Book publishers pay authors and illustrators in various different ways.
But here is the way that we (with a tiny handful of exceptions) pay for books… and it’s pretty standard for publishers who publish books for the general public, regardless of their size.
We agree to pay an author/illustrator an advance against royalties. A proportion of this is paid when we sign the contract with the author/illustrator; a proportion is paid on the delivery of the work that they’ve agreed to do; and a proportion is paid on the publication of the book.
This is a bit like a “debt” that the author/illustrator owes us – a sort of “pit” that has to be filled up, which is how the “debt” is repaid.
What fills up the “pit” is royalties. We pay authors/illustrators a percentage of the money we get from any retailer (bricks and mortar and/or online). The percentage takes into account all the other things we’re paying for for print or digital publishing – editorial, publicity, marketing, design, financial management (chasing people for money etc) – and the specific costs associated with print publishing (the cost of printing and binding a book, the cost of warehousing it, the cost of transporting it, and the cost of processing – and often pulping – returns).
a book pulping machine
Another thing that fills up the “pit” is a share of the revenue we earn from selling rights that the author/illustrator may have granted to us (and, at Nosy Crow, we only buy books on the basis of having rights in all languages). So, for example, if a publisher buys rights to publish the book in German, the author’s share of that money goes into the “pit”.
The royalties and the rights revenue shares aren’t exactly the same for all publishers, but in my experience, and certainly where Nosy Crow’s concerned, there’s remarkably little variation, actually, within books that are of the same type (so there’s a difference between the royalties and rights revenue share we pay the author of a picture book (in which situation we’re paying an illustrator too) and the royalties and rights revenue share we pay the author of a novel, but not between the royalties and rights revenue share we pay to one novelist and the royalties and rights revenue share we pay to another novelist… and not, really, much variation between the royalty rate that we’d pay a novelist and any other publisher would pay a novelist). Meanwhile, we have to do the very best we can with all the books on our small, new list, regardless of how much advance we’ve paid, and we also spend money on different kinds of marketing regardless of the amount of advance we’ve paid.
When the “pit” is full, the surplus earnings are given to the authors/illustrators, usually twice-yearly.
Sometimes the money earned from royalties or rights revenue isn’t enough to fill the pit, but the advance is non-refundable, so that gap between the advance and what the author/illustrator actually earns is our problem as the publisher, not the author/illustrator’s.
We buy some books directly from authors/illustrators (we do so in the case of some of our strongest-selling authors/illustrators, in fact), and we buy other books from authors/illustrators via agents. In theory, I suppose, we could pay authors, particularly first time authors, much lower royalties than we pay to authors who are represented by tough agents. We don’t. It would, in our view, be neither fair nor, in anything but the short-term, commercially sensible. Authors/illustrators talk to each other, now, given the opportunities to connect via social media, more than ever, and there are various sources of information and advice like The Society of Authors. So you’d quickly be found out and an author/illustrator who feels cheated by their publisher isn’t a happy author. It’s worth saying, of course, that, agents take a percentage (10% – 15% of the author/illustrators earnings from publishers as a rough rule). So you have to be pretty sure you’re going to get more money going via an agent before it’s financially worth having an agent, though agents offer advice and expertise and administrative support too so you might want to take that into account.
But, actually, there’s not much variation at all in the royalties or rights revenue shares we offer.
What varies more is advances: established, and, in some cases, agented authors/illustrators often end up with larger advances than newer and unagented authors. This means that they have more money up front… but a bigger pit to fill!
Some authors/illustrators and their agents feel that a high advance on a debut book guarantees that a publisher will try particularly hard to sell a book in order to earn back the advance. But I know of books that have gone on to be bestsellers on the basis of a small advance (The Gruffalo, for example, or the first Harry Potter book) and there are other books that have gone for what press releases describe as “a substantial six-figure sum” that have not gone on to sell anything resembling a proportionate number of copies… which may make publishers (any publisher, because when a publisher pays a lot of money for a book, the publishing community knows about it… and we can see what the sales figures are like when we look at Nielsen Bookscan) reluctant to take a punt on the author’s subsequent books.
This year (and bear in mind that we write several of our books in house), we’re budgeting to spend 15% of our book revenue on authors/illustrators royalties/rights share, but we’ll also have to take the hit on any advances that we judge won’t earn out – i.e. where the pits are unlikely ever to be full. I can say that there are already a couple of books for which we at Nosy Crow have had to “write off” a proportion of the advance: we have acknowledged that we are unlikely ever to be able to fill up the “pit”. We’ll have to add the (small) cost of these “write-offs” to the 15%. I know of publishers (still in business because of the way that the rest of their business model works) who have overestimated the value of books when they pay advances to the point that in some years the cost of write-downs are as high, or almost as high, as the cost of authors’/illustrators’ royalties/rights revenue. Sometimes one really hefty advance combined with very low sales can push a publisher into loss. But even when publishers are not playing that kind of publishing game – and we’re not – then I don’t know of any publisher whose overall author/illustrator costs aren’t higher than the costs of the royalties and rights shares because of the cost of “written off” advance money.
There are some publishers who pay authors and illustrators on a “flat fee” basis – so they pay an amount up front, but it’s not an advance against royalties. We sometimes do this, particularly for illustrators who are providing a small number of illustrations for a novel. But it stops an author/illustrator participating in the ongoing success of a book, and we think they should, so it’s something we generally avoid.
Some publishers are experimenting with different ways of paying authors/illustrators: not paying an advance but, in return, offering higher royalties; or a profit-share model, for example (but, as an author, you’d probably want to look carefully at what the publisher is counting as “profit”, i.e. what costs have to be subtracted from the revenue before you get to the “profit” to be shared).
Some publishers are setting up subscription models, and authors/illustrators get a share of the revenue generated either from full packages of books to which they contribute, or in the block of time in which their particular books are offered.
And, of course (and this is the subject for another post), some authors are choosing to publish either digitally or in print, by themselves.
I knew about Siobhan Dowd (pictured above), the London-born author of children’s books with a strong sense of her Irish heritage, who died far too young at 47, in 2007.
I never met her, and certainly never published her, but I admired her work: tough, original, clever and beautifully written.
She was identified by Waterstones as one of the top “25 authors for the future”, she wrote four award-winning novels for children and teenagers, most published posthumously:
Siobhan Dowd wasn’t only a children’s book author. She was also very active in PEN and worked as Deputy Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Oxfordshire, working with local government to ensure that statutory services affecting children’s lives conform with UN protocols.
So I knew a bit about her, But I didn’t know about the Siobhan Dowd Trust. I found out via @playbythebook on Twitter.
The Siobhan Dowd Trust exists to fund any person or groups that:
*Take stories to children and young people without stories;
*Bring the joy of reading and books to children and young people deprived of access to books and of the opportunity to read;
*Fund and support disadvantaged young readers where there is no funding or support.
This is what they say they’re looking for:
*The trustees wish to fund start up innovative schemes, where a small grant will act as “start-up” or seed money to grow into something bigger and ideally self-sustaining.
*The trustees want to encourage scattered groups to work together and co-ordinate the voluntary sector to learn from each other, not act in isolation or in competition with each other.
They say, “Trustees do not need long detailed notes outlining the need for a grant – we appreciate there is a great deal of need, we want grant submissions to give us all the details of what you plan to do to address this need, and what impact a grant would have.”
There are some examples of scheme’s they’ve funded here
So if you have an idea that could start small and grow big that fits their criteria, why not apply for funding?
The trustees next meet on 29 March, and they need to receive applications a month beforehand, so you have until 29 February to get your submission to them (they’ll meet again 28 June).
“Montgomery Flinch gripped the sides of the reading lectern, his knuckles whitening as he stared out into the darkness of the auditorium. His bristling eyebrows arched and the gleam of his dark eyes seemed to dart across the faces of each audience member in turn. A mesmerised silence hung over the stage; it was as if the theatre itself was holding its breath as it waited for the conclusion to his latest spine-chilling tale. The expectant hush seemed to deepen as Flinch finally began to speak…”
And so begins Twelve Minutes to Midnight by Christopher Edge, published today. An expectant hush is settling over the Nosy Crow offices as it makes its (beautifully jacketed) way out into the world. Set in 1899, it’s a gripping tale of skulduggery, spiders and teenage sleuthing, with ideas about literary creation and story-telling at its very heart.
Every night at twelve minutes to midnight the inmates of Bedlam, London’s notorious hospital for the insane, rise from their beds and begin scribbling strange words on any surface they can find – the walls of their cells, their clothes, even their own skin. What can it all mean? Penelope Treadwell, thirteen-year-old owner of the bestselling magazine, The Penny Dreadful, is intrigued. She’s always seeking sinister stories to fill her magazine’s pages but she’s never encountered anything as chilling as this. Soon she’s ensnared in a venomous plot, and Penny realises that this isn’t just a story, it’s the future. And the future looks deadly…
The Bookseller has already said that it’s a “really pacey historical thriller with a great sense of eerie Victorian atmosphere” and we’re sure more plaudits will follow now that it’s out there for real. Congratulations, Chris, on writing a great book and let’s hope that no spiders suffered in its research. Well, not too many, anyway.
Michael Thorn is the founder of Achuka, a children’s book, and now more general book website begun in 1997. Achuka has been a review and news website, but Michael wants to be a digital publisher and so created ACHUKAbooks. Just last week, he published his first book: a digital edition of The Field Bill Nagelkerke. A writer and reviewer, Michael tweeted about how different the experience of being a publisher was from his other book-connected roles, and I asked him to do a guest blog about the experience of being a first-time publisher.
I should probably make it clear that Nosy Crow doesn’t have any connection at all with Achuka or ACHUKAbooks, but one of the good things about being a small independent publisher is that it is somehow easier to talk about the work of your “competitors” in the field than it is in a larger, more corporate organisation, and anyway, I rate Michael and thought his perspective could be interesting.
You can download The Field for free if you are quick!
Well, it’s only three weeks into being (albeit in a limited sense at present) a publisher, but already I’m feeling the difference in my relationship to the books I’m dealing with, compared with the way I relate to them as a mere reviewer and website commenter.
When I’m reading submissions for ACHUKAbooks, I continue to read with a reviewer’s eye and heart (I’m not after all going to publish something that I would review highly negatively), but I’m aware that there is another, and sometimes conflicting, dynamic going on.
I’ll be thinking, “Yes, not my kind of book, but definitely well put together and on a theme that I can see would be popular. Can I like this book sufficiently, as well as admire the way it’s been created, to shout out loudly and convincingly enough on its behalf?”
It all comes down to the question, “Do I want a list confined to just my own personal taste in reading?”.
Definitely not, and besides which it would be commercial folly, since the books I tend to love are not often bestsellers. On the other hand, I do have to be passionate about wanting to get the book out to readers, so in a sense I’m finding, with one or two titles under consideration, that the book itself is having to persuade me in the direction of acceptance based on the potential audience to which I can perceive it being pitched.
As a digital publisher with low production and overhead costs, it will be easier to have a multi-faceted list than in the print world, but there still needs to be coherence and an evident consistency of quality and standard, just as you would hope to develop with any brand.
Most interesting to me has been my relationship to our first published title, The Field by New Zealand author Bill Nagelkerke.
I predicted that publishing would be exciting and nerve-racking. I was not so prepared for how emotional it is. I’m anxiously watching The Field make its way in the world, almost as a parent looks out for their own child. I’m hoping people pay my first publishing child due attention, that they speak well of it, that it reaches an audience and achieves the success it deserves.
The first review on Amazon was lukewarm, but my internal response to it was anything but tepid. How could the reviewer not be more passionate about the book? It is not a book to be dismissed as a quick interesting read.
Once further ACHUKAbooks titles have been released, and The Field is no longer an only child, and I have to share my affections and attention with others in the brood, I imagine my publisher watchfulness and nurturing will feel just as parental, but more evenly-spread and less intense.
I hope so. Excuse me, it’s been a while since I checked how Bill was doing. It’s still early days, and I mustn’t leave him unattended for too long…
2011 was Nosy Crow’s first year of publishing. We published our first book in January.
It’s been an incredibly busy and full year, and I find it hard to sort through the events and impressions of the past twelve months to write anything coherent.
But here goes…
The books and apps we published… and signed up
In 2011, we published 23 books for children aged 0 to 14. 8 were board books. 7 were picture books. 8 were fiction titles for children aged 6 to 14. Here they are in reverse publication order finishing, at the time of writing but this will update as publication dates pass, in December 2011.
We signed up a further 38 books and 8 apps for 2012, and already have projects scheduled for publication in 2013 and beyond. You can already find out about some of the forthcoming books (in publication order starting, at the time of writing but this will update as publication dates pass, in January 2012) and about some of the apps.
Selling at home and abroad
Working with Bounce, we had books sold and promoted in a huge range of UK sales outlets from independent booksellers through bookshop chains and online book retailers to supermarkets and toy shops.
We’ve travelled on Nosy Crow business and/or to speak at conferences to the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Holland, Italy, Mexico and Brazil.
We sold rights to books in the following languages: French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Hebrew, Chinese, Norwegian, Greek and Korean.
Nosy Crow authors on the road
Nosy Crow authors were at numerous literary festivals, including Hay, Edinburgh, Bath and Cheltenham, and staged countless events in schools, libraries and bookshops.
Nosy Crow on the move
We moved offices from our second office in Lambeth to our third office in Southwark (it’s always cheaper south of the river) as our staff grew from 8 to January 2012’s 19, including part-time people and “attached freelancers”. We’ve lost members of staff too (which is a real rite of passage). Two were only with us on a temporary basis and went on to roles that they had planned before they joined us, but Deb Gaffin has just left us to take on a marketing and partnership strategy role at Mindshapes. We are very grateful to her for helping us shape our first apps and the thinking behind them. Andi Silverman Meyer who has known Deb since they were at school together, and who has been fantastic at getting us US coverage for our apps, is joining Mindshapes too.
Spreading the word
We have reached a lot of people with Nosy Crow news of various kinds.
Nosy Crow as a company or Nosy Crow books or apps have been in the Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The Gadgetwise Blog of The New York Times, Wired Magazine, The Daily Mail, The Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent, The Scotsman, Prima, Junior, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus, School Library Journal, The Melbourne Age, The Australian, The Huffington Post and many great children’s book, parenting, technology and app blogs. We’ve had terrific coverage in trade press and websites including Publisher’s Weekly, The Bookseller, FutureBook, BookBrunch and The Literary Platform. The quickest look at the first few pages of a Google search result for Nosy Crow gives a sense of the range of coverage – and, where it’s third-party coverage, how positive it’s been. We’ve had more than our fair share of TV and radio coverage too, and coverage, through our Gallimard and Carlsen links in Figaro, Marie Claire and Buchreport.
From around 1,300 Twitter followers for @nosycrow (bit of a guess, this, but based on the numbers we had in September 2010) this time last year, we’ve built our @nosycrow following to over 5,700 and our @nosycrowapps Twitter following grew from 0 to over 1,800. I wrote about Twitter here. We’ve 1,250 Facebook fans.
Recognition
Our apps were included in so many “best apps” listings in the US, UK, France and Germany that it’s difficult to list them here. They won several awards, including, most recently a KAPi award for best ebook and a FutureBook Award for best children’s app which were both won by our Cinderella app. Our ratings in the iTunes app stores are excellent.
It would be ridiculous to pretend it was a year without disappointments or irritations. The much-investigated drainy smell in the bathrooms at 10a Lant Street continues to baffle. The many cakes we make and eat continue to contain a lot of calories. Camilla had her bag stolen and we had to have all the office locks changed. There are one or two important UK retailers who still haven’t stocked our books. There are several countries to which we’d hoped to sell rights but haven’t yet managed to do so – Japan for example, but there are good reasons for that. We didn’t always (though we did generally) agree what books we wanted to publish and how much we wanted to publish them. We offered for some books that we didn’t manage to buy, a couple of which I still feel sad about. One or two books (and I mean “one or two”: our strike rate has been good) didn’t sell quite as well as we thought they would. We had to cancel a couple of projects because they just weren’t working out the way that we’d planned.
Thank you
But it’s been a very good year.
Whatever we achieved in this first year, we did it in partnership with our many authors and illustrators, new and established, and with other artistic collaborators, such as composers, audio experts and paper engineers. Without them, we have nothing to publish. We threw a party to say thank you. You can see the pictures at the top of our Facebook page.
Our author party in The Crow’s Nest in Lant Street a few weeks ago
And whatever we’ve achieved in this first year, we did it thanks to the support of publishers abroad; booksellers of many kinds; librarians; reviewers; bloggers; literacy organisations; literary and illustrators agents; printers and print managers; talented freelancers; and, of course, the parents and grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends, teachers and librarians who have bought and read our books and apps to, with and for children.
We’d run a competition with DreamWorks Theatricals and a popular girls’ magazine – I don’t want to spoil it by saying which one! – for two of their readers to come to London to see Shrek: The Musical and to interview Lyn Gardner, the author of the Olivia series. Lyn, of course, is entirely at home in the theatre, being the Guardian’s theatre critic, and the theatre setting suited the dramatic aspect of the Olivia books perfectly.
It was a great day! The winners, Manon and Holly (pictured above, with Lyn), came to London from Wales, accompanied by Manon’s mum, Sally. They were absolutely charming… and very photogenic.
The girls’ questions for Lyn were first rate – they’d won the magazine competition on the strength of them – and they’d even rehearsed a dance routine to entertain Lyn with. Not only that, they made up a routine to teach to Lyn, too!
Cue some CRACKING photo opportunities…
I can confirm that Lyn not only gave excellent responses to the excellent questions, she also demonstrated herself to be pretty nifty on her feet! The step-shuffle-glide-together proved absolutely no problem…
The venue for the interview and impromptu dance lesson was the theatre’s Royal Retiring Room. It was breathtakingly grand. The theatre team took care of us all (BIG thanks to our magnificent red coat, Anthony, who was assigned to look after us) and our treatment throughout the day was every bit as royal as our retiring room. I want to give a massive thanks to Lyn for being so brilliant and game, to Dominic for taking such great photos, to Manon and Holly for being so utterly wonderful and professional, and to Sally for being such terrific company while the others were interviewing/tap-dancing/getting ready for their close-ups.
I didn’t get to see the play, but I know from Lyn’s tweets and a very thoughtful ‘thank you’ e-mail from Sally, that Shrek: The Musical was a hit with everyone. So, the day was over – a fat lady hadn’t sung, but a fat monster had – and now we just need to see what the final magazine feature looks like! Watch this space…
Packing clothes for a holiday is for me, secondary to packing non-clothes or not-really-clothes: suncream in a range of factors (all high); a bulging first-aid kit (so many of the accidents that have happened to my children, including the fractured skull that I can still only bear to think about sort of side-on, have happened on holiday); cagoules; walking boots; Smartwool socks; Earl Grey teabags; laptop cables; adapters; and, requiring most thought of all, books.
I feel quite panicked at the thought of being without a book, or of running out of things to read.
The photograph above is of the library of 33 print books that four of us in my family took between us on the two-week holiday (our first more-or-less real one in two years) from which we’ve just returned. There are a couple of guidebooks, walking books and wildlife books. But mainly they’re fiction. We didn’t read all of them, but we read a lot of them. I even read one of them aloud to the children, who are, other than on holiday, pretty sniffy about being read to these days.
In addition to the print titles, the sharp-eyed among you will spot an iPad (with iBooks) and two Kindles at the front of the frame. All of us used both the iPad as a reading device and the Kindles in the course of the fortnight.
I try to catch up on “grown-up” reading when I am on holiday or travelling on business, and so I keep a pile of books that I haven’t got round to reading to sweep into a suitcase. The collection here, then, wasn’t the result of a crazy pre-holiday splurge-buy. Yes, we did succumb to a book purchase each before we went on holiday, but mainly these are books that we’ve lined up for our holiday reading for months before we were due to depart. The copies of Gillespie and I and of The Tiger’s Wife were, for example, both given to me for my birthday three months ago.
Or they’re books that we want to reread.
THECHILDTHATBOOKSBUILT
One of the books I brought to reread on this holiday is in the foreground to the left of the hardware. It’s The Child That Books Built by Frances Spufford, who records an experience of childhood reading that is, at least until he becomes a teenager, remarkably similar to my own. Born in the same year as me, and the elder sibling of an ailing child (his seriously and, ultimately, terminally; mine, happily, neither), he came of reading age in the children’s-fiction-rich seventies, and describes an immersion in reading – as a route to escape, intensity and discovery; as a way to fill spaces in his mind and heart that his own life didn’t fill; and, later, as a part of an identity – that led to a fiction addiction in a way that speaks to me:
“I need fiction. I am an addict. This is not a figure of speech. I don’t quite read a novel a day, but I certainly read some of a novel every day, and usually some of several. There is always a heap of opened paperbacks face down near the bed, always something current on the kitchen table to reach for over coffee when I wake up. Colonies of prose have formed in the bathroom and in the dimness of the upstairs landing, so that I don’t go without text even in the leftover spaces of the house where I spend least time… I can be happy with an essay or a history if it interlaces like a narrative, if its author uses fact or impression to make a story[like sense, but fiction is kind, fiction is the true stuff…
… I don’t give it up. It is entwined too deeply within my history, it has been forming the way I see for too long.”
Bits of The Child That Books Built are a bit dense and over-argued for my taste, and it is a book that reflects the age and class of its author, but Francis Spufford does capture the joys of particular books – Where the Wild Things Are, The Hobbit the Narnia books, The Wizard of Earthsea, The Story of the Amulet, The Little House on the Prarie books – in a way that reminds me clearly of my own reading evolution.
Francis Spufford seems also to have a particularly clear recollection of the process of childhood reading.
BEINGREAD TO
Here he is on the a child’s first exposure to story through the experience of being read to aloud and of hearing fairy stories:
“What first teaches us the nature of story is not the fixed form of writing on a page. It isn’t the page that teaches us that story is language miraculously fixed into an unvarying shape which makes absent things present… That comes after. The medium of the first encounter is an adult voice speaking, and saying the same words in the same order each time the story comes around. Once a small child grasps the principle, no one is more eager for the repetition is to be exact. The words have to be right, or they aren’t the story. ‘Don’t say, “The fox met a family of ducks.” Say, “The fox met Mr and Mrs Duck and all their duckling children” The invariability of a story is what gives it a secure existence. It adds it to the expanding sphere of what is known for sure… such as the fact that morning always comes. Or that the third little pig’s house will never blow down in any telling of the story, no matter how hard the wolf huffs and puffs. Stories are so.”
LEARNING TO DECODE
Honestly, I don’t remember being read to, and I don’t remember the process of learning to read, however clear and important my later memories of being a fluent child reader were. I wish I did remember the process of becoming a reader with the vividness that Francis Spufford describes here:
“When I caught the mumps, I couldn’t read; when I went back to school again, I could. The first page of The Hobbit was a thicket of symbols, to be decoded one at a time and joined hesitantly together… By the time I reached The Hobbit’s last page, though, writing had softened, and lost the outlines of the printed alphabet, and become a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster, until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts… In fact, writing had ceased to be a thing – an object in the world – and become a medium, a substance you look through… So the reading flowed, when I was six with the yellow hardback copy of The Hobbit in my hands; and the pictures came.”
FILLING IN THEGAPS
Francis Spufford describes brilliantly the way that children can read – and this is something that I certainly remember – without being able to understand every single word on the page:
“At the same time, I couldn’t read quite a lot of the words in The Hobbit. I had accelerated into reading faster than my understanding had grown. If I press my memory for the sensation of reading the second half of the book, when I was flying through the story, I remember, simultaneous with the new liquid smoothness, a constant flicker of incomprehensibility. There were holes in the text corresponding to the parts I couldn’t understand. Words like prophesying, rekindled and adornment… I could say these words over, and shape my mouth around their big sounds. I could enjoy their heft in the sentences. They were obviously the special vocabulary that was apt for the slaying of dragons… But for all the meaning I obtained from them, they might as well not have been printed. When I speeded up, and up, and my reading became fluent, it was partly because I had learned how to ignore such words efficiently…
I found that the gaps in the text where I did not know words began to fill themselves in from the edges, as if by magic. It was not magic. I was beginning to acquire the refined and specialised sense of probability that a reader gets from frequent encounters with the texture of prose…
I remember there was an intermediate stage when strange words did not yet quite have a definite meaning of their own, but possessed a kind of atmosphere of meaning, which was a compromise between the meanings of all the other words which seemed to come up in conjunction with the unknown one, and which I had decided had a bearing on it. The holes in the text grew over… The empty spaces thickened, took on qualities which at first were not their own, then became known in their own right.”
WORDS WE NEVERSAY
Francis Spufford talks about those words that readers have in their internal vocabularies that, even as adults, we have no knowledge of how to pronounce, though we know what they mean:
“Such words demonstrated the autonomy of stories. In stories, words you never heard spoken nonetheless existed. They had another kind of existence.”
I have experience of this more often than I would like. I had a conversation with Adrian, just days before re-reading this book, and we were talking about whale-and-dolphin-like things (as you do). And I used the word “cetaceans” (as you do), which I pronounced, “seh-TAY-shuns”. Adrian looked momentarily puzzled. “Oh, you mean “set-ah-CEE-uns,” he said. For anyone who cares, I was right in this instance, but I am often wrong.
READINGANDVALUES
Francis Spufford not only writes about the mechanics of childhood reading, but about how we ingest values from our reading of children’s books. He writes about learning about social obligations, about the way people ought to behave to one another, through books and, in particular, through American literature, focussing on the moral assumptions behind The Long Winter and To Kill a Mocking Bird:
“I even began to understand what was not said on the page. This was the kind of reading that can magnify your curiosity about real people, and send you back to the world better equipped to observe and comprehend… Ought ran very close below the surface of is… For me, pattern-minded child that I was, ought was the key that opened the folds and tucks of human behavior and spread it out and made it knowable.”
THEHORROR
For me, who is, like Francis Spufford, someone unable to read (or watch) horror, he is funny and accurate on the power of the word to get stuck in your mind, so you can’t rid yourself of the images it conjures, as he describes his reaction to a story about cannibalism in The Fifteenth Pan Book of Horror Stories:
“Sometimes, when something is going to prey on your mind, you know it there and then. Some things your mind swallows, with a helpless alacrity, just so that they can be regurgitated when you least want to pay attention to them…
Maybe none of this is comprehensible to you, and my adrenalised panic in the dormitory corresponds to nothing in your experience. If so, you’re lucky. You’re part of the horror genre’s intended audience. You’re one of those people whose minds contain little or no fear they can’t bear to look at; none or little, therefore, that you can’t bring to a film or to a novel, and have it roused, coaxed expertly to a crisis, and then discharged, leaving nothing behind except the pleasant afterglow of successful catharsis. You leave the cinema and think, Hmm, time for a Chicken Korma. You lay down the Stephen King, give a comfortable shrug, and never think about it again unless you want to, you lucky bastard”.
In fact, I find that sometimes I don’t know that the words that get stuck, uninvited and unwanted, in my brain are lurking in a book until I have read them inadvertently. Sometimes I stumble upon them in a book that isn’t a genre book that clearly announces its unsettling contents.I found myself unable to finish The Slap, for example, because there was one sentence in it that ambushed me, and disturbed me to the point that I just didn’t want to pick the book up ever again.
CUTTINGYOURSELFOFFFROMTHEWORLD
Francis Spufford speaks about his mother noticing “a special silence, a reading silence” when the young Francis is reading in the house. He talks powerfully about the way that the silence went both ways:
“As my concentration on the story in my hands took hold, all sounds faded away. My ears closed… There was an airlock in there. It sealed to the outside so that it could open to the inside… There was a brief stage of transition in between, when I’d hear the text’s soundtrack poking through the fabric of the house’s real murmur… Then, flat on my front, with my chin on my hands, or curled in a chair like a prawn, I’d be gone.”
To the annoyance of many around me, I still do this, still become oblivious to my surroundings when I am reading. It’s something that one of my children has inherited completely, and that my other child experiences in relation to those books that she particularly enjoys.
But as a child – and and an adult – built by books myself, I think there are worse things to pass on.
Now that Summer is most certainly upon us (evidenced at Nosy Crow by the fact that almost everyone is on holiday), the ritual of reading round-ups has been getting its yearly airing in the press. Without wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth – we’ve been very pleased with the inclusion of our books in so many round-ups – there seems to me to be something a little… unsatisfactory about the criteria for these lists. Surely, in order to qualify as a great Summer read, a book ought to have more going for it than a recent publication date.
There is, of course, all kinds of ways one could choose to define a good Summer book. Some – like our Mega Mash-Up series – are brilliant for keeping children occupied on long journeys or during days at home. Others, like Noodle Loves the Beach and Bizzy Bear: Off We Go!, evoke Summer quite literally. And stories like Dinosaur Dig! somehow encapsulate the outdoorsy, spirit-of-adventure feeling that Summer represents when you’re young – or, as Camilla put it to me in an email from the road, “Summer is about liberation isn’t it – from school, parents and routine, and in theory, the weather.”
When I asked for everyone’s suggestions here (before they all left), we decided to restrict ourselves to books that actually take place over the Summer. Needless to say, as with every previous discussion on the subject of favourite books of one sort or another, the debate swiftly dissolved into endless one-upmanship, but out of this, I’m pleased to say, came some truly excellent suggestions.
As ever, we’d love to hear your favourites, so please leave your comments at the bottom of the page or on Twitter.
Dom, pipped to the post for The Wind in the Willows, chose Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, saying that, “Some of the scenes from that book were so vivid, they’ve become practically my own memories. It’s the book equivalent of Inception!”
Camilla’s first suggestion is The Enchanted Wood, by Enid Blyton – and she has exactly the measure of a lot of Blyton’s books:
“Ginger beer, doorstep sandwiches and smugglers coves – in fact the very holiday I am just embarking on, though of course it never seemed to rain and I bet they didn’t spend hours sitting in a traffic jam on the A30.”
My choices are, for much the same reason as Camilla, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, as well as A Spoonful of Jam by Michelle Magorian and Raspberries on the Yangtze by Karen Wallace, both of which have sort-of magical qualities about them. And finally, I believe I would be remiss not to mention the summer strips of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes cartoons (pictured above), which, like all of our choices, cannot capture everything that’s wonderful about Summer, but certainly go a long way towards trying.
Now – over to you!
We’ve had some Twitter recommendations with the hashtag #summerreads:
@rogue_eight suggested The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, by Alan Garner
There’s been a fair bit of speculation as to what the site will be, with at the time of writing, many thinking it’s there to announce new book, judging by the mashable.com vote. There’s been excitement too, over some images, supposedly leaked from the website, which suggest it’s an online game or a fansite.
A key question might be who has what rights… and what rights are left to exploit? This is a J K Rowling announcement and property, not one from her publishers or from Warner Bros.
Sadly, at the time of writing (an hour or so before the announcement), I don’t know what Pottermore is, so I can’t tell you, but as we (well, I don’t know about you, but I’ll be going) anticipate the release of the final film in the Harry Potter sequence, it’s good to have this reminder of the author behind this extraordinary brand. I rather liked this timeline of the rise of Potter.
The picture above is of young women who’d grown up with the Harry Potter books with their copies at the Scholastic street party in NY in 2007 for the launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Scholastic publishes the books in the US, and Bloomsbury does so in the UK). It was taken within hours after the of the release of the book, but these readers had only just got to the front of the queue to get their copies. I was Group MD of Scholastic UK at the time, and lucky enough to be there. It was a very happy experience to be at a book event that drew so many people and created such palpable excitement.
Since Harry Potter, widely described as the exception that proved the rule that children were not excited about reading and that the book industry was in dire straits, we have, of course, seen another – very different – phenomenon emerge from the world of children’s and YA writing: Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight sequence.
Whether these are just two black swans remarkably close together or indicative of the ability of creators – and, I would hope, publishers – to make, shape and present children’s and YA reading experiences that surprise and delight children and teenagers (and adults too) and to do so more than twice remains to be seen.
I look forward to the next phenomenon.
QUICKUPDATE:
Well, we know what Pottermore is now. It is, essentially, a shop for digital content.
The site will be the only source of digital book versions of the seven Harry Potter titles and this is interesting in relation to her publishers and eBookselling, as it appears to establish some unusual precedents, as The Bookseller outlines here)
There’ll be audio downloads too.
There’s 18,000 new words by J K Rowling (not a huge amount, really, given that Philosopher’s stone is 77,000 words long) but perhaps there’s more to come.
There’ll be talking head video of J K Rowling.
There will be, it seems, opportunities for fans to post their own content.
This Wired article and this Guardian article give some more information, and this “Futurebook article” is more reflective: http://futurebook.net/content/pottermore-worlds-biggest-enhanced-e-book. The Bookseller reports on this UK retailer response too.
On the question of the relationship with publishers, The Bookseller spoke Pottermore c.e.o Rod Henwood. Henwood who said: “[The physical publishers] are partners in this. You will see their presence prominent in the shop when it is launched, and they are involved in marketing the site. It is a very collaborative project, all contributing to the marketing and the activity. Their interests are aligned with ours.” He added: “We won’t sell physical books directly, certainly not on the site, but we will be providing links to publishers websites and if they sell the [physical] books there, people can obviously buy them.”
Way back in October, we did a post about the best books for ten year-old boys. A twitter enquiry prompts me to write a post on the best book for seven year-old boys. This is, in some ways, more of a challenge, as there is a huge difference in reading levels at seven. I know this is true at any age, but while some seven year olds are reading fluently by themselves, others very definitely are not.
So I have included a fairly wide (and, I am aware, quite UK-skewed) range here.
Funny Books
In my experience as a publisher, seven year-old boys love funny books, and I think it’s no surprise that I could think of lots of good books in this category.
Our very own Mega Mash-ups by Nikalas Catlow and Tim Wesson of which there are now a rollicking three titles. Each is a unique combination of a novel and a drawing book. As a reader, you draw your own adventure.
The Grubtown books by Philip Ardagh Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown
The Captain Underpants books by Dav Pilkey
The Astrosaurs books by Steve Cole My Brother’s Famous Bottom (and other books) by Jeremy Strong Bill’s New Frock by Anne Fine George’s Marvellous Medicine, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (here in the order of easiest to hardest to read) by Roald Dahl
Any Horrid Henry book by Francesca Simon Mr Majeika by Humphrey Carpenter The Legend of Captain Crow’s Teeth by Eoin Colfer Ug by Raymond Briggs
Any Mr Gum book by Andy Stanton
Any Buster Baylis book by Philip Reeve
Any Charlie book by Hilary McKay
Any Nate The Great book by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat
And – controversially, because it’s all about girls – any of the Iggie books by Jenny Valentine
Any Frog and Toad book by Arnold Lobel
Any Henry and Mudge book by Cynthia Rylant
Animal books
I was surprised that there weren’t more books that came to mind in this category (and the next two, for that matter). Here are some good ones, though.
The Hodgeheg and The Sheep Pig by Dick King Smith The Butterfly Lion by Michael Morpurgo One Dog And His Boy by Eva Ibbotson
Real life books
Buried Alive and Cliffhanger by Jacqueline Wilson
Adventure books
Any of the Beast Quest books The Iron Man by Ted Hughes The Wishing Chair by Enid Blyton
Any Magic Treehouse book
Non-fiction
I’d really welcome suggestions in this area, quite possibly because it’s not something that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, and I struggled to think of really stand-out examples of great non-fiction books for seven year old boys.
Any Horrible History book, but particularly the Horrible Histories Handbooks because they’re a bit younger (I think Horrible Histories is really 8 or 9+) Why is Snot Green? The Science Museum Question and Answer Book Again, this is a bit old for seven year-olds Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl The Guinness Book Of Records Ripley’s Believe It Or Not (I don’t love this brand personally – I’m more of a Guiness Book Of Records gal – but I’ve seen boys discovering it and thinking it’s great.)
Picture books
Lots of boys don’t want to tackle screeds of unrelieved text, so here are some picture books for older children in which the illustrations supplement the text… or tell a whole other story.
The Enormous Crocodile by Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs Solomon, the Rusty Nail (and lots of others) by William Steig The Wolves in the Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish by Neil Gaiman Wolves and Meercat Mail by Emily Gravett The Arrival by Shaun Tan Beware of the Story Book Wolves and That Pesky Rat by Lauren Child Leon and the Place Between by Angela McAllister Farmer Duck by Martin Waddell and Helen Oxenbury Where’s Wally by Martin Handford
Any of the Asterix books
Any of the Tintin books
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?
It may well be true that Father’s Day is without a jot of authentic tradition to its name, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to celebrate. At Nosy Crow we’ve been listing our favourite dads in children’s literature all week, and what started out as a harmless pub game between Kate, Camilla and me has spiralled rather dramatically into a mammoth collection of categories, sub-categories and clauses.
Being a bit of a purist about these things, I initially protested to Kate that our list should be comprised only of nice dads, and that bad dads would go against the spirit of the exercise somewhat – this is for father’s day after all! – but we all realised pretty quickly that a lot of the best characters are really awful fathers.
This initial concession led to a proliferation of different categories.
Here are our best categories and our strongest nominations, with, where I felt it necessary, some context or justification. Please add your own categories or nominations in the comments below or on Twitter with the hashtag #kidsbookdads or Facebook!
Good dads:
William from Danny, the Champion of the World (written by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake, see the picture above). This is a pretty uncomplicated one – I think we can all agree that William is an amazing and exciting dad (even if he does lead his son into a life of crime). The opening chapter is a really lovely and quite moving tribute to the relationship between father and son.
The dad in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming is another good example of an exciting dad.
The dad in Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce is a favourite of Kate’s.
Big Nutbrown Hare from Guess How Much I Love You (written by Sam McBratney and illustrated by Anita Jeram). Big Nutbrown Hare is never specifically referred to as Little Nutbrown Hare’s father, but I think we’re invited to assume as much.
Gorilla from Gorilla and the dad in My Dad by Anthony Browne are pretty good entries from the outgoing Children’s Laureate…
… And we have two from the incoming one: Stick Man from Stick Man whose quest is to get back to his family tree, and the Gruffalo, from The Gruffalo’s Child, who tries to warn his adventurous child against the mouse. Both are written by Julie Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler.
Pa Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
John Arable from Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White.
And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson and illustrated by Henry Cole, is an inspired choice by Camilla – the true story of the two male penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo who raised a baby penguin together.
Two excellent suggestions by Kate B were Mr. Brown from Paddington (by Michael Bond) and Pongo from 101 Dalmations (by Dodie Smith).
Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird (by Harper Lee). I have had to lobby quite hard for inclusion of Atticus Finch: on the one hand, he is, of course, the greatest father in any book, but is To Kill A Mockingbird really children’s literature? Well, it was treated as such on its release in 1960, and it’s taught all over the world in schools, so I think that makes it not not children’s literature.
Kate made the very interesting suggestion of Anne Frank’s father, “especially in contrast to how she portrayed her mother”.
My contribution to the sub-category of real-life good dads is Michael Rosen in his poems about his son Eddie, which reach their heartbreaking conclusion in Michael Rosen’s Sad Book.
Kate B also suggested James Potter from the Harry Potter books, which to begin with seemed like a silly suggestion to me; certainly not worthy of the Pongo/ Mr. Brown company in which it stood – James isn’t even alive in the books! – but it is, of course, actually an excellent choice. James dies protecting his family from Voldemort – a powerful symbol of fatherly love, and he’s there in Harry’s mind throughout the books.
James Potter segues seamlessly into our next category…
Absent dads:.
There are quite a lot of these in children’s books, ranging from dads who’ve abandoned their children to dads who are absent through no fault of their own.
The father in The Railway Children. I can’t remember his name, but it doesn’t matter – he’ll always be “Daddy, my daddy!” to me, in the manner of Dead Poets Society and “Captain, my captain”.
The fathers in Jacqueline Wilson’s The Illustrated Mum and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women were both examples of Kate’s category of “Absent Dads who are the Deus Ex Machina, resolving things at the end or making the ending happy”, as is the dad in The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr.
Bad dads:
Interestingly, a lot of bad fathers are defined in terms of their absence (in another blog post I’m sure there’d be a lot to say about that…) Some literary dads, however, would leave their offspring a lot better off if they did disappear.
Surely the absolute worst dad ever is Huck Finn’s; the violent town drunk who locks his son in a cabin and leaves him to starve. If we can have To Kill A Mockingbird then we can probably sneak in Huck Finn.
An excellent contender for the same title must be Matilda’s dad (from Roald Dahl’s Matilda)
Kate B points out that many fairy tale dads, such as the fathers in Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and Cinderella, behave shockingly badly towards their offsping, though they’re often under the influence of wicked stepmothers.
Bad dads who become good:
This is a more heartwarming category and it seems to be an popular archetype in children’s books:
The father in our very own Olivia’s First Term, by Lyn Gardner is viewed by some of us as a bit of a bad dad, but others of us felt this was harsh, and that he really was doing his best in difficult circumstances.
Other complicated and difficult dads who are more or less redeemed at the end of the book or books include Lord Asriel, from the trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman; Mortmain, from I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith; Mr. Darling from Peter Pan; and Colin’s dad in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden
Tom Oakley from Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian.
Joe Gargery in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
The magnificent Akela from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
Finally (!), here are a few that didn’t quite fit anywhere:
Kirsty called the dad in Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging “the best comedy dad”, and nominated the dads in Big Red Bath and Peepo“ for the title of “Best at giving baths dad”. And Charlie and the Chocolate Factory demonstrates the “Dad upstaged by grandfather” genre rather well…
As you can see, once you’ve started, it is hard to stop.
Julia writes fiction for older children (The Princess Mirror-belle books, The Giants and the Joneses and Dinosaur Diary) and has written a dark and challenging novel for teenagers (Running on the Cracks), but she is best known for her rhyming (though not always rhyming: The Smartest Giant doesn’t rhyme except at the end) picture book texts, of which the best known is The Gruffalo, illustrated by Axel Scheffler, who has been the illustrator of her most successful picture books.
I felt, vicariously, very proud: I’ve been responsible for publishing over twenty of Julia’s books over the years. I first got to know Julia’s work in the early 1990s. She sent the lyrics of a song to Methuen (which has been absorbed into Egmont) where I was working as a rights director. An editor there, Elke Lacey, liked it. I suggested that a friend, who I’d met when he was illustrating a couple of fiction titles for Faber and Faber when I was selling rights there, might be the man to do the pictures. He was Axel Scheffler. The book was A Squash and a Squeeze. Elke was a fiction editor, and hadn’t worked on picture books and she and I worked on A Squash and a Squeeze together. But then she got ill and died, ridiculously young, just before the book was published.
A little later, I moved to Macmillan as a publisher, and Alison Green came with me as editorial director of picture books. One day soon after we’d started, Julia sent Axel the text of The Gruffalo, and, we decided to publish it. It was the resumption of what became a truly astonishingly successful partnership, though Julia’s texts were also wonderfully illustrated by other illustrators including Nick Sharratt, Julia Monks and David Roberts. After ten years, Alison and I moved to Scholastic, and Axel and Julia’s new books were published under the Alison Green Books imprint there, though Julia continued to publish other picture books with Macmillan and has had some books published by other publishers too. The first of several Scholastic Julia-and-Axel books was Tiddler, and the most recent one, The Highway Rat, comes out this autumn.
Julia is many things. She has a command of the combination of rhyme and story that is unparalleled, and that she produces excellent book after excellent book is breathtaking. She’s passionate about her work and a true perfectionist. She’s an absolutely brilliant and indefatigable performer with as much of an affinity with music (she introduced me to this, which is one of the many reasons I am eternally grateful to her) and drama as she has with words. She’s honest, outspoken (even if it’s sometimes about subjects on which we don’t entirely agree!) and approachable. She is, quite properly, famous.
I think Julia will be a highly-visible and committed advocate for reading, for printed books and – at this time of real need – for libraries, and, I am sure, for other things too, as her Laureateship evolves. She’ll be great.
Last week (ahem – apologies, but life has got in the way of this post) we published two great new novels in print and ebook formats.
The first is Olivia’s First Term by Lyn Gardner, theatre critic for The Guardian newspaper. This is Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers meets Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes with a bit of Pamela Brown’s The Swish of the Curtain thrown in for deliciously good measure. It’s about friendship, family and performing, and its target audience is girls of 9+.
Parents in Touch says it’s “the first in a very promising new series from Nosy Crow – a relatively new publisher. I can see the series being an instant hit with girls, who will love the thought of the glamour of stage school – or is it glamorous?”
The School Run says “Girls will love this book, it is a great story, with many messages within the story about friendship… I am sure this series could become as popular as Enid Blytons Malory towers and St Clare’s series! I for one am looking forward to the next in the series to be released.”
The second is Perfectly Reflected by S C Ransom, and is the sequel to Small Blue Thing. A paranormal romance for young teens and pre-teens with an iconic London setting – the focus of the action is the River Thames and St Paul’s Cathedral, it’s about teenage schoolgirl Alex, and her battle with the evil Catherine, who has managed to cross over to our world from the world of the ghostly Dirges, who are doomed to steal the happiness of others in order to survive. Catherine has a grudge, and is determined to make Alex’s life misterable, and what better way to do that than to keep Alex apart from Callum, who is trapped in the world of the Dirges? You can find out more about the books on the series website.
Networked Blogs says, “If Small Blue Thing was a paranormal romance, Perfectly Reflected is a paranormal thriller … There’s always a worry that the second of a series may not live up to the expectations created by the first – happily this is not the case here and the twists and turns will keep you hooked to the last page.”
Congratulations to Lyn Gardner and S C Ransom on publication!
These books bring our total number of print/ebook publications to (drumroll) 12.
As soon as Sarah’s agent showed me these loveable pre-school characters, I knew I wanted to publish them. Lucky for me then that the rest of the Nosy Crows shared my enthusiasm! And, since having met up again with Sarah to see how she is getting on with our first Zac and Zeb book, my enthusiasm has gone into overdrive, as has Steph’s. So much so, I thought I’d better become a true Nosy Crowite, and learn how to blog. Help, Tom, is this right?
Sarah Massini and I had crafted the first story together, and then it was down to her to think about how the story might work illustratively and graphically on the page. She rocked up with a sketch book simply overflowing with thumbnail sketches for the whole book – about three times over. Suddenly, these two characters were coming to life in front of our eyes – it was so exciting! The great thing about working with an artist like Sarah is that she is simply overflowing with creative ideas and vision, as well as having a fantastic sense of graphic design and how a story should work as a visual narrative for young children. It’s so wonderful to be picking out the best ideas from a whole wealth of ideas, and I do believe that the best picture books come out of these kind of meetings. It’s often tempting to cram every single good idea into one book but that might lead to a lack of visual clarity, and Sarah was fantastically open to us cherry picking through her thumbnails. Thank you, Sarah, and at least we know the second Zac and Zeb book will also be a visual delight.
I went to Philip Ardagh’s event at the Hay Festival yesterday. He was talking mainly, but far from exclusively, about his latest Grubtown Tales book for Faber and Faber, When Bunnies Turn Bad.
Honestly, I’d have gone even if he hadn’t been a Nosy Crow author (we’re publishing the first in his new series, The Grunts, next year, with illustrations by Axel Scheffler). His events are masterclasses in high-energy, interactive, stand-up comedy and for a child-and-parent audience, that weave together the story of how Philip became an author with lots of great scatalogical and tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandising material that had the child one along from me actually falling off her chair she was laughing so much.
However professional and brilliantly prepared Philip is, he can’t predict everything, and a high-point of the event was him putting his foot (clad, as everyone in the audience knows, in size 16) through the set of one of Hay’s two swankiest event spaces:
Philip worked the incident into the event so brilliantly that even the technicians in charge of the venue were laughing in the aisles. Here he is with a triangle of broken stage after the event:
I, for one, can’t wait for the Philip–Axel The Grunts double-act.
They took the – big and lively – audience through the creation of the series, a unique and silly blend of doodle book and young novel that they describe as “draw your own adventure” which they both write and illustrate.
They said that some of their ideas come to them on the Thinking Couch in their studio. Here’s Nikalas on the Thinking Couch:
And here’s Tim on the Thinking Couch:
However, they also confessed that they traded ideas for cookies with the elves at the bottom of their garden.
Conveniently, Nikalas is right-handed and Tim’s left handed, which means that they can illustrate the same picture at the same time without either getting in the other’s way… and they demonstrated this on a flip-chart at the event:
They pulled in audience suggestions and questions brilliantly. Here’s Tim getting a suggestion from half-way up the theatre:
They asked, for example, what the roundish object might be that they’d drawn being spotted through a telescope hurtling toward the Romans’ and Dinosaurs’ Martian city, Romasauria. “A grape!”, suggested one child (it was an asteroid). In turn, they were asked whether they liked brussels sprouts. So we covered a lot of ground, not all of it fruit-and-vegetable-related, as well as drawing mashed-up characters together.
There was a long queue of enthusiastic children waiting for them to sign books, and I was surprised and pleased to see how many girls were in the audience, as I’ve always thought that these books skewed towards boys, and reluctant boy readers in particular:
Described by Library Mice as “… exactly the kind of books us parents need to be able to hand to our offspring in school holidays or on long car journey!” you can find out more about the Mega Mash-up books on the Mega Mash-up website, where you can also post your own pictures, like this one by Alex Kosowicz:
Hello, everyone. Pip and Posy here, posting from the Hay-on-Wye festival. It’s fantastic here – there are millions of books, quite a few clever grown-up people talking about books, and loads of wet other people wearing wellies. We even saw a royal Duchess (Camilla – no crown, but no wellies either).
The first thing we did when we arrived was run down to Penny Dale’sDinosaur Dig! event. Here’s Penny reading the story:
It was brilliant fun. We didn’t have to sit still, or behave ourselves properly or anything. Penny showed us how she drew the pictures which was really interesting – how do you get a T-rex’s tail in a dumper truck cab? But the best bit was when she got us all to stamp and stomp, and to roar a lot, just like in the book!
We had such a good time that Pip very nearly had a little accident, but we got to the (really nice) toilets just in time, so it was ok.
After that it was time to meet up with Axel Scheffler, for our very own show. He and Kate were on a big stage, with bright lights and loads of people watching. They told our stories, Pip and Posy: The Little Puddle and Pip and Posy: The Super Scooter. Axel did lots of pictures of us doing funny things, and Kate made everyone laugh by talking about wee and sick and things.
Axel even drew a picture of us meeting the Gruffalo, because, of course, even though people were very pleased to meet us, they all love the Gruffalo:
At the very end, we were allowed to come in and say hello to all the children:
It was lovely because absolutely everyone wanted to give us a cuddle:
Afterward, in the bookshop, Axel signed and signed copies of our books. And then he signed and signed some more. He was signing for an hour!
Then we all went back to the house where we were staying for dinner cooked by Adrian. With gooseberry fool for pudding – Hooray!
This week’s Stylist magazine (free outside the tube station, thank you very much) has a very good cover story on the children’s books we never outgrow, complete with rather marvellous illustrations by Quentin Blake. The article fudges a little towards the end, giving a list only of ‘Top 10 Children’s Books’, which is, of course, practically meaningless, but the core idea of un-outgrow-able books is a lovely one.
Stylist includes The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Charlotte’s Web and Matilda in its list (all favourites of mine), and the second Kate saw it lying open on my desk she pounced, conducting the fastest straw poll I believe I have ever seen. Well, I am pleased to say that ours is a suitably eclectic list, spanning most of the twentieth century, picture books and fiction, autobiography and fantasy, blockbuster names and forgotten gems. Helpfully, we’ve had quite a number of visitors this morning, so this is also a more comprehensive collection than it might otherwise have been. And without further ado, here it is – Nosy Crow’s list of the books we never outgrow:
Kirsty chose Autumn Term by Antonia Forest, the first in the Marlow family series of novels, originally published in 1948.
Dom named Going Solo, the second installment of autobiography by Roald Dahl and the sequel to Boy.
Deb initially wanted Charlotte’s Web but, at the time of writing, had settled on The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer.
Adrian picked, without a second’s hesitation, The Land of Green Ginger, a choice that caused a lot of blank stares amongst the rest of us. A little Wikipedia-ing later and I now know that it was written in 1936 by Noel Langley, who went on to be one of the (many) responsible for the screenplay of The Wizard of Oz.
Steph, insisting that she didn’t want to go for a picture book, and after much deliberation, has gone for Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women.
Kate Shaw fought off stiff competition from Camilla to be the one who gets to name another Roald Dahl, Danny Champion of the World, as their own (personally I always found the novel’s gritty social realism a little disturbing).
Imogen, remarkably unfazed by my ambushing of her the moment she crossed the threshold, selected Janet and Allen Ahlberg’s absolutely wonderful Jolly Christmas Postman.
Despite this being her idea, Kate W simply could not make a final decision, and seemed visibly pained by my insistence that she only be allowed one choice. However, after much cajoling from me and soul-searching from her, she’s plumped for Rumer Godden’s The Dolls’ House.
Kate B, after considerable thought, has picked Snoopy, by Charles M. Schulz.
Camilla, once her first instinct had been nixed by my increasingly dictatorial approach to rules, chose A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young.
And, because I’m the one writing this blog, I’m going to allow myself two choices. The first is Susan Varley’s Badger’s Parting Gifts, a criminally overlooked picture book and one of the most moving treatments of grief I have ever read. And the second is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, from 1876, about which nothing new can be said, but which still seems fresh and exciting and funny to me on every re-reading.
So, there they are! Between Nosy Crow and Stylist, Roald Dahl gets an excellent showing, as does American literature. But what have we missed? What books have you never outgrown?
Here’s what some of @nosycrow’s Twitter followers have said:
@rachelisking: Mine would be Matilda, although I also love Ursula Bear by Sheila Lavelle (sadly no longer in print)
@LizzyCampbell: Mine would have to be Anne of Green Gables
@Girl___Friday: I third Danny! :) Also Narnia.
@Rebecca Berry: I’ll never outgrow Cobwebs and Creepers. It isn’t in print anymore but I loved it!
@musingsofayalib: I would most definitely choose Jon Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales!
@sharontelfer: Wizard of Earthsea: original and best book about wizard school! Also another vote for the lovely Land of Green Ginger
@Lucy Coats: I’ll never outgrow The Wind in the Willows.P.S. Tell Adrian I used to LOVE the Land of Green Ginger. And Phantom Tollbooth taught me about dodecahedrons!
@macnelliebus: Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books! Sweet, funny, heartful and wise
@kbalzart: The Poky Little Puppy!
@NatashaFarrant1: Anne of Green Gables. Never, ever, ever outgrown. Went to Green Gables last summer and embarrassed children by crying. A lot.
@loops777: Em…where to start?!I NEVER tire of the wonders of Mr Dahl.Hilariously witty. Always a special place for ‘A Little Princess’ too!
@rookibooks: Brambly Hedge series. Kids & i named one of our dog walks after them and we take popcorn for the mice! #kidsbooks #notoutgrown
@SarahTFergusson: Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. Beautiful and scary!
@cathiesue: Caddie Woodlawn
@Discover_Story: Tom’s Midnight Garden haunted me. I’m still hoping to find my real enormous garden.
@utzy: Now We Are Six. Bought my daughter old copy in a bookshop yesterday, and yes she will be six soon
@GilesCroft: The Man Who Was Magic by Paul Gallico. Time for a reprint.
@moongolfer:Agaton Sax
@classygenes: The Phantom Tollbooth! Fab! Still have it on my bookshelf. Who needs 3D when u have Juster’s imagination?
@tomfinnerty: Lovely article, thanks! I’d go for Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones
@KathLangrish: Finn Family Moomintroll. And – well, most of them, really. LOVED The Land of Green Ginger!
@AnabelMarsh: Another vote for Anne of Green Gables. Matthew’s death is a sobfest every time
@georgialeaper: The Jolly Postman, and Minnie&Ginger by Barry Smith http://amzn.to/msSyXK – Timeless lovestory
@Alex_T_SmithThe Tiger who Came to Tea – I’ve always wanted to go to a cafe in my pjs like the girl in the story
@vivlives001: Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
@dansumption: Another vote for Agaton Sax. Also, the Uncle stories.
@rebecsmart: The Swish of the Curtain by Pamela Brown
@JustinSomper: Where the Wild Things Are + Ahlberg’s The Mighty Slide + Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ;-)
@neeshed: my childhood favourite was Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat – just started it with kids and still special
@Gem_Clair: Dogger, Shirley Hughes. (But I can’t talk about it because it still makes me cry!)
@alice_murphy: I also cried in the Book Shop about Michael Rosen’s The Sad Book. And Badger’s Parting Gifts… Among many others!
@janeconsidine: My childhood choice Where the wild things are.
@lesleytspencer: Eight Children and a Truck by Anne Catherina Vestly. Still got my battered copy:)
@Chiddle84: Ooh, the Jolly Postman!
@mightydanzy: The Monster at the end of This Book featuring the furriest, most favorite Muppet, Grover.
@katybeale: The Hobbit!
@Dreamteamsoft: Totally love Danny Champion of the World !
@LondonBessie: Gotta be Teddy Robinson. Just fantastic – funny, sweet, a bit bonkers and totally charming.
@Hilary Foster: The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark; The Dark Is Rising hairs standing up at memory
@stevemaythe1st: Any of Tove Jannson’s Moomin books – wonderful evocative stories & illustrations
@murhilltypist: ‘National Velvet’, ‘The Thirteen Clocks’, and ‘Are you my mother?’: the moving tale of a fledgling and a JCB.
@LuLhullier: In English, all Shel Silverstein books #kidsbookillneveroutgrow
@clarefenn: Mine are Danny Champion of the World and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
@julietanne: Hungry Caterpillar, Hairy McClary, The Little White Horse, The Tiger Child
@MissCellany: Beauty: Robin McKinley, Howl’s Moving Castle: Diana Wynne Jones and entire Little House on Prairie saga. And Mog! How could I forget Mog, The Forgetful Cat? (
@FlossieTeacake: YES TO PAMELABROWN. Have you seen: http://bit.ly/mdNk9C
@bowbrick: ‘Peepo’ by the Ahlbergs. A board book worthy of the Booker. Literally one of my favourite books ever
@le_robertson: Blue Hat, Green Hat by Sandra Boynton. you have to love silly turkeys. ;)
So tell us on Twitter (there’s even a hashtag now, as we’ve only included Twitter nominations from people who sent theirs as a reply) or comment below.
Really, I think, because I was in Australia on publication date, we haven’t taken time this month to celebrate the distillations of children’s book goodness that are our May publications.
And May was a big month for us: for the first time, we were publishing more than one print “thing”.
Just to remind those of you who are interested in a kind of “previously on Nosy Crow” kind of way:
In January, we published Small Blue Thing, so the list launched with a single romantic fantasy novel.
Dinosaur Dig was inspired by Penny’s pre-school grandson Zachary’s love of all things mechanical. It’s a counting book with (very benign) dinosaurs, mechanical earth-moving equipment, a bit of suspense and a swimming pool finale. It caters quite shamelessly for the obsessions of many, many small boys. One of the things we thought that they would respond to is the carefully-realised detail of the dinosaurs and the diggers: you can see every claw and every piston. This was a book that came in to Nosy Crow from Penny’s agent just weeks after we’d started up. It was a book that we’d made an offer for within an hour of opening the envelope with Penny’s beautifully detailed sketches in it. Here’s a little flavour of what the book looks like inside:
And, to give you a sense of how Penny works, here’s a movie of Penny (re)drawing the cover artwork on an iPad:
She’s written about the process of creating the book for a boy audience in a guest post for the Book Trust blog.
I went up to Lincoln on Saturday to talk to a group of children’s authors and illustrators (and agent Elizabeth Roy, many of them aspiring to be published. The event was organised by writer and blogger Addy Farmer (pictured here with me) for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
It was hard to know what to cover (and Kate had a scary 90 minutes to fill), other than pointing people in the direction of our “submissions guidelines” and to telling them we prefer to receive submissions digitally, which is the work of a minute. But I talked about how Nosy Crow got started, and what’s important to us: identifying the core audience for each book or app that we do and trying to ensure that every aspect of that book or app is right for that audience; bringing our own creative energies and skill to projects as we work with authors and illustrators to shape and make books and apps; embracing digital technology both as a means of creating new reading experiences and communicating with people about them; and thinking internationally, and accessing international markets through our partners in key countries.
Of course, most of the people there really wanted to know what Nosy Crow was “looking for” and that’s a hugely difficult thing to define.
But here’s a shot at it:
Print books:
Fiction for 0 – 12, bearing in mind that a lot of the texts for board and novelty books are are produced in-house.
“Mum-friendly” books – no drugs, sex or gritty or gratuitous violence.
Strong commercial concept-driven or character-led series novels and picture books.
Brilliantly-written stand-alone novels and picture books, but nothing too intensely high-brow.
Great illustration with child and parental appeal – nothing too dark and arty.
Apps:
While some of our future apps may be based on our books, Nosy Crow is currently focused on commissioning apps that start as apps, not as books. We are interested in working with authors and illustrators who are excited by, and really understand how, touch-screen devices can enhance and extend the story experience. As we have engineers on staff, we don’t need people who can code apps, and we don’t need to see a ready-made app. Instead, we want to see really great ideas and really great art (and need art that is created digitally in layers for this medium).
I got to visit glorious Lincoln Cathedral:
And I even saw a little of the top part of the city (here are Addy and Elizabeth Roy in front of something lovely and half timbered) before leaving.
I got a couple of nice comments on Twitter, and Addy blogged about it.
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.
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.
We’re in the run-up to Easter (and Passover’s begun – any good childeren’s versions of the Haggadah, people?), so it seemed interesting to ask people for their Easter and, more generally, spring book recommendations.
EASTER-SPECIFICTITLES
It seems that the most impressive – to me – children’s book telling the story of Easter, Jan Pienkowski’s Easter, is out of print. It combines King James Bible words with Jan’s trademark silhouettes against a marbled background.
@dredgewood suggested The Story of Easter by Christopher Doyle.
Tom, who’s interning here, and whose photography skills I’ve already roundly mocked, suggested that the great Easter children’s book is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. I looked puzzled. “But it’s about a world where it’s always winter and never Christmas,” I said. He reminded me of the Christian allegory of Aslan’s self-sacrifice for Edmund’s betrayal. Ahem. He is right, of course… though, as ever, I tend to see children’s books through the lens through which a child might look at it, and I don’t think that many 10 year olds will clock that allegory.
SPRINGTITLESMOREGENERALLY
Widening the search beyond Easter-specific titles, I asked Twitter followers about spring and chick ‘n’ bunny books.
There were a few generally spring-like suggestions.
@sarah_hilary proposed The Secret Garden, which is, after all, about a physical and metaphorical, transition from winter to early summer.
And, if we’re going general – and as maybe I’m thinking about it because of the current almost-full moon – what about The Very Hungry Caterpillar?
BOOKSWITHCHICKS, EGGSETC
I had the following suggestions that were poultry-based:
@prestonrutt suggested Ed Vere’s Chick.
@Discover_Story suggested The Odd Egg by Emily Gravett.
@AliB68 reminded me of The Spring Song in Tales from Moominvalley by Tove Jansson.
And I’d add a personal favourite, Ruby Flew Too by Jonathen Emmett and Rebecca Harry – read it as a parent and blub.
BOOKSWITHBUNNIES
There were some fine bunny-based suggestions too:
Camilla suggested Guess How Much I Love You (the office copy of which she’s just taken home to read aloud).
@prestonrutt suggested Emily Gravett’s The Rabbit Problem.
@dredgewood suggested The Country Bunny & The Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward.
Not a rabbit, but a hamster (so here because displaying impeccable rodent credentials and also because it has Easter in the title), was remembered fondly by @amandapollard, whose Haffertee’s First Easter by Janet and John Perkins was a Sunday School gift, “and undoubtedly the highlight of 8 years endured”.
@sarah_hilary suggested The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Wiliams (again, I think of this, in my literal-minded way as a Christmas book more than an Easter book) and it got two other votes too, so it made the list, on condition that no other edition than the William Nicholson illustrated edition is given house room, and I do love it.
Kate Burns suggested You’re a Hero, Daley B by Jon Blake, which was one of the first books that Axel Scheffler illustrated.
My own list would include:
Axel Scheffler’sPip and Posy and The Super Scooter (of course!), which not only features a very fine rabbit (Pip) but also feels very spring-like. As Julia Eccleshare says of this book in her round-up of new children’s books for this Easter in The Guardian, “Scheffler’s illustrations are full of comfort and gentle humour”.
Little Rabbit Foo Foo by Michael Rosen and Arthur Robins (just typing it makes me smile).
Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (and @publishingmum mentioned Peter Rabbit too)
ACTIVITYBOOKS
There’s lots of spring/Easter activity stuff out there.
The very fine website, Parents in Touch, has done a post on spring and Easter activity books here
Also on the activity books theme, when I asked on Twitter for Easter book recommendations, Usborne amusingly simply sent me a link to their homepage and therefore all of their books. However, it is true that they have an awful lot of Easter titles here. When pressed, their tweeter selected First Activities: Easter Fun as their favourite Usborne Easter book.
A RELUCTANTAFTERTHOUGHT
And finally, I am, with a stone in my stomach, forced, too, to acknowledge that several people pointed out that the weekend following the Easter weekend is the Royal Wedding weekend (maybe this is just sour grapes: I will be flying to Australia). The Perfectly Pretty Royal Wedding Book was suggested by Scholastic, which I’d have ignored (sorry, Alyx), except that @librarymice said she was giving it to her daughter as part of her Easter book bundle. So here it is, included with a bit of a sigh.
So what’s missing from this list? Do let us know by sending us a comment.
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.
Lots of interviewers wanted to talk to him about his best-known books, The Gruffalo, which he illustrated and Julia Donaldson wrote and which I published at Macmillan perhaps almost 12 years ago. The book is regularly described as a modern classic and is the basis of an Oscar-nominated short film, not to mention a merchandising phenomenon, so this isn’t terribly surprising.
The Pip and Posy books are about a boy rabbit called Pip and a girl mouse called Posy. They all explore a bad thing that happens, that makes either Pip and Posy very sad, or angry or scared, and then the books show how they resolve those problems. So in Pip and Posy: The Super Scooter, Posy takes Pip’s scooter without asking and then she falls off it. Even though Pip was furious with Posy, he gives her a hug, and, though Posy’s hurt her knee, she cheers up and they both go and play in the sand pit. Though the stories are short, Axel wanted to communicate in the illustrations how angry Pip is and how sad and sorry Posy is. In Pip and Posy: The Little Puddle, Pip has an accident and does a wee on the floor. He’s really embarrassed, but Posy makes it all OK. He borrows some clothes, and the next time he has to do a wee, he does one in the potty. So every story has an low point – and “oh, dear” moment – and then, at the end, a high point – a “hooray” moment.
Axel’s ability to capture, for example, the expression on the face of a male rabbit asked to choose between two alternative dresses to wear after a puddle-on-the-floor accident is one of the reasons we think he’s utterly brilliant!
Here’s Axel talking to BBC radio Humberside:
The interview, together with interviews on BBC Humberside, BBC Ulster, BBC Bristol, BBC Wiltshire and BBC Cumbria, will be broadcast today, with others following over the next few days.
Kate’s been describing the books – rather tongue-in-cheek, of course – as “when bad things happen to good toddlers”. In each story, a bad thing happens – whether it’s that Pip forgets he needs a wee, and wets his trousers, or Posy snatches Pip’s scooter without asking and then falls off – but between them, Pip and Posy are able to sort things out and, together, go on to do something nice and happy. So they very much reflect the roller-coaster of pre-schoolers’ emotional lives.
Pip and Posy’s first outing was, in fact, at the Discover Centre in Stratford East and you can read about it here, but now they’re properly published. Axel nipped into Waterstone’s flagship store in Piccadilly to draw on their blackboards to celebrate and will be talking about Pip and Posy at Stratford, Hay, Edinburgh and Bath Literary Festivals this year.
We’ve sold rights to the USA/Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Holland already, with many more languages to follow.
We’re proud of all of the books and apps we publish and of all of our authors, but it is the case that we were unusually and particularly lucky as a new independent publishing company to be able to persuade Axel to illustrate for us, and we’re hugely grateful to him for his leap of faith.
We’re marking the release of Pip and Posy with a competition to win a signed set of books.
So to be in with a chance of winning, please post a comment on our Facebook page or in the Comments field below telling us why you love Axel’s artwork. The winner will be picked at random. The closing date is Friday 15 April.
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…)
This is big bananas for us, and we have been working flat-out to get ready for it.
It is one of two weeks in the year – the other is the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, but Bologna’s the big one – when we meet the non-UK publishers we’ll do business with for the rest of the year. At Bologna, we have just 30 minutes (20 if they have to queue for the loo before the appointment) to impress a foreign publisher with our books. The aim of the game is to sell, or at least interest them in buying, the right to publish our books in translation.
For the last few months, Anne-Marie’s been putting together the schedule of selling appointments for me and for Adrian. We have appointments every half-hour from 9.00am to 5.30pm without breaks for three-and-a-half days.
For the last month, since the launch of The Three Little Pigs app, Ed and Will have been working with Deb on our next app in the 3D Fairy Tale series, Cinderella.
For the last month, too, Imogen’s been collecting together final print and freight prices for books of many different sizes and kinds – board books and pop-up books and picture books, and working out how much we have to sell them for in order to stay in business. This is a hard task: we always want our books to be the best they can be – to have the heaviest paper, the most spectacular pop-ups the most unusual touch-and-feels – and it’s tough to compromise!
For the past few weeks we’ve been receiving artwork from illustrators. Some of it arrived in time for us to proof it, but most of it, because we are still new and building our list and publishing sooner after artwork delivery than is ideal, did not, so we’ve had to make dummies using photocopies of the art stuck into blank books. This is an unbelievably time-consuming, tricky, painstaking and monotonous task, and Steph and Nia, in addition to doing lots of last-minute designing, have been working on this tirelessly with Camilla. Nia finished the very last one at 10.30pm yesterday evening.
And for the past few weeks we’ve also been pulling together words and pictures to add to the books section of our website to announce some of the books we’ll be taking to Bologna, including The Grunts, the acquisition of which we announced to a great response on Wednesday.
For the past day or so, we’ve had a steady stream of meetings with people who are in the UK before they go to the book fair – our Japanese agent, Noriko Hasagawa, for example – who I mentioned in a recent post – and Liz Bray from our Australian distributors, Allen and Unwin. They have gamely picked their way through the chaos of the office, and brushed scraps of paper and fur-fabric (for touch-and-feel books) from chairs before sitting down at a table that is slightly sticky with glue.
For the past day or so, too, I have finally been getting down to working on the slides for the first Tools of Change Conference to happen in Bologna, at which I am – eek! – the first keynote speaker on Sunday.
And yesterday, as if we didn’t have enough to do, we bought (or at least confirmed the deals on) three picture book texts, illustrations for two picture books and a debut novel.
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
I’ve written about it about it for The Bookseller online, but you can read about it here too:
I’m dating the start of the company from our announcement of our existence, which we sent to the trade press and others on 22 February 2010. In some ways, we didn’t feel quite ready to announce, but our hand was forced by two things. The first was that I had been asked to judge the British Book Awards and had given my job title as “MD of Nosy Crow” for an announcement of the make-up of the judging panels that came out in the week of 22 February 2010. The second was that I’d been messing around with Facebook on the evening of 21 February, working out how to set up a fan page and invite people to it, when I inadvertently sent out a message to my entire address book for a profile that referred to Nosy Crow.
We had, from memory, just three projects signed at the time we announced, and a stated intention to acquire from established talent and from newcomers. We also clearly stated that we intended to create apps from scratch. There were four of us – me, co-founders Camilla Reid and Adrian Soar, and Imogen Blundell – in a single room in an office complex in a Victorian school building.
One year on…
We have three print titles published. In mid-January, we published Small Blue Thing, a debut romantic fantasy that was written by the colleague of the headhunter I consulted when I was thinking I’d get the hell out of the industry. In mid-February, we published Mega Mash-up: Romans v Dinosaurs on MarsMega Mash-up: Robots v Gorillas in the Desert, innovative two-colour combinations of fiction and doodle-book drawing on popular boy themes by a team who came to us because I’d worked with one of them at Scholastic when he was a designer there.
This year, we will publish 23 print titles for children from 0 to 14, most acquired since February 22 2010. True to our original vision, these are books that children will really enjoy reading: when we acquire a book, we do so with a strong sense of who it’s for. Our books are by established names like Axel Scheffler and Penny Dale and from newer exciting talents. The list – and we’ll be announcing the first six months of 2012 before Bologna – will grow in 2012.
We have one e-book published. Small Blue Thing is our only black-and-white book so far and was the first ebook we created with the support of Faber Factory. I decided that we’d focus our digital aspirations on illustrated publishing and apps.
This year, we will publish 5 straight ebooks.
We have one app published. Last week, we published a cutting-edge story book app, The Three Little Pigs, to quite remarkable reviews (including one from FutureBook, The Bookseller’s digital publishing blog).
This year, we will publish at least 5 highly-interactive, cutting-edge, multimedia apps.
From the beginning, we were interested in using websites and social media to communicate with potential consumers – mainly parents in our case – as well as with potential suppliers in the form of authors and illustrators and customers. We launched with a lively website that has evolved over time but remains true to our original plan. We wanted to create something with real personality, that was professional but also warm, honest and informal… and that was updated constantly: we blog several times a week to provide a window into what we do. In our first year, we’ve had a over a quarter of a million page-views from over 20,000 visitors in 129 countries, and, since we’ve had books and apps on the market, visitor numbers have risen sharply. Thank you very much for visiting us.
We’ve sold in our first list via Bounce and have promotions with Sainsbury’s, Tesco, ELC/Mothercare, WH Smith, WH Smith Travel, Waterstones and Foyles. Our books are in shops from museum giftshops to Toys ‘R’ Us.
We’ve been active internationally too. In May, Allen and Unwin begins distributing our books in Australia and New Zealand. So far, we’ve sold rights in our books to Germany, France, Holland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, China, Korea and Israel with more good news lined up for announcement over the next few weeks.
There are 11 of us now. We’ve been able to attract the most extraordinary talent to work with us, from games coding genius, Will Bryan, to picture book supremo, Kate Burns. Most of us are parents; several of us work part-time; and several of us work from home and only come into our (slightly bigger) open-plan office occasionally.
There have been challenges and disappointments, and there will undoubtedly be more ahead! There has been constant, grinding, sometimes dull hard work.
We worry – of course we do – about the book market and our place in the print and digital future that is unfolding. But it’s been fun.
It’s been a good year!
Things we haven’t loved so much about this year:
Queuing at the post-office.
Being responsible for all the boring stuff like printer maintenance.
Cold-calling people without a big name behind us.
Things we’ve loved:
Being able to buy great books from authors and illustrators we want to work with as they develop.
Being able to act quickly and decisively.
Selling our books!
The conversations that have opened up online between us and readers, parents, creators and sellers.
Working with great colleagues in a relaxed and fun environment fuelled by cake.
Romasauria is the glass-domed city in Romans v Dinosaurs on Mars which Romans and Dinosaurs bicker and co-exist until their civilisation is threatened by an asteroid spotted heading towards Mars by Augustus Astronomus.
Food for the feast included mooncow and poogoid stew (no poogoids, were, however, harmed in the making of this stew, as, not being on Mars, Nikalas was forced to substitute chorizo), and the tablecloth was printed out spreads of the book. We were equipped with pens so that we could do what everyone should do when faced with a page of Mega Mash-up: read the story, and complete the illustration and fill in the speech-bubbles. I am happy to say that my camel, in the desert that the Robots and Gorillas race across to settle scores, drew particular compliments.
The books have been out for a week or so, and are being promoted in Sainsbury’s and Waterstones. They are quite unique in their combination of fiction and doodling.
We’ve had a couple of reviews so far:
Parents in Touch said: “This new series from Nosy Crow is an innovative and clever combination of novel and doodle book and I think is an absolutely brilliant idea for reluctant or struggling readers, especially that notoriously hard market – boys… Zany stories and quirky illustrations make these books great fun.”
Sarah’s Book Reviews wrote: “There is plenty of room for a child’s own imagination… I will be recommending it to friends as a great idea for their children.”
There’s a fun, interactive dedicated website, too.
In this case, we had planned the book, but when the roughs were done and the text in place, we felt that the pacing wasn’t spot-on. The pacing of a picture book, particularly what is revealed when you turn a page (as opposed to what you can see already see on the right-hand side of a page when you are reading the left-hand side of a page), is tremendously important, and one of those things that makes creating a really good picture book such a challenge and a skill.
Anyway, we got to work with photocopies of Axel’s rough sketches, bits of paper with the text on it, a pencil and some really big scissors to redesign how the book worked. I know it’s not hi-tech, but for us, it’s the best way.
Here’s Camilla, hand sketching so fast that the camera couldn’t catch it, at work.
The reworked roughs went back to Axel, who redrew some of the images, and we’ll have a full book of art to take to the Bologna Book Fair at the end of March.
“People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.”
These are the words of Martin Amis (pictured above), interviewed on Radio 4 by Sebastian Faulks.
Amis went on to say, “I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.”
Martin Amis is, perhaps, nowadays more remarkable for his controversial comments – about women and about Islam as well as about writing for children – than for his novels. Maybe comments like this are as much about keeping him in the public eye as making a serious point, but there are, I think, four separate but connected thoughts in this particular sound bite.
The first, and the simplest, is the crassness of the “brain injury” reference. Inevitably, the implication that writing for children is for those with diminished intellectual capacity has angered children’s authors, including Charlie Higson and Anthony Horowitz.
Katherine Langrish pointed out, “People who make shoes or clothes, or who prepare food for children, aren’t generally considered less skilful than those who do the same things for adults – why is the opposite so often assumed to be true of books?”
Jane Stemp, whose book The Secret Songs was shortlisted for the 1998 Guardian children’s fiction award, and who has cerebral palsy, said: “I have brain damage … So Amis couldn’t have insulted me harder if he’d sat down and thought about it for a year.”
The “brain injury” reference caught the headlines – I used it myself – but, I think, the other points are much more interesting, and I find that I agree with the essence of what Amis is talking about.
Amis claims that “the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me”. Let’s leave aside whether Amis is being disingenuous in saying that he does not write with a sense of what will appeal to his readers. I think that most good children’s authors do write with a clear sense of their audience. This doesn’t mean that all children’s authors do: in her angry response to Amis’s comments, Lucy Coats says she doesn’t, as a writer for children, write in a way that is prescribed by a sense of her audience: “When I write fiction, I research and plan just as (I assume) Amis does. Then I sit down and let what comes, come. The story generally tells itself without any inner voice saying, ‘Oh, but you’re writing for children – you mustn’t say this, or – goodness, certainly not that!’”
Certainly, as a publisher, with a commercial imperative, I judge children’s writing by whether I think it will appeal to a child reader. Are there characters with whom the child reader will empathise? Is the subject matter likely to interest the child? At Nosy Crow we’re publishing books for “children” from babies to teenagers, and, I hope, making carefully calibrated decisions for every book we choose. We aim to have a sense of the core readership for every book we publish: we always ask ourselves, “who is this book for?” Of course, if the appeal of a book goes beyond that target readership, so much the better. And, in children’s book publishing, there’s an additional complication: the person who will ultimately read your book is not the person who will buy your book. The person who will buy your book will be, in the vast majority of cases, an adult. So you also, as a publisher, have to find ways of signposting to an adult the ways in which a book might appeal to the child for whom they are buying.
Amis goes on to say, “Fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.” I think that authors and publishers of children’s books do impose restraints on themselves. Earlier today, I decided against zombies, albeit unthreatening comedy zombies, appearing in a book that I judged would have a core audience of 6 to 9 year-old boys. Some of the younger readers were too young for zombies, I decided: the undead were just too scary. I don’t think that I’m alone as a children’s book publisher in confessing to having a kind of moral (or, maybe, better, an “appropriateness”) compass – an individual one, a fallible one – that operates in my head when I am choosing children’s books for publication. I think that many writers have it in their heads when they are writing children’s books. As a publisher, I do think hard about the “messages” in the books we publish. I would find it hard to publish a children’s book in which violence or cruelty triumphed over gentleness and kindness. I wouldn’t publish a novel that celebrated or justified racism, sexism or homophobia. I spent a few months working in adult publishing and it was interesting to be free from this compunction – and I did, really, feel the difference. I know, of course, that many children face violence, cruelty, injustice and chaos every day in their lives. I am aware that children’s books need to reflect a world that contemporary children recognise. But I think that children’s books have a role in shaping children’s world views, and I, for one, think that it is important to offer them narratives and characters that are exemplars of hope, justice, tolerance, generosity and redemption.
Finally, Amis said that he “would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.” The Ernie Wise-like syntactic inelegance is amusing in the context, though it was just a spoken aside in a radio interview. But the question he raises (at least, I think this is what he’s talking about) is a real one: does writing for children require an author to limit their vocabulary? As a publisher, I’d say that, honestly, the answer is “yes”. I am the first to acknowledge that children often discover new language through books, and I think it’s great that they do. But I would strongly advise an author to edit swearing out of a novel with a core audience of 8 year-olds even though I know that most children are familiar with those words in the playground and, often, at home. Nor can I imagine publishing a picture book with the words “recondite” and “meretricious” in it. In fact, unless the point was that a character spoke in an unusually orotund way, I’d advise the avoidance of those words in a novel aimed at children younger than 12. And books for babies, I’d say, should have simple texts that reflect babies’ evolving language skills.
So, on the whole, I think we should leave “recondite” and “meretricious” to Amis, but acknowledge that, while the “brain injury” comment is both glib and offensive, there is some truth in the other things that Amis said: children’s publishers and, I think, many successful and loved children’s authors are aware of their audience, and, free from solipsism and with a sense of responsibility, they pitch their stories, their characters and their language to that audience. I think we should be proud to do so.
“We’ll be revealing our titles for 2012 shortly, but we wanted to give you a sneak preview of one of them. Just like little bear’s porridge, we think that this lovely person is just right for the Nosy Crow list: she’s the multi-talented, award-winning author/illustrator/animator Leigh Hodgkinson. I love working with Leigh, something that always involves great books, loads of tea and ginger biscuits.
Leigh’s debut picture book for us is called Goldilocks and Just the One Bear. It’s the story of what happens when little bear is all grown up and has somehow managed to wander off the beaten track from the wood into the big city. The bear doesn’t much like the lights (too bright) or the honking and beeping (too loud) but his salvation comes in the unlikely form of a rather glamorous blonde lady who seems very familiar for some reason – and she really knows how he likes his porridge.
I believe that children enjoy and benefit from fractured fairy tales and that they are brilliant way to fire the imagination and teach children about word play, story play, looking at things from a different point of view and generally having fun with books…”
“Today I’m going to share a bit of family tradition – quite a new one that we’ve been doing for maybe five or so years. We put some winter twigs into a jug, and put fairy lights on them and decorate the branches with stars and moon decorations – just stars and moons. By the jug, we have a bowl with a pen, and coloured paper and ribbon cut into short lengths, and over the course of Christmas we write our hopes for the coming year – for ourselves, or family and friends and for bigger things – on the strips of coloured paper. We roll them up and tie them to the branches. They’re secret: you don’t tell anyone else what you hope for. It’s our hope tree.
“As the days go by, there are more and more hopes on the tree: this is what it looked like this morning, and we have friends coming to dinner today so I expect there will be more before the hopes-on-the-tree deadline of midnight tonight.
“Tomorrow, we’ll burn the hopes on a small bonfire outside – if it doesn’t rain.
“I thought that this idea was entirely original. But of course, it’s not. My elder child pointed out that I had pinched it from references to the Japanese (summer) festival of Tanabata, that I had read as a child in Rumer Godden’s Miss Happiness and Miss Flower. In the book,Nona, unhappy and lonely in England, makes a wish tree as she is inspired to learn about Japanese culture by the arrival of two Japanese dolls. She ends up making a house for them while she herself finds herself increasingly at home. It’s all there in the book: the stars, the tree, the wishes (or hopes) and even the burning of the wishes (or hopes). I loved that book as a child, but I’d completely forgotten that part of it until my daughter read it and reminded me. It’s interesting to think that something from a children’s book lay forgotten and dormant in my head for almost three decades: just one reminder, for me, of the unexpected power of reading for pleasure as a child.”
And happy 2011 from all the Crows: we hope that your hopes are fulfilled.
The last of these is a short story that appeared in The Times just before Christmas in 2007. Kate read it first in a car on the way to Scotland. She loved it. It made her cry – several times. It made her smile – several times. She read it to her children for the first time on Christmas Eve that year.
She didn’t know Jeanette Winterson, so, on Boxing Day, she sent an email to Jeanette’s website, and, eventually, though it wasn’t easy, she was really proud and happy to acquire the text for Scholastic where it was published for Christmas 2009.
It’s a lyrical, mystical, funny retelling of the nativity story from the point of view of the donkey that carried Mary to Bethlehem.
It is a story she finds very hard to read aloud (because she gets very choked up), but she finds that’s true about T S Eliot’s The Journey of The Magi (and the end of The Story of Holly and Ivy, actually).
Are there books that you or your family go back to every year at Christmas? Do please tell us about them.
Kate had somehow managed to miss a piece of sad news until Marion Lloyd, of Marion Lloyd Books (with whom Kate worked for ages both at Macmillan and Scholastic, of which Marion Lloyd Books is an imprint), rang up today: Eva Ibbotson died on Wednesday aged 85.
Eva wrote books that are spooky, books that are funny, books that are historical and books that are moving. Kate ran Macmillan for 10 years and so had the privilege of being responsible for managing her backlist and publishing many of her books, including the one she is perhaps best known for: Journey to the River Sea.
Twice shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, shortlisted for the Roald Dahl funny prize and the Guardian children’s fiction prize, and winner of the Nestle prize, her wide-ranging imagination, wit and writing brilliance were acknowledged by librarians and critics, but she was very much a writer that children respond to: Kate, co-incidentally, listed The Secret of Platform 13 and Journey to the River Sea in her recent blog about best books for 10 year-old girls.
A mother of four and grandmother, Eva was born in Vienna (a city beautifully evoked in The Star of Kazan), and her childhood was split between pre-war Germany, Austria, Scotland and England. She came to call the North-East of England her home. She was droll, sharp (in a good way) and self-deprecating. Kate is very happy to have known her, and very sad that she has died.
Her final book, One Dog and His Boy, will be published by Marion Lloyd books in May 2011.
Having written a post on best books for ten year-old girls, Kate felt that she couldn’t not write the companion post on best books for ten year-old boys, not least because it’s another rich seam of terrific writing. Of course, there are many overlaps between books ‘for’ boys and books ‘for’ girls (and the gender divide was really driven by the twitter enquiry that prompted the list of best books for girls), but there are differences too. However much of an old-style Doc-Marten-wearing feminist Kate was (is…), and however much she swore that she would not encourage her own children into gender stereotypes, she’s come to accept differences, whether innate or cultural. in boys’ and girls’ reading and playing preferences. It is better, she thinks, for children to read things that appeal to them, than to try to push them into “appreciating” things that they don’t really respond to.
Once again, the reading levels vary and these are not all literary books. Kate thinks children should be encouraged to read widely.
Classics:
The Narnia stories by C S Lewis
The Just William books by Richmal Crompton
The Tintin books
The Asterix books
The Silver Sword by Ian Serrallier
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
Goodnight, Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian
The Wolves of Willougby Chase by Joan Aitken
The Kite Rider by Geraldine McCaughrean
The Legendeer Trilogy by Alan Gibbons
Gladiator by Simon Scarrow and Richard Jones is likely to appeal, and publishes in February 2011
The Eagle of the Ninth and other historical fiction by Rosemary Sutcliffe
Cue for Treason and other historical fiction by Geoffrey Treese
The Machine Gunners and other historical fiction by Robert Westall
Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver
Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo
“Ordinary boy”/school stories:
Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Cloud Busting by Malorie Blackman
Three Weeks with the Queen by Maurice Gleitzman
Bless the Beasts and Children by Glendon Swarthout
Goal by Michael Morpurgo
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
The Jamie Johnson football books by Dan Freedman
Fantasy/adventure stories:
The Alex Rider books by Anthony Horowitz
The Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer
The Cherub books by Robert Muchamore
The Young Bond books by Charlie Higson
Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke
The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke
The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Charlie Bone books by Jenny Nimmo
Harry Potter books by J K Rowling
Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman (a bit top-end of the age-group, this)
No Such Thing as Dragons by Philip Reeve
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve (a bit top-end of the age-group, this)
Stig of the Dump by Clive King
Our forthcoming Danny Danger books
Varjak Paw by S F Said
Born to Run by Michael Morpurgo
Arthur, High King of Britain by Michael Morpurgo
“Real-life” stories:
The My Story books (actually fictionalised, but still based on real historical events)
The Horrible Histories books
The Horrible Science books
The Horrible Geography books
Boy by Roald Dahl
One of Kate’s children recently turned ten, and, as it happens, someone @nosycrow follows on Twitter has just asked for reading recommendations for ten year-old girls (in this case, a ten year-old girl who likes to read).
To be a girl of ten reading in English is to be spoiled for choice. Not only are some of the great classics of children’s literature yours for the taking, but the last twenty years has seen a fantastic flowering of great writing for pre-adolescent children particularly in the UK, but also, it seems to Kate, in the US and in Germany. Here are the books that instantly sprang to Kate’s mind, some from her own childhood, some from 20+ years publishing children’s books (and she did publish some of the books below), and some from her experience of her own children’s preferences. No ten year-old reader is like any other ten year-old reader. Some of the books below are easier reads than others, and some more literary than others, but Kate’s a great believer in a varied reading diet. The categorisation was the first one that came to mind and is just a way of breaking up the list, and there are many others. Many books could be in more than one category, of course: Millions is very funny as well as being about an ordinary boy, and Eddie Dickens is historical as well as hilarious.
What are your suggestions? What has she missed?
Classics:
Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery
Little Women by Louisa M Alcott
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield
The Narnia stories by C S Lewis
The Little House on the Prarie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Just William books by Richmal Crompton
Matilda by Roald Dahl
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Silver Sword by Ian Serrallier
Funny books:
The Eddie Dickens books by Philip Ardagh
Molly Moon books by Georgia Byng
Larklight books by Philip Reeve
Ally’s World series by Karen McCombie
The Mr Gum books by Andy Stanton
The Ramona books by Beverley Cleary
The Rover books by Roddy Doyle (especially The Meanwhile Adventures)
The Humphrey books by Betty G Birney
Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson
Time-slip/historical books:
Charlotte Sometimes by Philippa Pearce
War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
Hetty Feather by Jacqueline Wilson
Tom’s Midnight Garden by Phippa Pearce
Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
The Wolves of Willougby Chase by Joan Aitken
Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
The Rose books by Holly Webb
Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico
The Kite Rider by Geraldine McCaughrean
“Ordinary girl (boy)”/school stories:
Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton
St Clare’s series by Enid Blyton
Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Cloud Busting by Malorie Blackman
Our forthcoming Swans on Stage series by Lyn Gardner
Most of Jacqueline Wilson’s work (though things like Love Lessons are a bit old for 10 year-olds), but Tracy Beaker is Kate’s personal favourite
Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen
Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Ida B by Katherine Hannigan
Three Weeks with the Queen by Maurice Gleitzman
Fantasy stories:
Ink Heart by Cornelia Funke
The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke
The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper
The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Charlie Bone books by Jenny Nimmo
Harry Potter books by J K Rowling
Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan
Into the Woods by Lyn Gardner
The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo
The Mennyms by Sylvia Waugh
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman (a bit top-end of the age-group, this)
No Such Thing as Dragons by Philip Reeve
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve (a bit top-end of the age-group, this)
Stig of the Dump by Clive King
“Real-life” stories:
Chinese Cinderella by Adeline Yen Mah (a bit top-end of the age-group, this)
The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig
The My Story books, especially Titanic (actually fictionalised, but still based on real historical events)
The Horrible Histories books
The Horrible Science books
Since the move last weekend, we’ve had a busy time at Nosy Crow.
Kate Burns (KB) and Stephanie Amster (Steph) joined us on Monday and quickly fitted into the team in our new, rather lovely space.
Since then, Kate’s been working on the update of the books pages: by Frankfurt, we wanted to get all of the 2011 programme (well, Kate supposes that a really exceptional book could just be squeezed into the second half of the year) loaded up onto the website, and to give people an opportunity to search the list in different ways – by series, or age, or type, or author/illustrator or publication month.
There are some nice extras, like an audio slide show for the Small Blue Thing trilogy and a little video for the Mega Mash-up series, and we hope to add to this as time goes on.
We will publish 27 books in 2011, and they cover a really wide range of titles, from board books to young teen fiction. Given that we announced the formation of Nosy Crow at the end of February, we think this is pretty good going!
We really hope that you enjoy exploring the books pages. We’re certainly enjoying working with authors and illustrators to put the books together.
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.
Kate was interested to see this article in Publishers Weekly about crying while reading.
The cathartic nature of a good children’s book (or adult book) cry is not to be undervalued, she thinks.
Kate was interested, though, that there’s an emphasis on sad books in the piece. Now, of course, sad books make Kate cry. Her first memory of crying at a children’s book is when her mother read her The Velveteen Rabbit from (how?) a Christmas edition of a woman’s magazine. Later, she remembers Charlotte’s Web (pictured here) made her cry a lot, and the The Snow Goose. And she remembers starting The Diary of Anne Frank aged about 11, and thinking it was fiction, and the enormous sadness of getting to the end, exacerbated, of course, by realising it wasn’t fiction. As a publisher, the sad book that made her cry most was Ways to Live Forever.
However, while sad books make Kate cry, she finds happy endings can be pretty blub-inducing things. She was absolutely fine through the loss of the precious picture and the car accident in A Dog So Small, but the moment that Ben realises that Brown is the dog for him is the part that she can’t type about without a little lump in the throat even now. And what about the return of the father in The Railway Children? As a publisher, the “happy ending” (sort of) that made her cry most was the one in Millions.
As an adult, Kate has discovered that reading aloud presents an even greater challenge than reading silently. She cannot read moving or sad or happy things to anyone without blubbing. This is quite incapacitating, both professionally and parentally. When she left Macmillan, she couldn’t complete her leaving speech because it concluded with a paragraph from the last page of A Gathering Light. She struggled to continue to address an audience at the Edinburgh Book Festival launch of A Little Piece of Ground after reading a quote from it.
And while one of Kate’s children is similarly afflicted, her other child cannot begin to understand why Kate cried when she read The Diddakoi or Once There Were Giants at bedtime, and poked incredulously (and sometimes painfully) at her tears.
Camilla says that the book that generated “uncontrollable sobbing” in her childhood was Jenny and has just admitted that she has to pause when she reads aloud the words, “‘I must not fail’, said the tiny snail,” in The Snail and the Whale.
The normally emotionally robust Imogen says that A Gathering Light, Private Peaceful, My Sister’s Keeper (she acknowledges embarrassing tears on a train), Lovely Bones (a book, by the way, that Kate can’t be doing with so we celebrate reading diversity here at Nosy Crow) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles all make her cry.
Deb nominates Bridge to Terabithia ,Shane and Flowers for Algernon.
Do please comment to tell us what books make you cry.
Kate had a real day off on Thursday and went to a West Wales beach, but came back in time for the Puffin of Puffins debate chaired by Lucy Mangan, top children’s books afficionado and Guardian columnist. Children’s book authors, adult author Jasper Fforde and Marcus Brigstocke each championed a book from one of Puffin’s seven decades.
Jackie Wilson championed the The Family at One End Street – the first book with people who weren’t posh that she’d encountered. She said that every character was imbued with their own personality, even baby William. She identified with kind Lily-Rose and bookish Kate and said that they were surprisingly modern in their aspirations: Lily-Rose wants her own steam laundry (their mother takes in laundry) and Kate wants to be a sort of eco-farmer (though she doesn’t express it in those words).
Jenny Valentine defended Charlotte’s Web, saying it had a brilliantly dramatic and ominous opening line, “Where’s Papa going with that axe?”, and was a celebration of the transformative power of friendship and loyalty.
Jasper Fforde spoke up for Stig of the Dump, speaking of the appeal he felt as a child of Stig’s complete freedom from the dullness and strictures of adulthood.
Marcus Brigstocke recalled the way that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory expressly addressed him in the first pages, and said that this made the book more approachable for someone who was dyslexic. He said that Willie Wonka was a brilliant fictional forerunner of Alan Sugar, and the whole set-up was like The Apprentice.
Cathy Cassidy championed Goodnight Mr Tom, a book, she said, about “learning to be loved” that she’d read non-stop in the course of a single night when she was in her 20s.
Andy Stanton defended The Hundred-Mile-An-Hour Dog: “A small comic masterpiece” that is “a kids’ book… It’s exactly what kids want.”
Jason Bradbury spoke up for Artemis Fowl celebrating the fairy gadgetry and its moral ambivalence: Artemis is really “a baddie, which is all to the good”.
Of these, Kate would have voted for Charlotte’s Web (had she had a voting slip, which, annoyingly, she didn’t), but the audience vote was for Goodnight Mr Tom, a very worthy winner.
On Friday morning, Kate momentarily owned a Viviane Schwarz original (pictured) after Viv and Grahame Baker Smith’s Kate Greenaway Medal event with Anthony Browne… but a little girl asked if she could have it, and it seemed churlish not to hand it over. Viv’s There Are Cats in This Book is a whimsical joy.
Later, in her event, Francesca Simon read from Horrid Henry Rocks, demonstrating once again that no-one writes about sibling rivalry more amusingly. She said she draws on the emotions of her own childhood and on her observations of her nephew and niece (who provided the line, “He’s looking out of my window!” in the course of a car journey), though she emphasised that Horrid Henry and Perfect Peter represent the “Two halves of everyone”.
Andy Stanton demonstrated the quirky energy and humour at the heart of his Mr Gum books in his event, bounding around the audience to take questions, drinking water “in French” and speaking about his writing process: “Sometimes ideas are like wasps. Probably. They get in your head and buzz around. Actually, they’re not like wasps.”
In his event, Morris Gleitzman spoke movingly of the challenge and process of writing his Holocaust trilogy, Once, Then and Now… prompting a bit of a debate (continued on Twitter) as to whether you have to be Jewish to write fiction about the Jewish experience of the Holocaust or whether any writing about the Holocaust is likely to act as a commemoration and a reminder. What do you think?
Oh, and there was more, but you’ve probably had enough. Once again, the Hay Festival of Literature and Art was fun and stimulating. It was a chance to meet old friends and meet new people. It was great to be there.
Yesterday, the Sunday Telegraph ran a Children’s Special books supplement, including an interview with Francesca Simon and a big old piece by Anne Bilson on the fact that children/teenagers have always been fascinated by horror and the macabre, whether it’s Hansel and Gretel, Dahl’s The Witches, the Harry Potter series or the recent crop of vampires.
In Kate’s house, though, it was the attempt by Lucinda Everett to come up with the “Twenty Greatest Children’s Books Ever” that really got the discussion going.
Here’s Lucinda Everett’s list:
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
The Harry Potter series, JK Rowling (Cheat! She has to choose one!)
The His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman (Cheat again!)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle
The Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
Babar, Jean de Brunhoff
Treasure Island, RL Stevenson
The Railway Children, E Nesbit
Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
The Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
Peter Pan and Wendy, JM Barrie
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Story of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
The Tiger who Came to Tea, Judith Kerr
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter
Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
Kate thought this was a pretty good list, if a bit skewed to older children, a tiny bit short on laughs, a bit over-heavy on the classics, and a bit too UK – but she recognises that twenty is hardly any books at all! Where was Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown? Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell? Where’s Spot? by Eric Hill? Dogger, by Shirley Hughes? Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss? Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg? The Snowman by Raymond Briggs? We’re going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury? Where were books by Malorie Blackman, Michael Morpurgo, Robert Westall, Philip Reeve and Lauren Child? And where were classics in translation (other than Babar)? What about Pippi Longstocking? Emil and the Detectives? The Little Prince? Asterix? Tintin?
Among Kate’s personal favourites that didn’t make Lucinda Everett’s cut were The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, The Owl Service by Alan Garner, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown, My Naughty Little Sister stories by Dorothy Edwards, Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce and something by Philippa Pearce – probably A Dog So Small. Oh, and utterly off-piste Alfonzo Bonzo by Andrew Davies. And if we’re going as old as Watership Down, what about I Capture the Castle, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Junk, The Hitchhiker’s Guide the the Galaxy and – yes – Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging?
In the course of discussion, the criteria moved about a lot: do you want a list that represents the canon of children’s literature for the last century or so; a list that reflects what YOU thought was great as a child; or a list that you think would appeal to a child reader (boy? girl?) of two, or seven, or twelve, today? It’s all, in the end, too personal to come up with a definitive list, but it’s fun to try.
Here’s a nine year-old’s list:
The Diddakoi, Rumer Godden
Holes, Louis Sacher
Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, JK Rowling
The Dolls’ House, Rumer Godden
Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, Rick Riordan
The Twins at St Clare’s, Enid Blyton
The Endless Steppe, Esther Hautzig
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Judith Kerr
Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
The Mouse and His Child, Russell Hoban
Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfield
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Why the Whales Came, Michael Morpurgo
The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
Journey to Jo’burg, Beverley Naidoo
The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo
The Giant Under the Snow, John Gordon
The Railway Children, E Nesbit
The Mozart Question, Michael Morpurgo
Here’s an eleven year-old’s list:
The Neverending Story, Michael Ende
Inkheart, Cornelia Funke
The Mouse and His Child, Russell Hoban
A Long Way from Verona, Jane Gardham
The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, JK Rowling
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
The Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke
King of Shadows, Susan Cooper
A Gathering Light, Jennifer Donnelly
Noughts and Crosses, Malory Blackman
Cosmic, Frank Cottrell Boyce
Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
You’re a Bad Man, Mr Gum, Andy Stanton
Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
Anne of Green Gables, L M Montgomery
Little Women, Louisa M Alcott
Here Lies Arthur, Philip Reeve
I, Coriander, Sally Gardner
What’s your list? Send it in as a comment on this post. We’d really like to know.
We are sorry. We haven’t posted since last Sunday, and we apologise to those of you – and we know you exist and we love you! – who’ve been coming to the site every day for our daily Nosy News. We’ve been at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair since Monday and have had no time at all to post, though Kate’s tweeted a bit.
The picture of Kate and Camilla on the stand with an author was taken by lovely Liz Thomson from Book Brunch.
Kate has her schedule to hand and sees that she had over 50 appointments in three-and-a-half days just counting the ones which she spent showing non-UK publishers and a couple of UK retailers the material on Nosy Crow’s books for 2011. Camilla had a full schedule too. Given that, as some of you know, we initially planned to come to Bologna just to have a few chats with old friends, this wasn’t bad going.
Of course, because we’d been launched for exactly four weeks when the fair began, we didn’t have a huge amount of material – though Imogen did manage to pull together bound proofs of Small Blue Thing which went like hot cakes. We couldn’t be more pleased with the response to all that we had to show, though. Several key people came back to the stand, some with colleagues, to look again at things that particularly interested them. Kate got five requests to come to visit publishers/groups of publishers to talk through the programme over the next few months. There wasn’t a single project on which we don’t have a lot of interest to folllow up, and we’re really grateful to the authors, illustrators and other creative people we’ve been working with over the past weeks for all their hard work as it meant we could make a really strong debut.
People were really compelled by the concept and storyline of Small Blue Thing, for which Kate’s shorthand pitch was, “Twilight in London but with memories instead of blood”.
They responded really well to the “mash up” element of Mega Mash-Up, and doodle books were doing well in many markets so the idea of doodle novels was really popular. As has happened to Kate before, Alan Boyko of Scholastic Book Fairs USA made a brilliant observation that will improve the books as we develop them: thank you, Alan! This is one of the excellent by-products of selling to really good people: their comments really help you to refine the books. Here’s how Book Brunch reported on the books.
Benji Davies’s Bizzy Bear character was tremendously popular – accessible and cute but still distinctive and classy – and people responded well to the very simple and well-thought-through mechanisms.
The idea of being able to tell the story of life on earth from blobs to us in 32 pages in Evolution went down very well, and there was real interest in narrative non-fiction for young readers. This is the book that’s furthest off in terms of scheduling for us (we plan to publish in September 2011, while the rest of the books we were talking about are for the first half of next year), and we’ve yet to confirm an illustrator for it, so it will have it’s first real outing at Frankfurt.
Like us, others recognised Penny Dale’s spectacular brilliance in combining dinosaurs and diggers in Dinosaur Dig. As one interested publisher said, “It’s got dinosaurs, it’s got diggers, it’s got counting, it’s got a story. It’s even got suspense!” Here’s how Book Brunch reported the acquisition
We could sell Pip and Posy many times over in every major market. Axel’s work is known and loved in so many countries, but people also really liked the idea of reflecting the realities of toddler life, including the bits that make toddlers cry. And here’s how The Bookseller reported the acquisition.
We were on the Publisher’s Association stand with other independent publishers who were exceptionally friendly, though we’re not sure we were the best of neighbours as we were both noisy and messy. Gloria and Helen from the PA looked after us brilliantly.
Both off the stand and on the stand, we met authors, illustrators, agents and journalists as well as non-Uk publishers, and there’s a handful of really interesting ideas for us to follow up as possible additions to the list.
Book Brunch gave Nosy Crow a mention in its Bologna Book Fair round up, and did a great write up of this year’s Bologna party of parties: Scholastic’s 90th birthday.
As we were flat-out, we can’t really say that we spent much time taking the temperature of the fair, but we think that the general view was that it was pretty lively and buzzy. UK and German children’s books markets at least did well last year, and people seemed open to buy. A lot of people were talking about US fantasy The Emerald Atlas, which Nosy Crow saw, but decided not to bid on, and which Writer’s House had done a very good job of hyping up before the fair. It went to Random House in the US and Germany and HarperCollins in the UK.
Here are a few photos that we took – we’ll remember to take more next time.
It was a gorgeous spring day today, and Kate and Camilla were off to the corner of St James’s Park, where the crocuses were blooming, for the annual Books and The Consumer Conference. There was lots of interesting stuff said, but the overall message for books was a sobering one: the number of books bought, and the amount of money paid for them (both the average price and the total amount of money spent) decreased in 2009 compared to 2008. The percentage of people in the 15,000 sample who’d bought a book dropped to 56%, though the number of books bought by people who had bought books had increased. Steve Bohme of Book Marketing Ltd, who gave the main presentation, pointed out that books had done less badly than other entertainment products sold in physical form, like DVDs, computer games and CDs (the growth in download sales doesn’t compensate for the loss of revenue on music in physical form).
On the bright side, this was another conference at which the industry considered its digital future, raising all the challenges of staff recruitment, piracy and high costs of devices that any discussion of books and digital involves. A presenter from the US, Kelly Gallagher, reminded us that ebooks currently represent just 3% of the market there, but also pointed out how young the market was, with 34% of the people who said they’d bought an ebook in a survey conducted in November 2009 saying they’d bought their first ebook within the previous 6 months. We felt glad, certainly, that Nosy Crow has an apps dimension.
Another good news story was that the number of children’s books bought increased between 2008 and 2009. This was true even after Stephanie Meyer sales were subtracted: Meyer’s titles are classified as children’s books, even thought they are bought more for young women (17 – 34) than for any other group and people under 17 represent a relatively small part of her audience. The increase was across both fiction and non-fiction, with picture books and early learning (at one end of the age-range spectrum) and horror (remember the Meyer books) and science fiction/fantasy (at the other end of the age-range spectrum) performing perticularly well. Money spent on books bought for children had also increased. Again, we felt pretty chipper that Nosy Crow is a children’s book publisher.
Today’s photo was taken at the conference and is of Camilla with Dawn Burdett (who did a cracking presentation on the Simon and Schuster campaign for The White Queen) and the great Steve Bohme himself, who once again contrived to make statistics – some of them gloom-inducing ones – comprehensible and entertaining.
We have bought a new book: Dinosaur Dig!, by Penny Dale, a fabulous picture book for toddlers. It’s also our speediest acquisition yet: 2 hours after it was posted through the door, we made our offer to Caroline Sheldon, Penny’s agent! Read all about it in Books, and find out about Penny in Authors etc.
Yesterday, Camilla and Kate were off to Random House for a drink and a chat at the launch of the National Literacy Trust’s Vote for Literacy Campaign, which aims to push all political parties to make literacy a priority. The NLT-ers have been busy bunnies, rebranding and relaunching their website, which is a treasure-trove, really, and if you don’t know it, have a look.
A recent YouGov survey, quoted on the NLT website, found that 92 % of the British public say literacy is vital to the economy and 87 % believe that good literacy skills are essential for children to cope in today’s multimedia society. However, the last PIRLS survey (due for an update soon) found that English children’s standard of reading was dropping in absolute terms and in comparison to reading standards in other countries, and that English children reported enjoying reading less than they had in the previous survey and less than kids in many other countries. The NLT’s own survey found that children think that readers are clever and successful, but also geeky/nerdy and boring … and children think that their friends think more negatively about readers than they do.
At Nosy Crow we know – because we feel it and have lived it in our own and other children’s lives; and because we’ve read the research – that:
Reading for pleasure correlates with increased attainment in reading and writing.
Reading for pleasure fosters creativity and imagination.
Reading for pleasure develops good social attitudes.
Reading for pleasure contributes to knowledge and understanding of the world.
Reading for pleasure contributes to self-esteem.
We think that the best ways of encouraging children to read for pleasures are to supply them with things they want to read in print and digitally, and to get children to talk about reading with other children and with adults face-to-face and on-line.
