Nosy Crow tag

Kate wins Mumpreneur's Inspirational Business Mum of the Year Award

Posted by Kate on Oct 03, 2011

I am still feeling a bit dazed. Last week I went to the Mumpreneur UK 2011 conference… and came back with the top award: Inspirational Business Mum of the Year award.

The conference is an opportunity for parent entrepreneurs to meet up, learn from one another and from the seminars (on subjects like using Google Analytics more effectively), and to celebrate the achievements of parent entrepreneurs in the awards ceremony at the end of the afternoon.

Nosy Crow, as we’ve already mentioned on the blog, was shortlisted in the Best Start Up category, and there were 10 other categories in addition to the final award, the Inspirational Business Mum of the Year award, which has no shortlist.

When we didn’t win the Best Start Up award (it went to Gander Kids), I was, I have to say, a little bit disappointed. The award, judged by a panel including former Dragon Duncan Bannatyne of The Bannatyne Group, was for a company that had made the biggest impact in the shortest period of time. I really hoped that we were in with a chance, given our UK and international sales performance since our launch in January, the selection of many of our books in key UK book retailers’ promotions, and the reception that our apps have had.

But I’m realistic: I knew that there were 720 entries for these awards, and, besides, I’d been to enough award ceremonies in my years of publishing to know that you win some, and you lose some, so I applauded Maxine Lewis of Gander Kids and settled down to the rest of the awards.

Best Online Business was won by The Letteroom
Best Green Business was won by Evolve Beauty
Best Supporting Business was won by Lawyers 4 Mumpreneurs
Best Saleswoman was won by Clare Moran of My Secret Kitchen
Best Interactive business was won by The Creation Station
Best International business was won by Cuski
Best Dadpreneur was won by Daddy Natal
The Mum on a Mission prize, a new prize for women who’d set up charities and social enterprises, was won by Sarah Settelen of The Promise
The gold Best Product award was won by Twinkle Tog from Dream Genii

I thought that the Inspirational Business Mum of the year would have won one of the category prizes already.

But as the spokeswoman from the sponsor, Intuit (whose QuickBooks system we, by happy chance, already use), started to describe the winner, the story seemed awfully familiar to me… because it was my story, and Nosy Crow’s story.

I stumbled up to the stage to accept the prize and gabbled something: I’ve never been less prepared to speak. But if I had had my wits about me, this is pretty much what I’d have said:

This is the most fantastic – and unexpected – validation of the hard work of the clever and professional staff of Nosy Crow and of our creative and professional authors and illustrators. I am proud of their work every day.

I am so grateful to our customers, from independent bookshops just a few minutes down the road to major supermarkets and online retailers in the UK. I am grateful, too, to our overseas customers, particularly to Allen & Unwin (in Australia and New Zealand), Carlsen in Germany, Gallimard in France, Candlewick Press in Boston and Apple throughout the world, whose support of the books and apps we are publishing has made our first few months of publishing such a success.

And, of course, I am grateful to Mumpreneur UK, Yell, DHL and Intuit for making the awards happen, and to my kids and my husband for their daily support and understanding.

Anyone setting up a business, a social enterprise or a charity, particularly in the current economic climate, is courageous. To do so while having young – or youngish, in my case! – children takes even more bravery. I think all the parents shortlisted for the awards are inspirational, but I am very proud and happy that we were singled out.

To win this award, almost 2 years to the day since leaving corporate publishing, is one more indication that, in starting Nosy Crow, I made a great decision.

But I am still kind of stunned.

Tagged with carlsen germany, gallimard jeunesse, kate wilson, mumpreneur conference

Apple selects German version of The Three Little Pigs to be "App of the Week"

Posted by Deb on May 28, 2011

We’re delighted with the attention Apple has given The Three Little Pigs app lately! Yesterday two things happened:

The English language version of our first app made it to the homepage of the UK App Store. And, to top it off, our German language co-edition partner Carlsen emailed us to say that 3 Sweinchen iPad (the German version of the app) was selected as “App of the Week” in the App Stores in Germany and Austria.

We’re pinching ourselves.

Tagged with app awards, apps, app store, carlsen germany, three little pigs

Die drei kleinen Schweinchen tops the App Store in Germany and Austria

Posted by Deb on May 20, 2011

We’ve got some exciting apps news to share. The German version of The Three Little Pigs app hit the App Store late last week, published by our co-edition partner, Carlsen and it’s already topping the charts.

Not only is Die drei kleinen Schweinchen listed in New and Notable, as of today, the iPad and iPhone versions are featured on the App Store homepage in both Germany and Austria. And the iPad version is currently the highest grossing paid app in the Books section (image above). Hooray!

There have also been several nice reviews in the German press and blogs. Here’s one example.

Congratulations to Carlsen on Die drei kleinen Schweinchen! We’re truly delighted with this successful start to our apps partnership.

Tagged with apps, app store, carlsen germany, co-editions, ipad, iphone, ipod touch, itunes, three little pigs

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

The Three Little Pigs app - the first two months in the life of an app

Posted by Deb on Apr 18, 2011

We’re really pleased to be able to tell you that our Three Little Pigs app has just been honored with an Editor’s Choice Award from Children’s Technology Review. CTR is a highly respected publication and we’re very proud.

Here’s a quote from the review: “…(The) app’s animations, original music and interactive elements bring a new type of spark to this age-old story, making it one of our favorite ebooks. ….So is it worth $8 — easily the cost of a print edition? We think so, if you’re in search of a premium children’s ebook.”

The past two months have been a whirlwind of activity on the apps front for us. After nearly 8 months of planning, developing and testing, we launched the iPad version of The Three Little Pigs on Feb 17 and the iPhone/iPod touch version on March 4.

As new app publishers, we thought those launches were the key milestones… and, of course, they were important. But in some ways the real fun began when we started to hear from reviewers and from customers – parents, teachers, fellow app developers, and children – from around the world. To date, we’ve heard from over 400 people. This direct feedback has been enormously important to us. We’ve been able to find out, in a very (cheering and) direct way that people are enjoying our app and their kids are too. And we’ve also been able to find out how they use it, when they use it, how old their children or students are, and what they’d like to see us offer in our next apps. We’ve always felt that our internal app development process was collaborative – but now we are collaborating with customers too!

We were always aiming high with The Three Little Pigs app: we wanted to create something that was a really new kind of reading experience, that looked and sounded as good as it possibly could, and that was truly interactive. Nevertheless, the success of the app has exceeded our expectations.

Some highlights for us have been:

• Featured in iTunes’ New & Noteworthy category in 12 App Stores: Belgium (#4), Denmark (#4), Finland (#4), Greece (#4), Italia (#4), Luxembourg (#4), Nederland (#4, )Norway (#4), Portugal (#4), Spain (#4), Sweden (#4), Switzerland (#4)

• Featured in iTunes’ What’s Hot > Books in South Africa, Thailand, Brazil, UK, Russia, Turkey, New Zealand, Ireland, Austria, Norway, Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong

• Glowing reviews in many parenting and children’s technology publications – both online and in print, including being listed in “Best Children’s Books for iPad” in the Gadgetwise column in The New York Times and mentioned on television as great app for kids on The CBS Early Show.

• Lots of interest from other non-English language publishers which has led to apps co-edition partnerships for versions in French and German. This is a new sort of business model, and it’s exciting to be at the cutting edge.

But this is no time to pat ourselves on the back. There’s work to be done: we have lots more apps to plan, develop and test. We’re in the middle of creating our next release in our fairy tale series, 3D fairy tale: Cinderella. Here’s a sneak peek of two beautifully illustrated scenes (click each image below to see it larger) by Ed Bryan. These are works in progress – you’ll need to wait until June to see the real thing!

Tagged with app store, carlsen germany, children's apps, ed bryan, gallimard jeunesse, ipad, iphone, ipod touch, three little pigs

Selling books at the Bologna Book Fair

Posted by Kate on Apr 05, 2011

The Bologna Book Fair is many things, but the main thing it is is a market for rights and co-edition selling.

As a publisher, you have a grant of rights from an author and an illustrator, including the right to publish their work as a book. Sometimes – always if you’re Nosy Crow – you have rights that you do not want to use yourself, but are able to sell to someone else. So Nosy Crow doesn’t itself publish in Finnish, but we know several Finnish publishers who like the books we do and who would like to publish them in Finnish. So we negotiate a deal with them, and the author/illustrator gets a share of the money we make when we sell the rights.

If you are publishing illustrated books – and over half of Nosy Crow’s list is illustrated in full-colour – there is another element to rights selling: building a co-edition run. There are certain costs associated with printing a book which are the same whether you print one copy or 100,000 copies, and it makes sense to spread those costs over as many books as possible. So the aim of the game is to say to the Finnish publisher that not only will you sell them the rights to publish the book in Finnish, but you will print the books for them in Finnish too.

This makes perfect sense, because the pictures in, for example, a picture book are printed first, and then the text of the picture book is printed on top of the pictures, so you can print a whole quantity of pictures and then put the UK text on a quarter of that quantity, the French text on a quarter of them, the German text on a quarter of them, and, let’s say, the Finnish text on a quarter of them (of course, the quantity doesn’t divide into quarters because different language markets are of different sizes – Germany’s bigger than Finland – but you get the idea). Each country’s version of the book is called a co-edition.

So, in the course of the fair, two of us Nosy Crows – Adrian and me – were hard at it selling for three-and-a-half days. Between us, we had 90 pre-booked appointments with 90 different publishers from 20 countries… and a few appointments with film companies and other people too.

We were able to finalise a number of rights deals on books that had been in discussion in the course of the weeks leading up to the fair, and we have lots of interest to follow up for newer books that we had been working on in the weeks and months before the book fair that we’ll publish in 2012.

It’s bizarre to think that a queue for the loo (and the queue for the women’s loos at Bologna is always long) might make the difference between having an appointment that lasts 30 minutes and one that lasts 20 minutes… and that therefore, because you lost 10 minutes of an appointment, you might fail to make a deal that would have worked for both of you.

The skill of selling is, therefore, to cut to the chase and not waste time talking about books – however much you love them yourself – that are failing to ignite the enthusiasm of the person opposite you.

Of course, the longer you’ve been selling rights, the better you know markets, publishing companies within those markets and individuals within those publishing companies, so it’s easier to know what books to show to whom. And it’s certainly the case that there are people that I meet at fairs that I would count as friends, with whom I have been talking about children’s books for almost a quarter of a century. There are people whose reaction I can predict before I show them a book, and many people with whose own tastes and views of publishing I feel real affinity, despite the fact that we operate in different companies and countries. (And since we are nothing if not honest in this blog, there are people I have absolutely failed to connect with over years of book fair meetings. It’s a joy of being an independent company that I just don’t book an appointment to see them any more…)

So, as well as all the excitement of speaking at the Tools of Change Conference and as well as our apps deal with Gallimard and Carlsen, we got on with the solid, unflashy, necessary and very satisfying thing we do every day: we sold print books.

Tagged with apps, authors, bologna book fair, carlsen germany, children's apps, children's books, children's publishers, conferences, gallimard jeunesse, illustrators, toc bologna