured) of Winged Chariot in the Crow’s Nest to talk about the opportunities for collaboration amongst apps publishers, and, specifically, children’s apps publishers. For all of us involved in apps publishing, the challenge is how people – parents in our case – find good apps among the ever-growing sea of apps on the store.

They also talked about the Bologna Tools of Change Conference 2011, which Neal is heavily involved in, and at which Kate will be a keynote speaker.

Then Kate and Imogen left for the Bounce! Marketing sales conference for April to August titles in Islington, wrapping fizzy wine in the back of the car to give to the Bounce! reps so they could drink to Nosy Crow’s first book (Small Blue Thing) being published on 13 January 2011. Kate presented to an enthusiastic audience of 18, and it was great to see how many of the reps had already read many of the titles: Bizzy Bear and Pip and Posy were being enthusiastically read by one sales manager’s two year-old. The six year-old “reluctant artist” son of one of the reps had loved completing his first Mega Mash-up book. And one of the reps told everyone how much she’d LOVED Olivia’s First Term.

After a meeting at the Publisher’s Association about World Book Day 2012 (which’ll be the subject of another post), Kate met up with Imogen and Kirsty at Bounce!‘s Christmas Party, and Kirsty and Kate had to be asked to leave as the pub was closing. A fine time was had by all.

Tagged with allen & unwin, apps, axel scheffler, benji davies, bizzy bear, bologna book fair, bounce!, conferences, lyn gardner, mega-mash-up, nikalas catlow and tim wesson, olivia, pip and posy, s c ransom, small blue thing, world book day

It's not all cake and candles

Posted by Kate on Dec 13, 2010

Just to point out to any of you who think that it’s all party, party, party at Nosy Crow, that ordinary – indeed, dull – stuff goes on all the time.

And, sometimes, we even have more than one man in the office.

Here are Adrian and Ian (who provides accounting and finance support to us, having worked with Adrian, Kate and Camilla at Macmillan) working on a review of next year’s budget. The budget for 2011 is our first year’s sales budget: we’ve only spent money since we started up at the end of February this year.

Book publishing decisions are always a balance of information and hunch. If you’re an established publishing house, you may have a lot of historical data on the performance of your established authors. But many of the authors and illustrators that Nosy Crow will publish are new or are doing something different from what they’ve done before. While we have, between us, many decades of experience of sales patterns to draw on, we don’t have a lot of concrete information, so we are, at the moment, more reliant than we’d like to be on our instincts. We are very careful to pull together whatever information we have, and, of course, we can draw on data that Bounce! and Allen and Unwin can provided based on their sales of several lists.

App publishing decisions are even harder: there’s so little concrete information about a market that is changing very rapidly.

For Nosy Crow, all the signs for next year are good. We think we have really good, child-orientated books and highly original, rich apps. We have a good line-up of promotions in the UK trade; good sales representation from Bounce! and Allen and Unwin; some rights sales under our belts; and lots of other interest in rights in our titles.

Our hunches are informed by all the information we can pull together.

But publishing’s still a risk business.

It’s one of the things that makes it excitiing.

Tagged with allen & unwin, bounce!, independent publishers, publishing

With a Bounce! in our step: our first sales conference

Posted by Kate on Sep 10, 2010

Kate went to Nosy Crow’s first Bounce! conference: 18 sales reps and marketeers in a room who wanted to hear about Nosy Crow’s first seven books so that they could sell them to their customers. (Bounce! is our sales agency for UK and export as we announced in our recent blog post.

Oh, and, the truth is that Kate loves an audience, and it is perhaps the only disadvantage of being a small, independent publisher that she doesn’t get one as often as she used to. And while she’s stood in front of reps and talked about books before, they’ve never been her very own company’s books. So all in all, it was a Big Day for Nosy Crow.

The audience couldn’t have been more receptive and attentive, and were very enthusiastic about our first four months’ of books – Small Blue Thing, the first two Mega Mash-ups, the first two Bizzy Bear board books and, of course, Axel Scheffler’s two Pip and Posy books.

Sue Ransom joined us for a lunch that featured chips and ice-cream (top lunch in Kate’s books), and at least one of the reps was able to give her excellent feedback from real, live bookshop people based on their reading of proof copies of Small Blue Thing.

All good!

Tagged with bizzy bear, booksellers, bounce!, conferences, mega-mash-up, pip and posy, small blue thing, sue ransom

Books for babies (and pre-schoolers)

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.

Tagged with awards, books for babies, book trust, bounce!, children's books, children and reading