Nosy Crow tag

Selling and learning in the USA

Posted by Kate on Nov 16, 2011

Last week I came back from a trip to the US. I was joined half-way through by Deb, who’ll herself be writing about the Dust or Magic Conference we went to last weekend.

Arriving on the afternoon of Hallowe’en (but with a dinner appointment and jetlag that precluded going to the parade, in case you were wondering), I was in the US to see publishers. The key visit was to Candlewick Press in Somerville near Boston. They are about to launch their second season of illustrated books under the Nosy Crow imprint, and have already reprinted two of the first ten launch titles.

We were finalising the Fall 2012 programme.

I like talking about our books to Candlewick. Their comments about projects in their early stages are insightful and interesting, and provide a different editorial and design perspective, as well as a different culture perspective, that can help us refine books. Sometimes they even put their finger on some small detail that has been niggling us but that, in the rush of getting books to Frankfurt or some other deadline, we’ve managed to suppress. I find this process of refining through feedback is one of the great joys of rights selling… though, of course, we are talking about refinement here, not wholesale ripping apart and starting again.

I found them feeling confident about illustrated books and their ability to bring them to market. They were particularly excited by I Want My Hat Back by newcomer Jon Klassen, which has had excellent reviews from The New York Times among others. I brought back a copy for Axel Scheffler: it has a dark and grown-up sophistication (though it looks very simple) that I thought would appeal to him.

I spent the rest of the time in New York, with a packed schedule of fiction appointments (Candlewick’s Nosy Crow imprint is just for illustrated books). On my busiest day, I saw 13 publishers… though actually what I mean is that I saw the heads of 13 imprints at four different big publishers. While there was interest in our titles to follow up with pretty much all of the publishers that I saw, I found many of them focused on Young Adult fiction, with an emphasis on dystopian fantasies in particular (the halo effect of The Hunger Games and the forthcoming film is much in evidence) and fantasies in general. Many of the children’s publishers I spoke to acknowledged that they were acquiring and shaping books for an adult audience. This is a dance that Nosy Crow, with our emphasis on books for children under 12, has decided to sit out.

It’s also interesting to be be reminded of what titles, series and authors are selling in the US. Many, many books work on both sides of the Atlantic. Recent years have seen a reversal of the “Harry Potter tide” of books flowing from the UK to the US as US-originated books and series – Twilight and Wimpy Kid in particular – have dominated the UK market as well as the US market. But it’s always interesting to be reminded of the differences between the two markets, which this list of children’s bestsellers indicates. Some of these titles are familiar to the UK market, but many won’t be familiar to many people here at all. I remember buying rights to Goodnight Moon for – let’s be honest here – a ridiculously small advance because it wasn’t known here and had been out of print for years. The same is true of UK titles travelling to the US: Jacqueline Wilson books have never really sold in the US, for example and The Gruffalo isn’t a fixture of as many millions of children’s bookcases there either.

The Jacqueline Wilson phenomenon illustrates something that I’ve found throughout my time selling rights: with a few exceptions, often for older readers (Louise Rennison’s books, for example), “real-life” fictional stories that are set in the UK with a UK vernacular do not often sell well in the US. By contrast, stories rooted in real life from Judy Blume’s books to Wimpy Kid do often travel well from the US to the UK, though real-life books for younger readers often struggle to cross the Atlantic in either direction: it’s a source of real amazement to US publishers that Junie B Jones and Ramona are little known in the UK. It used to be the case that UK originated fantasy sold well in the US, but arguably there’s less need for it now that the US is home-growing and exporting series by Rick Riordan and Suzanne Collins among others.

Other recurring topics of conversation when I was in those New York offices were the impact of the loss of Borders and the growth of e-reading. There were many references to the prominence of the Nook in Barnes and Noble stores, and an expectation that the launch of the Amazon Fire would impact on children’s e-reader reading, not only directly as children get Amazon Fires as Holiday gifts, but also indirectly, as older devices are handed down the family.

Now I just have to get down to the follow-up…

Tagged with amazon fire, barnes and noble, bestsellers, candlewick, children's fiction, diary of a wimpy kid, ereaders, ereading, harry potter, jacqueline wilson, louise rennison, rick riordan, the hunger games, twilight, usa

What should Noodle eat?

Posted by Kate on Aug 10, 2011

Last week, on 4 August, while I was away, we published two further Noodle books illustrated by Marion Billet, Noodle Loves Bedtime and Noodle Loves to Eat.

These are very simple rhyming touch-and-feel books that would, I think, be exactly right for a baby aged between 6 and 18 months. When we were looking for an illustrator (Marion Billet is French, and none of us had worked with her before), we were influenced by the look of Japanese packaging, and Camilla had a line up of various Japanese biscuits and sweets on her desk.

We’ve sold rights to the books to the US (they’re going to be published under the Nosy Crow imprint by Candlewick). And that was an interesting process: Noodle was originally eating (chopped up) sausages and strawberries (not together, of course: that would be revolting), but Candlewick thought that sausages would be viewed as being bad for young children, and said that US paediatricians discouraged parents from giving strawberries to babies and toddlers because they were allergenic. So we changed the sausages to pasta (you can see on the “sausages” version, which is a proof, the line that indicates where the card will be cut so that the green, bumpy fabric can be felt through the hole):

Noodle with his sausages

Noodle with pasta

And we changed the strawberries to raspberries.

This was expensive and time-consuming (I mean, we love Candlewick, so nothing’s too much trouble, but still…). However, the only way that illustrated books (and particularly touch-and-feel books) are financially viable to produce is if we can collect together a really big print-run, printing our own (UK and Australia/New Zealand) copies together with copies for as many other countries as we can sell rights to. So, if you’re creating illustrated books, you have to accommodate the taste (literally, in this instance) and the cultures of different countries.

There are people who argue that this “internationalisation” leads to bland books. I don’t think it does, and looking round the halls at Bologna, I am always struck by the variation and I am very sure that many really great books wouldn’t get published if you only had the UK market to rely on: the example that I always give is that of The Gruffalo, of which, I think, perhaps 1,500 hardback copies were printed for the UK/Australia/New Zealand, but a financially viable print run was made up of this quantity plus quantities in other languages.

We’ve also so far sold rights in these books in Dutch, Portuguese and Italian – to countries where, it seems, pasta and raspberries are absolutely fine for babies – so it all ended well for Noodle.

Tagged with books for babies, books for toddlers, candlewick, marion billet, noodle

Sebastian Walker died 20 years ago today

Posted by Kate on Jun 16, 2011

Sebastian Walker founded Walker Books in 1979, aged 37. He died 12 years later, having achieved something remarkable. Walker Books was, and is, an excellent children’s book-only publishing company. He started the business in a back bedroom with a handful of colleagues and a bank loan. 12 years later, Walker Books was turning over £17 million (perhaps the equivalent of £27 million in today’s money), and publishing over 300 titles per year. In the years in which he ran the business, Walker published Where’s Wally by Martin Handford, Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? by Martin Waddell and Barbara Frith, Five Minute’s Peace by Jill Murphy, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, and Ten in the Bed by Penny Dale, among other great children’s illustrated books.

I never met him. I was at school when he set up Walker Books, and not many years into my publishing career when he died. I admired him from afar, though, and continue to admire his achievements and legacy. A few months ago, I read his sister, Mirabel Cecil’s, honest, detailed and touching biography, A Kind of Prospero (the title is taken from a phrase Maurice Sendak used to describe Sebastian Walker). Sebastian Walker seems to have been a mass of contradictions: gregarious but isolated; indiscreet but secretive; a gay man who struggled to sustain relationships but someone obsessed with the idea of family (who perhaps built his own “family” when he build his company); someone who, on the one hand, was devoted to his business but, on the other, someone who would nip out of the office for hours to hone his skills as a pianist; a charmer and a terrible snob; someone who demanded and provided enormous loyalty, but who sacked people in a way that was harsh and acrimonious; a publisher who spoke about the importance of literacy but someone who professed little interest in reading himself.

Julie Myerson gives her perspective in this article in The Guardian, My Hero Sebastian Walker. Altogether, he sounds fascinating and amazing… if capricious and difficult!

The Mirabel Cecil biography is also – and this was one of the reasons I wanted to read it – the only book I have found that is in large part about doing what I am spending my time doing: building a children’s book publishing company, beginning at a time of recession, with a clear sense of its own purpose and identity. Mirabel Cecil gives information about turnover, staff numbers, office moves and title count over the years in a way that is useful – and inspiring – to the founder of a business that has been publishing for exactly five months!

The other reason that I read the book is that Nosy Crow has its own connection with Walker Books: Candlewick Press, who will begin publishing books under a Nosy Crow imprint in two months, is the US division of Walker Books. Sebastian Walker made the decision to start up in America, and the company was set up in the year he died. Candlewick Press is a substantial – and the fastest-growing independent – US children’s pulbishing company. It publishes some great books originated by Walker UK (like Lucy Cousin’s Maisy Mouse Books, and Guess How Much I Love You) and is the original publisher of books by best-selling and award-winning authors like Kate DiCamillo (Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Desperaux),Megan McDonald (the Judy Moody and Stink books) and M T Anderson (the Octavian Nothing books).

In his twelve years at the helm of Walker Books, Sebastian Walker built a business and a brand; impacted on the standards of picture book production and design internationally; made the UK children’s publishing business more international as publishers sought to emulate his success with co-edition publishing (I wrote about this in my post about this year’s Bologna Book Fair); and challenged bookselling conventions (he struck a deal with Sainsbury’s to publish children’s books under the Sainsbury’s brand, for example). He changed children’s publishing in the UK. Who knows what else he’d have achieved and what new directions he’d have taken had he lived another 20 years?

Tagged with best books for children, candlewick, children's books, children's publishers, independent publishers, julie myerson, maurice senak, publishing, sainsbury, sainsbury's, sebastian walker, the guardian, walker books

Toddling along nicely

Posted by Kate on May 12, 2011

Yesterday, the Nosy Crows had a bit of a lunch-time knees-up to celebrate (nearly) 15 months of existence and (nearly) 5 months of publishing. It was a non-birthday party, because we hadn’t been able to get ourselves organised enough to celebrate earlier. We’d love to have a photograph to show you what it was like, but our usual Nosy Crow photographic incompetence precludes this.

I wrote about our real birthday in our blog post of 22 February.

Adrian cooked, mainly Ottolenghi stuff as we have some vegetarians/borderline vegetarians in our group, and, besides, the recipes are great. I wheeled out the old pavlova trick. We ate like hogs, and staggered off into the early evening.

Because of how we work – three of us work from home, and some of us work part-time – and because we have as few formal meetings as possible, we don’t spend much time round a table, so it was great to have us all (well, nearly all: Deb’s in Rome but we couldn’t bear to postpone any further) in one room just to talk.

And it was a welcome moment to stop (because we hardly ever have time to stop) and think about what we’d achieved so far.

We now have nine books published in the UK:

Small Blue Thing

Mega Mash-up: Romans v Dinosaurs on Mars

Mega Mash-up: Robots v Gorillas in the Desert

Bizzy Bear: Fun on the Farm

Bizzy Bear: Let’s Go and Play

Pip and Posy: The Super Scooter

Pip and Posy: The Little Puddle

Dinosaur Dig!

Noodle Loves to Cuddle

Noodle Loves the Beach

The first few are also published in Australia /New Zealand via Allen and Unwin, and many will be published in the second half of the year in the USA/Canada by Candlewick Press under the Nosy Crow imprint. So far, we’ve sold rights to translate these books to publishers in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Holland, Germany, France, Israel, Korea and China.

We have one app, The Three Little Pigs, available in the App Stores throughout the world, which has been named as one of the top 10 children’s book apps by the New York Times, and been extensively reviewed and praised by people who’ve bought it, bloggers specialising in apps and some of the increasing number of children’s book reviewers who are turning their attention to children’s reading experiences on the iPad (you can see most of the reviews on our The Three Little Pigs page of the Media Kit section of our website. The app will be published in German by Carlsen and in French by Gallimard Jeunesse.

We feel lucky to have pulled together the team we have – people with the best possible experience in fields as diverse as computer games coding, picture book design and children’s fiction commissioning (you can find out more about each of us in the Who Are We? section in the About As part of our website.

It’s not all cakes and ale: these are exceptionally tough times to be a print publisher, and the apps market is in its infancy, but, 15 months on, we reckon that we’ve made the best possible start and are toddling along nicely.

Tagged with allen & unwin, apps, bizzy bear, candlewick, carlsen germany, children's apps, children's books, children's publishers, dinosaur dig, gallimard jeunesse, mega-mash-up, noodle, pip and posy, small blue thing

Interview with Axel Scheffler as he draws Pip and Posy

Posted by Deb on Apr 25, 2011

The first two books by Axel Scheffler for Nosy Crow, Pip and Posy: The Super Scooter and Pip and Posy: The Little Puddle are now out – you should find them in all good UK and Irish bookshops and many supermarkets.

Pip and Posy: The Super Scooter was reviewed in an Easter children’s books round-up in The Guardian on Saturday, and the books have been listed as big books for Book Expo America (Candlewick Press will publish them in December 2011).

Axel’s done some “proper” interviews: I wrote about them in an earlier blog.

But, when we were working on the books, I interviewed him too, while we filmed him drawing Pip and Posy. You can see the results in the video above.

Tagged with axel scheffler, candlewick, children's books, children's books for easter, pip and posy

Nosy Crow in the USA and Canada

Posted by Kate on Apr 08, 2011

Well, things got very real – and exciting – this week for Nosy Crow in North America.

Those of you who follow the blog will know that on March 10 (gosh: just under a month ago – things have moved fast since then!) we announced in our blog post that day that 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.

Since then, as I say, things have moved quickly, and we’ve finalised the first Nosy Crow list for the US and Canada which will be published between August and December 2011. The books that will be published on the first Fall list are:

Dinosaur Dig! (publishing August in the US)

Noodle Loves to Cuddle and Noodle Loves Bedtime (publishing September in the US)

Bizzy Bear: Fun on the Farm and Bizzy Bear: Let’s Go and Play (publishing December in the US)

Pip and Posy: The Super Scooter and Pip and Posy: The Little Puddle (publishing December in the US)

Mega Mash-up: Romans v Dinosaurs on Mars, Mega Mash-up: Robots v Gorillas in the Desert and Mega Mash-up: Aliens v Mad Scientists under the Ocean (publishing December in the US)

I’ve spent the last few days with friends at Candlewick.

First, I went to Boston to present the SPRING 2012 list (because publishing never stops, folks, and we are now working on the titles that Candlewick will be publishing under the Nosy Crow imprint from January to July 2012).

Then I went to New York (and I do love New York), to present the Fall list to Random House Special Markets team (because Candlewick is distributed by Random House in the US and Canada and they do some of their specialist selling through Random House’s sales force) to present to the people who do deals with things as diverse as museum shops and Pampers. Then on to Scholastic (for whom I used to work and an organisation I hugely admire) to talk about the Nosy Crow/Candlewick list to David Allender of US clubs before a lunch with Lisa Dugan, Barnes and Noble’s baby, toddler and picture book buyer.

While I was in New York, I managed to meet up with Andi Meyer, who is clever, dedicated and nice, and who works on publicising our apps in the US and does a lot or our @nosycrowapps tweeting. It was, as it happens, the eve of the mention of The Three Little Pigs on CBS (you can see the clip here, but we didn’t know it was happening until it was happening, if you see what I mean. We had a lot to talk about over our pasta.

And now I’m writing this in a hotel near Niagara (the Canadian side – the photo is of the Canadian side of the falls and it was – really – glorious to see it yesterday evening), having presented the Fall list to the very nice people at Random House Canada (who do Candlewick’s selling in Canada).

It’s been a busy three days, but there’s nothing like being able to present great books – in person – to the people who will then be the advocates of those books as they make their way to readers more than five thousand miles away from the place that those books were created.

Tagged with apps canada usa, bizzy bear, candlewick, dinosaur dig, mega-mash-up, noodle, pip and posy, random house canada