Articles tagged with: bounce!
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
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
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
Posted by Kate on Aug 24, 2010
Well, we made another big step forward today: we announced who was going to act as our sales agent (selling our books to bookshops in the UK and export markets) who will distribute our books.
We’ve appointed Bounce Sales and Marketing as our UK and export sales agency, and they’ll start selling in our books immediately, in time for the publication of our first books in January 2011.
Bounce is a specialist children’s agency who sell books for several children’s book publishers, including Templar and Piccadilly Press.
Over the past few months, we’ve taken our time to investigate our selling options carefully: it’s a big deal to entrust an important part of your success to anyone. After reviewing all our options, we made our decision. We feel that Bounce is a really impressive organisation. They are children’s book specialists with a great track record as they already sell major children’s lists like Templar Books and Piccadilly Press. In fact, they have more people in the field than any other children’s specialist sales force, so their coverage of accounts in the UK is particularly good. The company was founded and is run by Robert Snuggs (that’s him in the picture with Kate), who Kate has worked with before (and, in the publishing business, personal relationships count for a lot).
Robert says, “Everyone at Bounce is thrilled that we’re going to help launch the Nosy Crow list to the trade in the UK and internationally. Nosy Crow is the most significant, innovative and dynamic new independent children’s publishing company to be established in the UK for years and we know that it will quickly prove itself to be a major source of income for booksellers everywhere. The launch list is quite exceptional and we’re very excited about working with Kate and her team to promote their top authors and illustrators and brilliant books in the months ahead.”
We’ve appointed Grantham Book Services (GBS) as our distributor, having, again, explored our options carefully. Bounce’s connection with GBS (most of Bounce’s publishers are distributed by GBS) made it a natural choice for us. We want really reliable distribution and good information about which of our books are selling where and GBS already supplies both of these services to other independent publishers.
GBS is owned by The Random House Group, and Ian Hudson, Deputy CEO The Random House Group, said, “I’m delighted that Nosy Crow has chosen to partner with GBS as it sets out to build its exciting new business. This will be a fantastic alliance of expertise between this up-and-coming children’s publisher, an excellent sales and marketing agency and a first class distributor of independent publishers.”
So that’s another milestone.
Oh, and we hope that you’ve spotted some changes to this page of our site, which we are now acknowledging is, in fact, a blog.
Tagged with bookselling,
bounce!,
gbs
