Nosy Crow's Blog, page 131

My Brother is a Superhero has been shortlisted for the Branford Boase award!

The shortlist for the Branford Boase award has just been announced, and we are absolutely thrilled to see that it includes My Brother is a Superhero, the debut children’s novel by David Solomons!

The Branford Boase award is given annually to to reward the most promising new writers and their editors, as well as to reward excellence in writing and in publishing. It’s the only award that recognises a book’s editor in this way, and alongside David Solomons, My Brother is a Superhero’s editor, Kirsty Stansfield, is also shortlisted.

We are INCREDIBLY pleased and proud for David, Kirsty, and the book – My Brother is a Superhero is an absolutely amazing story: super-exciting, laugh-out-loud funny, and with enough heart to fill an entire galaxy.

If you’ve not discovered this fantastic story yet, here’s a look inside the book:

You can buy My Brother is a Superhero directly from us here. The Branford Boase winner will be announced in July – congratulations, David and Kirsty, and good luck!

There’s a week left to apply for a Designer job at Nosy Crow

We recently announced that we’re looking for a Designer to join our team at Nosy Crow – and there’s just under a week left to apply.

We want to find someone hard-working, creative, clever and good at communicating, who’s got great taste in illustration and design (or, at least, taste that matches and complements ours!) and a strong interest in and understanding of visual storytelling of all kinds. They also need to be willing to muck in with goodwill: the team is phenomenally busy.

This is a full-time role and the successful applicant will be based in our crowded but lively office in Borough (near London Bridge, Borough and Southwark tube stations, and 15 minutes’ walk from Waterloo).

Candidates will have a minimum of 3 years’ experience in graphic design, probably exclusively in children’s publishing. Proficiency in Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator programmes, excellent proven book design and typographic skills, and a love of children’s book illustration are essential, along with good written and spoken communication skills, and the ability to work to a deadline.

The successful candidate will design and manage full-colour illustrated book projects (mainly picture books and the exciting new non-fiction that we are working on for our partnerships with the  National Trust and The British Museum) from initial layouts all the way through to production, supporting the illustrator or the author/illustrator throughout the creative process.

The designer will report to the Head of Design but will work closely with other members of the Nosy Crow team, particularly the editorial staff, to produce child-focused, parent-friendly, high-quality books.

If you think this sounds like you, and you would like to apply for the role, please send a CV and application letter, along with digital samples of your design work, to Stephanie Amster via email (stephanie@nosycrow.com) by midnight on 9 May 2016. If you have a bit more or a bit less experience than we are asking for (but a minimum of a year of hands-on illustrated children’s book design experience) then do still apply: it’s more important, in the end, for you to be the right fit than that you have exactly the right level of experience, and we can be flexible about the role level for the right person.

The are just a couple of days left to apply for a Digital Publishing and Marketing Assistant job at Nosy Crow

There are just a couple of days left to apply for a Digital Publishing and Marketing Assistant role at Nosy Crow. This would be a fantastic first job in publishing – and the closing date for applications is this Sunday.

This is an incredible opportunity for a hardworking, bright individual with the right to live and work in the UK to join our team on a full-time basis, working in our London office near London Bridge.

The Digital Publishing and Marketing Assistant will work across the company, but primarily with the Business Development Manager and Commissioning Editor on Nosy Crow’s award-winning digital publishing, audio publishing, digital marketing, and events programmes. While the job is predominantly an administrative role, Nosy Crow is a fast-growing company with opportunities for career development.

The ideal candidate is likely to be educated to degree level, and, in addition…

Will be able to demonstrate a strong interest in children’s books, and in digital publishing and marketing
Will be highly organised (and willing to do a lot of admin stuff), with great time management skills, and excellent attention to detail
Will have perfect written and spoken communication skills in English
Will have strong digital skills, an interest in various digital and social media channels, and be comfortable using content management systems
Will be a self-starter with lots of initiative who is ready to ‘muck in’
Will be able to produce great copy, and will have some experience at writing – a blog, perhaps, or a student newspaper

 

You can read the full job description for the position here.

To apply, please send Tom Bonnick your CV, accompanied by an application letter, as soon as possible via email (tom at nosycrow dot com).

The closing date for applications is Sunday May 1st at midnight (UK time).

Win an exclusive proof copy of My Gym Teacher is an Alien Overlord, the follow up to the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize-winning My Brother is a Superhero

This July we’ll be publishing My Gym Teacher is an Alien Overlord by David Solomons – the highly-anticipated sequel to the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize winning My Brother is a Superhero.

It’s another hilarious, exciting adventure – funny, full of heart, and with an absolutely racing plot. It won’t be available in shops for several months – but today, you can win an exclusive proof copy of the book!

To win one of three proof copies of My Gym Teacher is an Alien Overlord, just sign up to our books newsletter at this page or with the form below, and then send an email to tom at nosycrow dot com with My Gym Teacher is an Alien Overlord in the subject heading. The competition is open to residents of the UK and Ireland, and we’ll contact the winners next week.

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Here’s a look inside My Gym Teacher is an Alien Overlord:

Good luck!

Take a look inside Don’t Wake Up Tiger, the beautiful new picture book from Britta Teckentrup

Next month we are enormously pleased to be publishing Don’t Wake Up Tiger!, the absolutely beautiful new picture book from Get Out Of My Bath! illustrator Britta Teckentrup – and today you can take a look inside for the first time.

Tiger is fast asleep, but – oh dear! – she’s completely in the way. Just how will the animals get past without waking her up? Luckily, Frog has an excellent idea – he holds his balloon and floats right over sleeping Tiger! Fox is next, followed by Tortoise, Mouse and Stork – but it will be tricky for them all to get past without Tiger stirring…

This is an absolutely stunning, wonderfully interactive picture book – with a charming text, stylish art, and bright, shiny spot UV balloons throughout, its perfect for the very young.

Here’s a look inside Don’t Wake Up Tiger:

Don’t Wake Up Tiger! will be available in shops in May – 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:

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World Penguin Day

Today – April 25th – is World Penguin Day (not to be confused with Penguin Awareness Day, which takes place annually on January 20th)… and what better way could there be to mark the occasion than with our non-fiction story app, Rounds: Parker Penguin?

This highly-acclaimed, award-winning app is the second in our fantastic Rounds series, and just like the first one, Rounds: Franklin Frog, it combines a charming and accessible story with a bold, graphic illustrative style (using only circles and components of circles), some hugely innovative interactivity, animation, voicework and original music throughout, and LOTS of fun facts – perfect for both home and the classroom.

You can help Parker do all the things that penguins do best – waddle, slide, swim, hunt, march, dance, protect their eggs, help a chick to hatch and shed its down – and then start all over again with Percy! Along the way, there’s lots to find out about penguins and the Antarctic – did you know that penguins can dive over 500 metres underwater? Or that they can hold their breath for 20 minutes when they are hunting?

The app is the winner of a 2013 FutureBook Innovation Award and was named as one of USA Today’s top 10 apps for kids for 2012.

You can watch a preview of the app at the top of this post – and here’s a free, downloadable penguin fact sheet to accompany the app:

Happy Penguin Awareness Day – we hope you have fun with Parker!

There’s just over a week left to apply for a Digital Publishing and Marketing Assistant job at Nosy Crow

We recently announced that we’re looking for a Digital Publishing and Marketing Assistant to join our team at Nosy Crow. This would be a fantastic first job in publishing – and there’s just over a week left to apply.

This is an incredible opportunity for a hardworking, bright individual with the right to live and work in the UK to join our team on a full-time basis, working in our London office near London Bridge.

The Digital Publishing and Marketing Assistant will work across the company, but primarily with the Business Development Manager and Commissioning Editor on Nosy Crow’s award-winning digital publishing, audio publishing, digital marketing, and events programmes. While the job is predominantly an administrative role, Nosy Crow is a fast-growing company with opportunities for career development.

The ideal candidate is likely to be educated to degree level, and, in addition…

Will be able to demonstrate a strong interest in children’s books, and in digital publishing and marketing
Will be highly organised (and willing to do a lot of admin stuff), with great time management skills, and excellent attention to detail
Will have perfect written and spoken communication skills in English
Will have strong digital skills, an interest in various digital and social media channels, and be comfortable using content management systems
Will be a self-starter with lots of initiative who is ready to ‘muck in’
Will be able to produce great copy, and will have some experience at writing – a blog, perhaps, or a student newspaper

 

You can read the full job description for the position here.

To apply, please send Tom Bonnick your CV, accompanied by an application letter, as soon as possible via email (tom at nosycrow dot com).

The closing date for applications is Sunday May 1st at midnight (UK time).

 

 

The Nosy Crow Reading Group verdict on Little Bits of Sky by S. E. Durrant

On Tuesday, the Nosy Crow Book Group (20 of us – four of us part of Nosy Crow) met in Nosy Crow’s meeting room to talk about debut novelist S. E. Durrant’s first book, Little Bits of Sky, which publishes on 5 May.

It’s always a nerve-racking thing to do, being party to a discussion about a Nosy Crow book, and we don’t do it often – maybe three or four times in total in the nearly three years we’ve been running the group. The book’s editor, Kirsty Stansfield, couldn’t quite face being there, but the rest of us were bolder. The challenge is that we are so invested in any book that we are publishing that it’s ridiculously hard not to rush to its defence at the merest whisper of criticism.

I think we needn’t have worried about Little Bits of Sky. Of course, as the hosts of the Book Group, we know that people are maybe going to pull their punches a bit, but the feeling was universally positive.

Before I go further, though, I should say that this blog post contains plot spoilers, so if you think you’ll want to read Little Bits of Sky, and like to keep surprise an element of your reading, look away now.

As I say, all of the group really liked the book, and many of us said they “loved it” and spoke of the feeling of warmth it had given them. They spoke of how accessible it was (an “effortless” read), and of how they’d read it in one or two sittings. They talked of how much they’d liked the child characters, central and peripheral, and how important to their enjoyment of the book the “honesty and simplicity” of Ira’s voice had been. The authenticity of the voice was commented on by several people, one of whom currently works with children in care, and one of whom asked if it was the author’s own story (it isn’t).

People picked out moments they had particularly loved, or that had particularly moved them – the moment when Ira gets a key-ring in a Christmas cracker while she is in residential care, and says she will keep it until she has a home of her own, or the moment when Ira says her favourite meal is fish and chips, but she hasn’t had fish and chips yet, so it’s her favourite for the future. Several people spoke of “wet eyes” and lumps in their throat (and I must confess that I am sitting writing this with tears dripping onto the desk as I am looking for various references).

We talked about the fact that this was much more voice-driven than narrative-driven: this is an episodic book with, as one reader described it “snippets of a world and glimpses of the people who inhabit that world” and another described as “simple, powerful sketches”, in which not a huge amount happens. But the very lack of a clear narrative shape was what made many of us feel the book felt authentic.

There was real debate about the value of the introduction and the epilogue. These are contemporary bookends to a story that is set in the eighties and nineties, told from the perspective of Ira as an adult. Some readers felt that they weren’t necessary, that they offered too much sense of resolution or that they were too separate from the rest of the book. Others really liked the framing device and the perspective it gave on the story. We talked about tense and about the construct of the diary – in the introduction, the adult Ira says she has “reconstructed” the story from the diaries she kept as a child. We talked about the importance of the historical setting. Some of us felt that the poll tax riots were rather obscure and recent to have as a central part of the story, but one of the teachers in the group commented that we shouldn’t assume that children have any more sense of, say, the Second World War, than they would have of the poll tax riots: it’s all history, all before they were alive, and all equally opaque. We all recognised the importance of the events at the poll tax riots as a gear-changing mechanism in the book: they precipitate the key event of the book.

We talked about the characterisation of the adults. A couple of us felt that Mrs Clanks was too cartoonish, but others felt that she was believable and very credibly seen though a child’s less nuanced eyes. A conversation about how Hortense and Silas were portrayed led to an interesting conversation about race and the book. We never know what Ira and Zac look like, and this was something that the author was keen to keep unstated. Generally, we liked the “Everyman” quality that this gave the narrative, but one reader felt that, if Ira and Zac had been, for example, black or mixed-race, this would have impacted in multiple ways on their lives and it wasn’t right to suggest that race wasn’t of enough importance for it to be clear.

We talked about reading this as an adult – and many of us talked about the way that we had felt “grown-up” reading it, rather than trying to read it as we think a child would read it. A couple of us spoke about how it made us feel protective, or even made us want to adopt or foster (“It made me wish I had a house in the country so I could be like Martha.”). We agreed, though, that though this book does have strong adult appeal, it’s not to the exclusion of child appeal. It has the same sort of attraction that other books about children in difficult situations have to readers who don’t, perhaps, themselves face such difficult situations – I’ve called this “pain by proxy”: children can experience an intensity of emotion their own lives don’t afford. It’s the driver behind the appeal of Tracey Beaker, Wonder, Goodnight Mr Tom and Carrie’s War, all of which, together with Daddy Long-Legs, readers said Little Bits of Sky reminded them.

This is a book that we love, and we were hugely relieved that it had weathered its first outing into the real world of readers so well.

If you weren’t at our reading group, you can take a look inside Little Bits of Sky below – and if you’d like to join us at a future reading group event, email tom@nosycrow.com and we’ll add you to our reading group mailing list.

Come to the next Nosy Crow Reading Group – we’re discussing Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo

Would you like to come along to the next Nosy Crow Reading Group?

In May we’ll be discussing Raymie Nightingale, the new book by two-time Newbery Medal-winner Kate DiCamillo. Kirkus gave the book a starred review, writing “Once again, DiCamillo demonstrates the power of simple words in a beautiful and wise tale”, and Booklist wrote, “As in her previous award-winning books, DiCamillo once again shows that life’s underlying sadnesses can also be studded with hope and humor, and does it in a way so true that children will understand it in their bones. And that’s why she’s Kate the Great.”

We’ll be meeting on Tuesday, May 24 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.

You can order Raymie Nightingale online from Waterstones here. You can read a preview of the book here – and here’s an interesting interview with DiCamillo about the book for NPR (you can listen to it below, or at this page):

We’ll post some discussion points for the book a little closer to the date – we hope you can join us!

Come and work for Nosy Crow: we’re looking for a designer to join our team

We are recruiting another designer as our list expands:

We want to find someone hard-working, creative, clever and good at communicating, who’s got great taste in illustration and design (or, at least, taste that matches and complements ours!) and a strong interest in and understanding of visual storytelling of all kinds. They also need to be willing to muck in with goodwill: the team is phenomenally busy.

This is a full-time role and the successful applicant will be based in our crowded but lively office in Borough (near London Bridge, Borough and Southwark tube stations, and 15 minutes’ walk from Waterloo).

Candidates will have a minimum of 3 years’ experience in graphic design, probably exclusively in children’s publishing. Proficiency in Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator programmes, excellent proven book design and typographic skills, and a love of children’s book illustration are essential, along with good written and spoken communication skills, and the ability to work to a deadline.

The successful candidate will design and manage full-colour illustrated book projects (mainly picture books and the exciting new non-fiction that we are working on for our partnerships with the  National Trust and The British Museum) from initial layouts all the way through to production, supporting the illustrator or the author/illustrator throughout the creative process.

The designer will report to the Head of Design but will work closely with other members of the Nosy Crow team, particularly the editorial staff, to produce child-focused, parent-friendly, high-quality books.

If you think this sounds like you, and you would like to apply for the role, please send a CV and application letter, along with digital samples of your design work, to Stephanie Amster via email (stephanie@nosycrow.com) by midnight on 9 May 2016. If you have a bit more or a bit less experience than we are asking for (but a minimum of a year of hands-on illustrated children’s book design experience) then do still apply: it’s more important, in the end, for you to be the right fit than that you have exactly the right level of experience, and we can be flexible about the role level for the right person.