It was our birthday on Wednesday last week, at least if you measure from the day we announced our existence. We were, by that reckoning, two years old.
I’ve already written about some of our achievements in 2011. Since then, January/February 2012 has brought the following:
*We won a Publishing Innovation Award for the best juvenile app for our Cinderella app at the Digital Book World conference in New York.
*9,560 new people visited our website
*We’ve picked up 1,000 further Twitter followers for nosycrow and nosycrowapps
*We raised 38 contracts raised for rights or co-edition sales in five languages – the latest rights sale being a sale of French translation rights in Christopher Edge’s Twelve Minutes to Midnight trilogy which was sold to Flammarion today.
*Four out of six of our April titles were selected by Waterstones for promotion, which we think is a good hit rate.
*A W H Smith Richard and Judy book club book promotion for Lyn Gardner’s Olivia’s First Term is running at the moment.
*We bought several pretty exciting books/apps – more news to follow.
To celebrate, true to Nosy Crow form, there was cake: Claudia Roden’s orange cake, made by me, though it’s actually a Tom signature cake.
It’s essentially, as far as I can see, a sort of custard held upright by ground almonds:
6 nice eggs, beaten with
250 grams of caster sugar to which you add
2 tablespoons of orange blossom water and
250 grams of ground almonds and
1 teaspoon of baking powder and
2 whole unwaxed oranges (or an orange and a couple of satsumas, or the equivalent in any orange-coloured citrus fruit that you happen to have waiting for the kids’ lunchboxes) that you’ve boiled for 90 mins and then whizzed up (without the water) in a food processor.
Cook in a buttered-and-floured tin at 175 degrees centigrade for an hour.
Actually, there was another cake (chocolate and raspberry), brought by Michelle from Imago that she got in the Borough Market branch of Konditor and Cook. We had that with prosecco at the very decadent hour of 4.15pm, because Giselle goes then on a Wednesday to pick up her little boy (because that’s the kind of family-friendly company we are).
Anyway, we had a happy birthday, and it was sort of great to look back on the 2 years of our existence. Thanks so much to those of you who regularly come to the Nosy Crow site.
This is a moody picture (thank you, Leen and Instagram) of Dom and Joanne Owen, who does freelance marketing for us, with the cake as we gathered for the publishing meeting that day:
And this is a less moody, less competent picture, taken by me, of the office feeling rather bigger and buzzier than it was when the four of us gathered for our first day of public existence two years ago:
