Nosy Crow tag

London Book Fair - a (slightly) late update

Posted by Kate on Apr 17, 2011

Last week was the week of the London Book Fair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But all in all, a worthwhile few days.

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

Gallimard: salvaging from the wreckage of the London Book Fair

Posted by Kate on Apr 21, 2010

Though there were a number of people we didn’t manage to meet up with at the fair, there were others who had managed to get here, and one of our best meetings was with Gallimard (Hedwige Pasquet and Christine Baker pictured here with Deb and Kate on the cool French stand where you can get tiny cups of lethally strong French coffee).

Gallimard was pretty chipper, because Antoine Gallimard (and the clue is in the surname) had won a lifetime achievement award (click and then look at the press release “Respected French Publisher Antoine Gallimard to receive The London Book Fair Award 2010”). Axel Scheffler, who’s published by Gallimard, was at the select gathering that was the prize-giving.

Another highlight was that Kate went to her first tweetup (meeting of twitter-folk, or tweeple) yesterday evening, an event so thrilling and so fuelled with white wine that she left her LBF badge on yesterday’s jacket.

She met Jon Slack there for the first time. She’s doing a thing called CANONtales that he organises to “promote creativity in publishing” (if you have trouble accessing the webpage then just refresh – works for Kate every time). It’s tomorrow evening at 7.00pm with 11 other speakers doing what sounds frighteningly like powerpoint karaoke: 20 slides each up for 21 seconds. Come along to the Free Word Centre and laugh at her, if you’d like to.

Tagged with london book fair

One day down, two to go

Posted by Kate on Apr 19, 2010

Today was the first day of the London Book Fair.

Kate had expected to see tumbleweed rolling in the aisles, but in fact it wasn’t like that, at least for Nosy Crow. A lot of our meetings were with UK people – agents, retailers and others – and we had huge trouble keeping up with our schedule. We were constantly on the move from place to place, as we only have a share of a table on the IPG stand (all we could get when we tried to book just after our 22 February 2010 launch). Here (with apologies for another terrible photo) are Deb and Imogen on the stand.

We went to a couple of seminars this morning, of which the first, about creativity in relation to content for children in the digital world, was really good. Chaired by Chris Meade and with Naomi Alderman, Amanda Wood and Neal Hoskins, it was an intelligent look at different ways that children’s reading experience might be affected by the technological devices that are available.

The second, which was about how bricks bookshops might evolve in a digital era was either reassuring or scary, depending on how you look at it. Clever Jonathan Douglas asked trenchant questions of John Newman and Simon Mackay of Westfield’s Foyles, who were resoundingly chipper in the face of digital developments. Nosy Crow loves an independent bookshop, and really hopes that their focus on community, hand-selling, recommendation, connection to schools and children’s events is the way they’ll keep thriving into a future in which Mike Shatzkin estimates that 50% of books will be sold online in 2012 (in the US).

Kate tweeted both seminars (@nosycrow and #lbfdc and #lbfk – this last # is new, and could be used by anyone who wants to tweet about children’s books at the fair, she thought).

Tagged with bookshops, london book fair

London Book Fair digital conference

Posted by Kate on Apr 19, 2010

Kate and Deb spent yesterday at the London Book Fair digital conference. You can follow what was said on Twitter at #lbfdc, and Nosy Crow (@nosycrow) tweeted throughtout. Kate was on a panel on maximising commercial opportunities in the digital environment.

Several good sessions. Issues covered included the challenge of large-scale organisations working through processes and politics in order to come up with good digital stuff; the fact that publishers haven’t had to link up to consumers seriously before; the sheer variety of digital projects, both marketing and product; and the importance of the smartphone.

Nosy Crow was saying that it was excellent to be a new start-up in this digital environment: we don’t have a big, legacy infrastructure to feed and an established business model to transform from. We don’t even have backlist books that it’s tempting to spend time trying to squash onto a phone. We have freedom to make our own, new business model and we have a small integrated team. We said that, while we’ll be doing more standard digital products (straight ebook novels, eg), we have clearly defined our core digital audience – techno mum of children under 7 (so, in UK terms, pre-school and Key Stage 1) and will deliver exceptional products that have been commissioned for the device – in our case, iTouch, iPhone and iPad at this point – using the capabilities of the device including interaction, sound, animation, text and pictures.

Lots of people – judging by the retweets and the people who wanted to talk to us afterwards – seemed to like this approach.

So now it’s off to the London Book Fair.

Tagged with conferences, digital, london book fair