We are really delighted to be launching Nosy Crow Inc in 2023. We feel it’s time to spread our wings and engage directly with the amazing and very different market that is North America. It’s a wonderful natural extension of our strongly international perspective on children’s publishing.
The new business will be led by John Mendelson, formerly SVP of Sales at Candlewick Press, and will publish the full range of formats that have been key to Nosy Crow’s international success: innovative board books; warm and witty picture books; beautifully designed and engaging non-fiction; and compelling chapter books and fiction. It will be sold and distributed by Hachette Book Group, effective immediately. We will also bring to North America our award-winning Stories Aloud audio programme, which has been such a success in the UK and export markets.
We are hugely grateful to the US publishers, particularly Candlewick, who have been such supporters of the Nosy Crow full-colour lists in the first decade of our existence. In fact, John Mendelson is someone we got to know very well through Candlewick, as he previously led the sales team there.
We will be focusing on the Americanisation and publication of titles from our full-colour lists in the next year or so, but looking ahead, we are keen to explore the publication of our fiction titles in the USA by Nosy Crow Inc too.
It’s important to say that existing series and picture books that feature the same characters will continue to be published by those US publishers who have already launched them. This particularly applies to Candlewick, who publish a number of our pre-school series and character-based picture books brilliantly, but also to fiction series where titles from the start of the series have already been sold to other publishers in the USA.
We look forward to bringing our great books, our reputation for sustainability, and our commitment to diversity and inclusivity to this vibrant market with a new company under the leadership of John Mendelson, whose customer focus combined with an intelligent engagement with books, authors and illustrators is unparalleled.
