It has been nearly 4 years since we wrote about selling our 40th language, and what an exciting 4 years it has been. This year also marks the centenary of Margery Williams’ timeless classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, which was the title we sold our 50th language, Armenian, in. So really, celebrating Nosy Crow’s 50th language at the same time as the Velveteen Rabbit has such an important birthday could not have been timed better…
These past few years may have been full of rights excitement, but they have not been without a multitude of challenges as well. The pandemic, Brexit, a worldwide shipping crisis have meant our rights team had to adapt, innovate, and improvise at every turn in the road. Being awarded Rights Team of the Year at the British Book Awards last year was both “a reflection of the way that so many of Nosy Crow’s sales are made” and a validation of our “rights machine” that has never stopped running at full throttle!
We are now left with only 5 letters of the alphabet that we haven’t sold rights in, but since pinning down V and W, with Vietnamese and Welsh, we are (almost) content to let O, Q, X, Y, Z sit under our rights desks as a challenge to dream about. Since we have already sold in most major languages, it is becoming more and more difficult to find new languages and territories to sell our books in. However, as we are currently on the hunt for a fifth member to add to our team, which would mean yet another person wholly dedicated to selling rights, this dream could end up becoming a reality in the not-so-distant future.
But first, little bit more about our 50th language title, The Velveteen Rabbit…
First published in 1922 and republished many, many times since, Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit has been touching the hearts of children and parents alike for 100 years this year. Celebrate the centenary of this timeless classic with Nosy Crow’s fully-foiled cloth-bound edition of the original unabridged text, beautifully illustrated by Sarah Massini. The Velveteen Rabbit has been awarded the IRA / CBC Children’s Choice award and continues to be adapted into multiple different print, audio and visual formats – even sometimes used in wedding toasts and sermons.
To date, we have sold the rights to The Velveteen Rabbit in Bulgarian, Chinese simplified, Dutch, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian, US English and Vietnamese, and are undergoing negotiations for 2 more potential languages as we speak.
If you haven’t yet discovered The Velveteen Rabbit, here is a look inside the book:
And if you are interested in more of the Nosy Crow Classics series, please find more information about all of the books below: https://nosycrow.com/series/nosy-crow-classics/
