Nosy Crow tag

Nosy Crow wins best children's app at the Futurebook Awards

Posted by Kate on Dec 09, 2011

I know it’s a bit late (for reasons too complicated/embarrassing to go into) to be posting this now, but, just for those of you who missed it, I went, on Monday, to the second FutureBook Conference in London, run by the FutureBook team at The Bookseller. Well-organised and informative, with (for me) stand-out speeches from Stephen Page of Faber and Jon Ingold of Inkle, I, and many others, live-tweeted throughout, and you can find our tweets (for now, at least) here, several of which have links to stats and blog posts.

I will have a shot at posting a blog posting my impressions of the day if I have time over the weekend.

Immediately after the conference, the FutureBook Innovation Awards were presented. I was on the jury, but, because Nosy Crow’s Cinderella was on the shortlist for best children’s app, this year, I had to recuse myself from that part of the judging, disappearing to another room and biting my nails… and we won our category!

Above you can see our very smart and glassy award.

Our Three Little Pigs app was highly commended at the first FutureBook Innovation Awards, for which there was just a single apps category (won by Faber and Faber and Touch Press for The Solar System).

For this second round of awards, there were three apps categories, one of which was best children’s apps. The judges said of Cinderella:

“Nosy Crow has created a visually attractive and highly interactive application for children which takes a classic, popular fairy tale and immerses the reader in the world of Cinderella.

“The illustrations are beautiful and the interactive features mean that there is plenty to keep even the youngest digital reader occupied for a long time.

Nosy Crow has managed yet again to marry education with entertainment with this fun, interactive application and deserve to win.”

The awards were reported by The Futurebook, but here’s the list:

Best Children’s App: Nosy Crow for Cinderella

Best Adult App: Faber and Faber and Touch Press for The Waste Land

Best Reference App: Dorling Kindersley for The Human Body

Best Start-up: Unbound

Best Technology Innovation: Bardowl

Best Digital Marketing Campaign: Harvill Secker for The Night Circus

Most Inspiring Digital Person: Rebecca Smart of whom the judges said, “Under Rebecca Smart’s leadership, the Osprey Group’s businesses have demonstrated success across the range of digital publishing – including apps, online services and ebooks – that many larger houses would envy. In giving this award to Rebecca, the judging panel also took into account her generosity in sharing her knowledge through conferences and industry events, and her open and informative use of social media. This willingness to inform and inspire others makes her a deserved winner.”

(Just as a very silly aside, Philip Ardagh was so intrigued by the FutureBook conference and the tweets emanating from it that he “ran” and tweeted (aided and abetted by others who should really have been working), his own non-existent publishing conference, Non-Conference, the following day. You can find the tweets (again, for now, at least) here.)

Tagged with app awards, apps for children, digital publishing, futurebook, philip ardagh, prizes, twitter

Twitter

Posted by Kate on Nov 05, 2011

I see that at some point, probably yesterday but I’m not sure, follower numbers for @nosycrow topped 5,000 (of course, because, like investments, Twitter following may go down as well as up, this may no longer be the case!).

I think that I set up the Twitter account once we’d finalised the Nosy Crow name (which will be the subject of a future post, by the way), but I actually started tweeting as @nosycrow on 22 February 2010, which was the date that we announced the existence of Nosy Crow.

I had a – seldom-used – Twitter account under another name already, so I was sort of familiar with the mechanics of Twitter, but, to tell the truth, I was a bit scared of what using it might mean for me professionally. I am not always awfully good at knowing when (or how) not to say things. It’s got me in to trouble as a corporate employee more than once, and it seemed positively dangerous to amplify this problem by being able to broadcast views to anyone who followed me. I worried that I would not be able to be me and be an employee simultaneously.

But as the founder of Nosy Crow, I was freed from the concern that I might offend or inaccurately represent an employer… because my employer was me.

There are some things – personal things, family things – that I choose not to tweet about (and that’s about the privacy of the other people involved, really, as well as the fact that my personal life is not particularly gripping), but I don’t spend time thinking about whether I am tweeting as Kate-Wilson-the-person or Kate-Wilson-the-professional (and anyway, that’s often a pretty meaningless divide for me nowadays).

Tweeting as @nosycrow is part of my effort to make Nosy Crow as transparent and approachable as it’s possible for a business to be.

I certainly tweet about books and apps that Nosy Crow is bringing out, and I retweet comments and reviews about what Nosy Crow is publishing and making. However, I am absolutely happy not to present a super-shiny, always-positive professional facade. I’m in the USA at the moment, and rather rushed and tired (on Tuesday I racked up 14 meetings in four different locations in New York). I tweeted to acknowledge that this was impacting on my judgement: I’d done at least two really quite stupid things in the previous 14 hours. I’ve also tweeted about procrastination, saying once that I’d chosen to check my children’s hair for nits on a Saturday evening rather than get down to the piece of work that I knew I needed to do that weekend. And I have a weakness for wordplay hashtag games that have no bearing on my professional life (#Shakespeareanfood: “It is the yeast and Juliet is the bun”, for example).

Other people at Nosy Crow tweet too. We use @nosycrowapps to talk to people about our apps; let them know when there’s a price promotion or a giveaway going on; and to connect with people who might be particularly interested in that area of Nosy Crow’s activities. And there’s a Twitter list of other people who work for and with Nosy Crow. There’s also a Twitter list of authors, illustrators and other creative people that Nosy Crow works with.

In my 20 months of Twitter use, I’ve found Twitter a terrific way to find things out. It’s been my source of world news: I was in an airport motel in Australia when Osama Bin Laden’s death was announced, and Twitter was how I found out about it. It’s a great way to find opinion pieces, surveys and news about the rapidly changing publishing and apps businesses. We’ve used the opinions we’ve solicited on Twitter to inform our publishing decisions, as this blog post on what girls draw indicates. And when I’ve found out something interesting through Twitter, I use Twitter to offer it to other people.

If I go to a conference, I often live-tweet it – combining my own note-taking with letting other people have a sense of what are, in my view, the most interesting things being said.

And perhaps most importantly, in these ridiculously busy early days of starting up a company when my life is pretty much my work and my family, Twitter has been a way for me to keep in touch with people that I know in the real world, including some of the authors and illustrators Nosy crow publishes. It’s been a way to find new contacts too: there are people I have met through Twitter who I’ve subsequently (and often as a result) met in the real world. There are also several people with whom I have regular Twitter conversations but who I have never met in the real world.

I use Twitter because I like it. I find it fun, undemanding, informative and reciprocal.

If you follow me, thank you.

And thanks to the 1000+ people I follow too.

If you use Twitter, why do you do so?

If you don’t, why don’t you?

Do please comment.

Tagged with social media, twitter, web

Mega Mash-up: Aliens v Mad Scientists under the Ocean - some feedback

Posted by Kate on Jul 05, 2011

Two weeks ago, we published the third of Nikalas Catlow and Tim Wesson’s funny, clever and innovative new Mega Mash-up series of Draw-Your-Own-Adventure books, Mega Mash-up: Aliens v Mad Scientists under the Ocean.

An alien and a mad scientist eye one another suspiciously.

We always want to know what people think about our books and apps, whoever they are.

This time, we have had some terrific feedback from a friendly bookseller. Matt Black (pictured doodling above) is Children’s Bookseller at Waterstone’s High Street Birmingham. We know him from Twitter (where he rejoices in the name @marquiscarabas). Here’s what he says:

“Mega Mash-Up: Aliens v Mad Scientists Under The Ocean is by Nikalas Catlow and Tim Wesson and well, you when you add to the pictures! If you haven’t seen any of the previous books in this fab series, then you are in for a treat. The whole point of these great stories is to bring the reader in on the action: you get to make up parts of the narrative as the story progresses, creating and illustrating elements of the story yourself. Using pencils, pens and felt tips (with hints on how you might want to do so from the authors) you can fill in the gaps in the story and pictures and make it your own little adventure.

This makes a great alternative to the usual doodle books available, which don’t have stories. Here, the narrative adds so much more to the book, making interacting with it much more fun. Also the illustration is very loose and simple – very child-friendly – which, I think, helps to encourage children to draw and to use their own imagination.

I love the idea of aliens and mad scientists being put together in one book set under the ocean: just such a good idea! Why just doodle, when you can create?”

We really like to hear from booksellers, whose role in getting our books into the hands of readers is so important… but it’s also great to hear from readers – or their parents – themselves. Yesterday, we got an email from a mum who had taken the trouble to contact Nosy Crow via our website after Nikalas and Tim did an event at her child’s school. This is what she says:

“Hi I just wanted to send you guys a quick email to say thank you for doing a talk at my son’s school, Bellenden Primary School, last Friday. He was shy about talking to you after school when we bought a couple of your books, but then was full of excitement and enthusiasm telling me all about your talk to the children and about your drawings, and all weekend he has been drawing aliens, asteroids, smelly socks and sound effects like “ZAP!”: he is totally inspired and loves your website and your books. The kitchen table is covered with his drawings and I will keep them all.

It does make a difference when you talk in a school. It gets kids excited about reading and drawing as well as making for a bit of fun!”

The first books in the Mega Mash-up series have reprinted, and rights have been sold to the US, France, Germany, Korea and Israel so far. We publish the fourth book, Pirates v Ancient Egyptians in a Haunted Museum, in September, and three more next year.

Tagged with best books for 7 year-olds, best books for 7 year old boys, best books for boys, booksellers, bookselling, books for boys, bookshops, children's drawing, children and reading, illustrations, illustrators, mega-mash-up, nikalas catlow and tim wesson, twitter, waterstone

Nosy Crow interview in The Huffington Post

Posted by Kate on Jun 06, 2011

We thought that you might be interested to read this review of The Three Little Pigs and profile of Nosy Crow in the The Huffington Post by 2MorrowKnight and Amy Neumann (who tweets as @CharityIdeas).

A while ago, I wrote a post about the challenges of getting media coverage, particularly traditional print media coverage, for apps. We’re hugely grateful for the online coverage we’ve had and continue to get, and the article in yesterday’s HuffPost Books section is a great and cheering example.

Tagged with apps, children's apps, facebook, huffington post, ipad, iphone, ipod touch, mega-mash-up, new kids apps, nikalas catlow and tim wesson, three little pigs, twitter, web, website

Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators event at the Lincoln Book Festival

Posted by Kate on May 16, 2011

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.

Tagged with authors, children's apps, children's authors, children's books, children's fiction, children's illustrators, children's publishers, children and reading, facebook, illustrations, illustrators, parenting blogs, picture books, publishing, twitter, web, website

Tools of Change Bologna

Posted by Kate on Mar 27, 2011

Today, Deb and I went to the first Tools of Change conference at Bologna. Tools of Change is a sequence of conferences about publishing in the digital age, but today’s was the first to focus exclusively on children’s books.

Organised, at least in part, by Neal Hoskins of Winged Chariot, who couldn’t be more passionate in his conviction about the importance of apps as a new form of story-telling for children, it was a 200+ person conference with delegates from 27 countries… and a great success.

Deb spoke eloquently about the interactivity that’s at the heart of our apps development. She spoke about the interactivity that is at the heart of the content – we want to creat apps that children want to read, explore and play with. She spoke about the interactivity that is the basis of how we create an app, pulling together original text, audio, music, illustration, animation and coding into a whole in a way that involves lots of collaboration. She spoke about the interactivity that we have with readers and buyers of the app, as the digital world provides us ways of finding out – and acting upon – what our customers think of what we’re doing. She was mobbed by publishers at the end of the panel discussion in which she took part, all keen to find out more about what we do and how we do it.

And, at the very beginnning of the conference, I delivered the first keynote address. Frankly, this was playing against type: I could bore for Britain about Nosy Crow and what we believe is important, but I thought that the first keynote should sort of sketch out the landscape that the rest of the conference might cover. Armed only with data from Book Marketing Limited and The Futures Company, together with a few opinions, I talked about, on the one hand, digital selling and marketing of print books and of eBooks and other reading experiences; and, on the other hand. about digital products. First I talked about what was happening now in those two areas, and then I looked at what might happen in the future.

The opportunities for digital selling and marketing are already huge. One in four books – and one in five children’s books – in the UK is sold via an internet-only retailer (and Amazon is much the largest of these) so digital selling is a real and growing fact of life. Websites, electronic marketing and social media have opened up a way for publishers, who have traditionally “handed off” relationships with readers and book-buyers to retailers, to communicate directly with their consumers in a two-way conversation, and we have seen the development of the “consumer critic” – blog and rate-and-review website-enabled people whose opinion is trusted by other consumers, perhaps more than they trust the voice of the professional critic.

The opportunities for digital selling and marketing will, I think, only grow in future, and I quoted Aaron Miller of Bookglutton:

“Social publishing is the natural evolution of publishing as a business. It encompasses the web and all new distribution platforms including the way people read and discover on them… Social publishing involves a deep interest in, and study of, what happens to a text after it’s disseminated – how readers interact with it, how they share it, how they copy it, how they talk about it.”

The market for digital product is still evolving. Ebooks (and I’m not including apps here) accounted for only 1.26% of the UK book market by volume in 2010 and 0.4% of the UK children’s book market in the same year.

Nevertheless, the rate of adoption of digital reading is accelerating: in January 2010, just 3% of US book-buyers had bought a digital book, but by January 2011, that figure was 13%. And where the US leads, I think, the rest of the world will follow. Looking ahead, one concern is the consumer expectation that digital product should be cheap, or, indeed, free. As Lyle Undercoffler of Disney said, “Free is the four-letter word of digital publishing – the word that we don’t want to hear.” Another concern are the ongoing challenges to copyright. Almost a year ago, I wrote a blog post welcoming England’s Digital Economy Bill, and it now seems perfectly possible that the current government may not implement this protection of creators’ rights. Whether or not this Bill represents exactly the right way to protect the rights of creators is less important to this post today than the fact that this challenge to copyright may be in line with consumer expectations that they should be able to interact with, personalise and change the things that they read in ways that suit them. I quoted Adam Penenberg:

“Instead of stagnant words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living, breathing, works of art.”

When I think about the impact of the digital world on publishing, I think of this quote from the twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter:

“A railroad through new country upsets all conditions of location, all cost calculations, all production functions within its radius of influence and hardly any ways of doing things which have seemed optimal before remain so afterwards.”

The role of the publisher is changing. If there is this thing that we call “content” – ideas, words, images, audio, video, animation – and there is a reader, and there is a process for getting that content to the reader, we need to think strategically about what our role in that process is. We don’t, as publishers, have any kind of right to play a part in that process. We have to carve out our place in the process, by bringing to it something that we can do better than anyone else.

No-one owes us publishers lunch. We have to earn it.

Tagged with apps, bologna book fair, conferences, digital, illustrations, interactive music, ipad, iphone, ipod touch, toc bologna, twitter, web

Nosy Crow publishes its first book!

Posted by Kate on Jan 13, 2011

Today, we publish our very first book!

For regular readers of this blog it’s no surprise that our first book is Small Blue Thing by S C Ransom. It’s a paranormal romance set, unusually, in the UK, about the love between seventeen year-old schoolgirl Alex and the ghostly but gorgeous Callum, who drowned in the Fleet river, and is condemned to a half-life of stealing memories.

We have a very, very respectable 21,000 copies of the book in print, with promotions in Sainsbury’s, WHS, WHS Travel and Foyles as well as strong support from other bookshops and from Scholastic, Travelling Book Fairs and Red House. Allen and Unwin will release our edition of the book book in Australia in May, and we’ve sold rights to Fischer in Germany and Amber in Poland.

Looking back through the email trail, I see that I made the offer to publish the book a year ago yesterday, and we’re publishing the book just ten months after announcing that we were launching Nosy Crow.

This is a really exciting moment, for Nosy Crow, and I’m happy that Small Blue Thing is our first book. It’s the kind of reader-focused publishing that’s at the heart of Nosy Crow: as soon as I read the manuscript, I immediately felt I knew readers who’d love it. I read the manuscript at a point when I was thinking I might leave publishing altogether, but reading it made me realise that I know and love this business too much. Essentially, I decided to set up a publishing company to publish this book, so it’s particularly appropriate that this is Nosy Crow’s first title.

Deb has been working on the digital marketing for the book. She says, “For several weeks, Sue and Nosy Crow have been talking about the book on Twitter so our followers know all about it, and we’ve just launched a dedicated microsite. We’ll be focusing our efforts in places where teen readers spend their screen time, particularly Facebook, where the book’s fans are discussing friendship and pop culture, chatting with S C Ransom, participating in contests and swapping insights about the series.”

Sue says, “I’m thrilled that my debut novel is being published this week. It’s such a privilege to be able to share the story I wrote as a present for my daughter with so many other girls. I hope they enjoy it as much as she did! Nosy Crow has acted as the best of midwives, helping me shape and edit the story and putting in place a fantastic marketing plan with press pieces in publications as diverse as Bliss and Good Housekeeping! I really look forward to our continuing collaboration as we publish the rest of the trilogy.”

We’re publishing Perfectly Reflected, the second book in the trilogy, in June 2011 and Scattering Like Light, the third book in the trilogy, is published in January 2012.

Nosy Crow staff are having a fizzy wine brunch today in the office to celebrate a milestone in Nosy Crow’s journey (here we are in the picture), and we’re having dinner with Sue at my house in the evening.

Tagged with booksellers, children and reading, s c ransom, small blue thing, sue ransom, twitter, website

More cake, more apps

Posted by Kate on Dec 08, 2010

It’s Kate B’s birthday. Happy birthday to her! We can’t let standards slip, so a cake has been baked. Look at Twitter later for pictures.

Yesterday, Kate W spoke in a Digital Book World/Publisher’s Weekly webinar on Children’s Publishing in the Digital Age with Rick Richter of (US-based) Ruckus Media and head of Harper Collins Children’s Books in the US, Susan Katz. The webinar is available for one week, before it goes into the members-only section of the Digital Book World site, and for now you can see it/listen to it here

Kate said that we had ten aims for our apps:

1. To create something new and exceptional
2. To experiment (and to experiment in media other than text and still images)
3. To find new talent
4. To commission creative material that really uses the features of the touchscreen devices
5. To avoid squashing existing book-based content onto touchscreen devices
6. To make sure that a child who is used to the interactivity and multimedia experience of the touchscreen device is not disappointed by anything we make
7. To create an enhanced and different reading experience for children
8. To create something that parents will feel happy to give to their children
9. To invite the reader into the story through interaction and personalisation
10. To create or evolve a business model that works for us, for our creative talents and for any partners we may work with.

If you’d like to see a (very basic – a professional one’s in the works) video of our first app (which we’ll release in January), here’s the link to it on our YouTube channel

Tagged with apps, digital, three little pigs, twitter