Nosy Crow's Blog, page 113

Listen to Kate Wilson and Steven Lenton on a special Christmas episode of Down the Rabbit Hole

Last December we wrote about a special Christmas episode of Down the Rabbit Hole – airing on Christmas day itself! – with Kate Wilson, Nosy Crow’s founder and managing director, and Steven Lenton, illustrator of the Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam series, as two of the show’s special guests,

And, somewhat belatedly, I thought that I’d share the episode itself, which you can listen to on catch-up now!

You can find the Christmas special of Down the Rabbit Hole here, and hear Kate and Steven’s children’s books of the year (along with those of guest Melinda Salisbury, and Down the Rabbit Hole hosts Melissa Cox, Katherine Woodfine, and Louise Lamont.

Down the Rabbit Hole airs monthly on Resonance FM, 104.4FM, and online here – you can find an archive of previous shows here, and you can find out more about the show at the Down the Rabbit Hole website and Twitter account.

 

School Library Journal review Fairytale Play Theatre

It’s been a couple of months since we released our Fairytale Play Theatre app, and we’ve been absolutely thrilled by the response it’s received – and the app has just received a great review from School Library Journal!

In their review, SLJ’s Cathy Potter calls Fairytale Play Theatre “a superb storytelling tool that encourages children to express themselves, and it’s likely to draw repeat visits from children who love to create, imagine, and perform”. You can read the full review here.

If you haven’t yet discovered Fairytale Play Theatre, you can watch our trailer for the app below. It’s a FANTASTIC creative app for both the home and the classroom – if you’re a teacher or school librarian who’s interested in using the app in school, please do get in touch.

With beautiful artwork from our award-winning series of fairytale apps, The Three Little Pigs, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Snow White, and Goldilocks and Little Bear, The Complete Fairytale Play Theatre features over 60 characters to choose from, along with dozens of scene backgrounds and props to bring your story alive. And you can soundtrack your story with stunning music from our fairytales, along with your own voices and sound effects.

Create your own brand new stories, or re-tell our fairytales in your own words and voices!

The app boasts a hugely intuitive, user-friendly interface that’s perfect for young children – you can create individual scenes from scratch, save them, and build multiple scenes into a complete story. Multi-touch screens allow multiple users to create stories together – it’s a fantastic way of creating stories, encouraging imaginative play, and sharing a screen between adults and children.

The complete edition of Fairytale Play Theatre, with all of the content from all six fairytales, is available to download for $4.99/ £3.99 from the App Store here. And you can download a free edition of the app here – choose any one fairytale “pack” for free when you download the app, and get additional bundles of content for just 99¢/ 79p each.

Here’s a quick preview of the app:

Thank you, School Library Journal, for the great review!

Dzhangal: what remained in the Calais camp

Photograph © Gideon Mendel, reproduced with kind permission

I meant to write this before, but here we are.

On 31 December, The Guardian ran a piece in its magazine about Gideon Mendel’s photographic project based on the things left behind after the clearance of the Calais refugee camp. Gideon Mendel went to the Calais camp as a photographer and was faced with real hostility. As one refugee said to him, “You come here and you take our photographs and you tell us that it’s going to help us, but nothing changes. The only person it helps is you.” Mendel, himself the son of refugees, felt uneasy about photographing the refugees, but he did photograph what was left behind – shoes, clothes, toys, toothbrushes empty tear gas canisters remade into hanging plant pots… and children’s books.  Or burnt scraps of children’s picture books, at least.

There’s a photograph with images of scraps from We’re going on a Bear Hunt, from The Tiger that Came to Tea (something laden with obvious irony, given Judith Kerr’s own refugee history)… and from Nosy Crow’s Pip and Posy: The Scary Monster, illustrated by Axel Scheffler.

Of the burning, Mendel explains, “Fire was a recurring thing in the camp, first because there was no electricity, just candles, so a lot of things were burnt accidentally, and later people were torching things before the demolition [of the camp].”

I felt two very conflicting things looking at the image with the two Pip and Posy scraps in it (left middle row and right bottom row). On the one hand, I thought, children in the camp had presumably had books – and good books – shared with them, and that’s a positive thing. But of course, on the other hand, these books were burned and abandoned so no child was enjoying them now. I was also struck, too, by a worry about how meaningful our stories would be to children in the camp. In Pip and Posy: The Scary Monster, the worst thing that happens is that Posy is frightened, for a minute or two, when Pip appears in a monster costume. And at the end of the book they eat the cakes that Posy makes at the beginning of the book. The scrap (bottom right) with the ingredients for the cake was, for me, the most poignant of all: doing something as simple as baking a cake wasn’t something that those children would be able to do.

We are a commercial organisation, and we publish books that sell to an audience that can pay for them. We can’t publish books that reflect the experiences of those children. I know that. And, besides, we do what we can. We published Refuge in 2015, donating £5 for every hardback sold and then £1 for every paperback sold to WarChild for their work with refugees.

But this was a sobering image to come across on 31 December.

The pictures are disturbing and remarkable. An exhibition of them, Gideon Mendel: Dzhangal, runs at Autograph ABP Gallery, EC2 from today to 28 January, and they appear in a book, Dzhangal, published by Gost on 27 January.

 

The next Nosy Crow Reading Group is almost here – we’re discussing re-imagined classics

The Nosy Crow Reading Group will be back in just under a fortnight – we’ll be discussing two re-imagined classics, The Best Bear in All the World, by Kate Saunders, Brian Sibley, Paul Bright, and Jeanne Willis, and Mary Poppins: Up, up and Away, by Helene Druvert, and if you’d like to come along, there are just a couple of places remaining!

We’ll be meeting on Wednesday, January 18th at 6.30pm, here at the Nosy Crow offices – 10a Lant Street, London, SE1 1QR – for a discussion of the books (along with wine and crisps).

If you’d like to come along, just register for a place with the form below, or at this page – if the reading group becomes fully booked, you can add your name to our waiting list, and we’ll notify you if a place opens up.

You can order The Best Bear in All the World online here and Mary Poppins: Up, up and away online here.

We hope to see you there!

Looking back at 2016: our sixth year of publishing

In February 2016 we celebrated our fifth birthday with a party at Lumiere London

I write a blog post looking back at – and celebrating the successes of – each year that Nosy Crow has been in existence. Here’s last year’s, for example.

Pretty much each year, I acknowledge that writing it is an indulgence: it’s as much a kind of journal entry for me as it is written for anyone else who might stumble upon it. So thank you for indulging me again.

2016 was, in so many ways, a grim old year (from our point of view at least) – endless stories of conflict and terrorism, the Brexit vote, Zika, Trump and the deaths of iconic writers and performers. We cared about these. In the case of the Brexit vote, we wrote about it.

But the truth is that, for Nosy Crow, 2016 was our best year so far.

In our 6th year of publishing, our sales were £9 million – an increase of 76% on the previous year, and another year of growth. Our UK print sales to consumers, measured by Nielsen through the TCM (Total Consumer Market) were up 73%, which is, co-incidentally, a figure that is 10 times the size of the 7.3% increase in UK print sales to consumers (as reported by The Bookseller today). We ended the year the UK’s 13th biggest publisher of children’s books, and £1.30 in every £100 spent on children’s books in the UK was spent on a Nosy Crow book.

Not all of our sales come from the UK, though. By the end of 2015, we had sold rights in 28 languages. We have now sold right in 35 languages: Ola and Michela added Lithuanian, Slovenian, Romanian, Basque, Serbian, Faroese and Estonian rights sales to their tally. It’s also worth saying that 2016 was our best year ever for English language sales outside the UK, especially in Australia and New Zealand, where we work exclusively with Allen & Unwin, and in USA and Canada, where we have a particularly strong relationship with Candlewick Press, but where we’ve also worked with a number of other publishers. (If you are a foreign publisher or a scout, and would like regular updates about our rights activity, email rights@nosycrow.com to be added to our rights newsletter mailing list.)

The Nosy Crow stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair

Though we were very proud to have, in My Brother is a Superhero by David Solomons, our very first number one children’s book bestseller in 2016, no one single title drove this sales increase: we had successes across the list and we also grew our list. We published 95 original books (so that’s more than 95, if you include paperbacks and board books), up 27% on 2015.

The big areas of expansion for us were non-fiction and activity books: we published 17 in the year. Many of these were published as part of our partnership with The National Trust, which got off to a really terrific start in 2016. Not only were The National Trust a dream to work with, but the books we published jointly were brilliantly supported by supermarkets and bookshops. We had some rather innovative colouring book ideas, some of which were published with The National Trust and some of which we published simply as Nosy Crow books, and these sold very well not just in the UK but internationally. In 2016, we published our first book in partnership with The British Museum too – a tie-in to their Sunken Cities exhibition, and we have lots more to come from this partnership which launches properly later this year.

And in November we published Buster’s Christmas, a children’s picture book based on the 2016 John Lewis Christmas advert (and the fourth time that Nosy Crow has been chosen to produce the companion picture book).

Initial sketches by Sam Usher for the mum in Buster’s Christmas, our book for John Lewis to tie in with their Christmas advert

We were hugely proud to be named the Independent Publisher of the Year at the Independent Publishers Guild Awards – their highest accolade – beating off extraordinarily strong and long-established competition. We were also named the Independent Children’s Publisher of the Year. If you include Tom Bonnick’s Young Independent Publisher of the Year Award, we’ve won 11 Independent Publishers Guild Awards in 4 years. And in December, I won Women in Publishing’s Pandora Award (which is awarded for “significant and sustained contribution to the publishing industry”).

Kate with fellow Pandora Award shortlistees Justine Solomons and Alison Jones

Individual apps, books, authors and illustrators won awards too. Our Goldilocks and Little Bear app won the FutureBook Children’s Book of the Year Award, and we are hugely proud to say that this is the fifth year running that we have won this prize – every time that the prize has been awarded, in fact.  My Brother is a Superhero won both the Waterstones Children’s Book of the Year Award, and the inaugural The Bookseller Industry Awards Children’s Book of the Year Award. Pamela Butchart and Thomas Flintham, previous winners of the children’s fiction Blue Peter Book Award, won the Federation of Children’s Book Groups Children’s Book Award for My Headteacher is a Vampire Rat. Ross Collins won the inaugural Amnesty CILIP Honour for There’s A Bear on My Chair. Mouse’s First Night at Moonlight School by Simon Puttock and Ali Pye won the Scottish Children’s Book Award. Box, illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw and written by Min Flyte (AKA Camilla Reid), won the Sheffield Baby Book Award. A book written and/or edited by Camilla has won the prize, one of few that acknowledges the importance of books for the youngest readers, four out of the last five years. Congratulations to all of our prize winners – I could go on – and all of our commended and shortlisted authors and illustrators.

Though we lost a few of our great colleagues to competitors or, in one case, Australia, 2016 was a year of huge growth for us in terms of the number of crows: 11 people joined the team, and today there are 35 people working for Nosy Crow – not all of us full-time, though.

If you’re reading this, you’re on our website. In 2016, we had 262,816 unique users (up 5% on last year), and 942,866 page views. To date, 852,000 people have viewed Nosy Crow videos on YouTube and our views were up 9% compared to the previous year. We have 6,258 Facebook likes, up 16% on last year, and we have 40,195 Twitter followers, up 16% on last year.

Thanks to every single book-lover, mum, dad, teacher, and librarian who has bought one of our books or apps. Thanks to the redoubtable, knowledgeable, savvy booksellers who have stocked our books. Thanks to all the publishers from Beijing to Boston and from Sydney to Stockholm (and we visited all four cities to sell books this year, as it happens). Thanks to our publishing partners, The National Trust, The British Museum and John Lewis. Thanks to the literacy charities we’ve worked with and support. Thanks to the printers and other suppliers who made so much of what we do possible. Thanks, above all, to the authors and illustrators (and their agents) who continue to entrust us with their creativity, imagination and skill with every book we work on with them. You have all helped to make 2016 a rather stellar year for us, and we are very grateful to you.

Take a look inside Here Comes the Sun

This March we’re very pleased to be publishing Here Comes the Sun – a beautiful new picture written by Karl Newson and illustrated by Migy Blanco. And today you can take a very first look inside the book!

While all the other animals sleep through the night, Little Owl has work to do – she needs to blow the stars out one by one to make way for morning.

With beautiful artwork by Waterstones Children’s Book Prize-shortlisted Migy Blanco, and a wonderful rhyming text by Karl that rolls off the tongue, this reassuring picture book will have little ones ready for a peaceful night’s sleep.

Here’s a first look inside the book:

Here Comes the Sun will be in shops in March – you can find out more about the book here. And if you’d like to stay up to date with all of our book news, you can sign up to our books newsletter at this page, or with form below.

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There’s a week left to enter our Fairytale Play Theatre competition!

Last week we launched our biggest-ever app competition to celebrate the recent launch of our Fairytale Play Theatre app – our new free-to-download edition of The Complete Fairytale Play Theatre. We have apps, books and other Nosy Crow prizes to give away, and there’s just over a week left to enter – the competition closes on New Year’s Day!

We want to see the stories that you make using Fairytale Play Theatre – share your movies on Twitter to @NosyCrowApps with the #PlayTheatre hashtag, and we’ll award prizes to the best ones! The competition is open worldwide, and we’d love to see how you’ve used the app – whether it’s to re-tell our fairytales, or to use our characters to tell another well-known story… or even to make up a brand new story of your own!

To enter our competition and share the stories that you’ve created in the Fairytale Play Theatre App app, export your story as a movie, and then share it via the Photos app to Twitter (make sure you use the #PlayTheatre hashtag).

If you’re new to Fairytale Play Theatre, here’s our trailer for the app:

With beautiful artwork from our award-winning series of fairytale apps – The Three Little Pigs, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Snow White, and Goldilocks and Little Bear – Fairytale Play Theatre features over 60 characters to choose from, along with dozens of scene backgrounds and props to bring your story alive. You can soundtrack your story with stunning music from our fairytales, along with your own voices and sound effects.

The app boasts a hugely intuitive, user-friendly interface that’s perfect for young children – you can create individual scenes from scratch, save them, and build multiple scenes into a complete story. Multi-touch screens allow multiple users to create stories together – it’s a fantastic way of creating stories, encouraging imaginative play, and sharing a screen between adults and children – it’s great for storytelling activities in classrooms and at home. Set the stage, choose your characters, and create and record your own story!

Our Fairytale Play Theatre competition ends on January 1st – so get creating!

Take a look inside Edgar and the Sausage Inspector

Next March we’re absolutely delighted to be publishing Edgar and the Sausage Inspector – a brand new picture book by multi-award-winning author-illustrator Jan Fearnley, creator of Mr Wolf’s Pancakes and Little Robin Red Vest. And today you can take a first look inside the book!

Edgar and Edith are hungry, and it’s up to Edgar to bring home something tasty. But just when Edgar finds some delicious sausages, they are taken by The Inspector, a very important-looking rat with a big hat. Poor Edgar and Edith are left with nothing but dry crackers and pickles for dinner. That is, until one day, The Inspector is all fattened up, and Edgar does some inspecting of his own…

With a FANTASTICALLY funny text, beautiful artwork, and a stylish Paris setting (and an array of delectable food), this is a future classic in the making – witty, charming and with wonderful child appeal.

Here’s a look inside Edgar and the Sausage Inspector:

Edgar and the Sausage Inspector will be in shops in March – you can find out more about the book here. And if you’d like to stay up to date with all of our book news, you can sign up to our books newsletter at this page, or with the form below, and you’ll never miss a thing.

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The Nosy Crow Reading Group is back soon – we’re discussing re-imagined classics

The Nosy Crow Reading Group is having a Christmas break, but we’ll be back in just under a month – in January, we’ll be discussing two re-imagined classics: The Best Bear in All the World, by Kate Saunders, Brian Sibley, Paul Bright, and Jeanne Willis, and Mary Poppins: Up, up and Away, by Helene Druvert.

And if you’re interested in coming along, there are just a couple of places remaining!

We’ll be meeting on Wednesday, January 18th at 6.30pm, here at the Nosy Crow offices – 10a Lant Street, London, SE1 1QR – for a discussion of the book (along with wine and crisps).

If you’d like to come along, just register for a place with the form below, or at this page – if the reading group becomes fully booked, you can add your name to our waiting list, and we’ll notify you if a place opens up.

You can order The Best Bear in All the World online here and Mary Poppins: Up, up and away online here.

We hope to see you there!

New books for 2017 from Nosy Crow!

Christmas may be upon us, but we already have an eye on 2017 – and we’ve got some GREAT books coming out next year: incredible new novelty, picture books, fiction and non-fiction for children from ages 0 – 12. And here’s a look at all of the new Nosy Crow books that you’ll be able to find in shops from January!

We’re launching a FANTASTIC new novelty series in January – Felt Flaps, illustrated by Ingela Arrhenius. Vibrant board books with an animal hiding on every spread – just peek behind the bright felt flap!  With bold graphic artwork, these textile sensory reads are perfect for sharing with babies and toddlers and have a fantastic mirror reveal on the final page.

The first two books in the series are Where’s Mr Lion? and Where’s Mrs Ladybird? – here’s what to look for in shops:

Find out more about the book.

Find out more about the book.

We’re publishing a brand new cased board book edition of Littleland: All Year Round next month – the third title in the Littleland series, beautifully illustrated by Marion Billet.

Loosely following the months of the year, this colourful, busy book follows the little ones as they take part in seasonal activities, from visiting the spring lambs to paddling on the beach to cooking for an autumn feast. With a ‘Can you see?’ feature on every spread and a simple, conversational narrative, this is the perfect step on from board books. Here’s a look inside the book:

Find out more about the book.

And there’s also a brand new cased board book edition of I Love You, written by Clemency Pearce and illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw, publishing next month! In this beautiful board book, toddlers will love repeating the three special words that can help them if they’re feeling sad, grumpy or shy. With delightful illustrations of adorable animal families, this comforting story reassures children that their mummies and daddies will always be there for them with hugs and kisses through all life’s little challenges. Here’s what to look for in shops:

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Find out more about the book.

Dave’s Rock will be out next month – the highly anticipated follow-up to the hilarious and hugely acclaimed Dave’s Cave, written and illustrated by Frann Preston-Gannon.

In this funny and stylishly illustrated follow-up, two loveable cavemen endeavour to make their rocks the very best they can – inventing, in the process, something really rather remarkable. It’s another brilliantly funny, clever picture book – PERFECT for reading aloud. Here’s a look inside the book:

Find out more about the book.

We’re incredibly pleased to be publishing I’m In Charge! in January – a fantastic new picture book by Jeanne Willis and Jarvis, the amazing duo behind Poles Apart.

When Rhino finds a mango tree bursting with fruit, he isn’t about to share it with anyone – after all, he’s in charge round here! But it looks like things are about to change . . .

With brilliant illustrations from Jarvis, and a hilarious story, this brilliantly funny toddler-tantrum tale is all about being bossy and learning to listen to others – a romping story starring a little rhino who likes to make the rules! Here’s a look inside the book:

Find out more about the book.

The first paperback edition of Love…, by Emma Dodd, will be out next month – with flurries of foil throughout and featuring a tenderly-told rhyming text and heartwarming illustrations, this beautifully-designed picture book will soon become a bedtime favourite. Here’s a look inside the book:

Find out more about the book.

We’ll be publishing the next book in the fantastic Secret Rescuers series, written by Paula Harrison and illustrated by Sophy Williams – The Secret Rescuers: The Star Wolf. Set in a fantasy world populated by dragons, unicorns, and firebirds, this superbly-realised series for 7+ year olds is packed with magical adventures and baby creatures in peril.

In a magical kingdom far, far away it’s up to a small group of secret rescuers to keep magical creatures safe from the grasp of the evil Sir Fitzroy and to keep passing on the secret challenge to new girls.

The beautiful forest that Emma lives in is home to the star wolves. Each evening, the wolves’ magical song makes the stars appear in the sky. One autumn day, Emma rescues a star wolf pup from a trap. She begins a search for the little pup’s family. But mean Lord Hector is trying to catch all the star wolves – he hates magical creatures and has a horrible potion to prevent the star wolves from singing. Can Emma rescue the star wolf pack from Lord Hector before the stars stop shining at night? Here’s a look inside the book:

Find out more about the book.

And finally, Emerald Secret by Susan Moore will be out next month – the sequel to Crimson Poison, and the second book in the Nat Walker trilogy. This is another exciting, fast-paced and action-packed adventure – full of high-tech gadgetry and fun – and today, you can read an early preview of Emerald Secret for the very first time!

Nat is perched on the prow of the Junko as it glides up the Thames one cold, drizzly night. London is to be her home for the next year, and it looks to be a strange and uninviting place after the bright lights and fast pace of Hong Kong. Little does Nat know that she and her dragon-robot, Fizz, are at the start of their second adventure, one that will see them become lost in the high-tech world of one of her father’s games and seeking out a long-lost Chinese sword.

Secrets that have been kept hidden for decades will be revealed and Nat will learn some startling things about her family, her future and herself . . . Here’s a look inside the book:

Find out more about the book.

If you’d like to stay up to date with all of our new book news, you can sign up to our books newsletter at this page, or with the form below, and you’ll never miss a thing.

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