Nosy Crow's Blog, page 134
March 18, 2016
My Brother is a Superhero has won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize
Yesterday evening, as many of those of you who read this blog will know, David Solomons, modest and charming as always, accepted two awards: his funny, accessible, exciting book, My Brother is a Superhero, won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize for Younger Fiction… and then went on to win the overall Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. The prizes are for people at or very near the beginning of their writing or illustrating careers.
We had another reason to celebrate too: Cinderella’s Sister and the Big Bad Wolf by Lorraine Carey and Migy Blanco was shortlisted in the picture book category.
To make it to the shortlist is a remarkable achievement. Not including self-published books, an estimated 10,000 new books are published each year. It’s hard for a new voice to be heard, or a new illustration style to be seen, in such a crowd.
Relative to our size, Nosy Crow’s books have been remarkably well recognised in the shortlists over the past: we’ve had 6 titles shortlisted, which means (and Tom thinks I am absurd to have worked this out) we have over 8% of the shortlisted titles. And in 2014, Open Very Carefully won the picture book category.
That My Brother is a Superhero won the overall prize is a testament, first and foremost, of course, to the brilliance of David’s writing. Publishers talk, probably in quite an irritatingly undefined way, about the importance of “voice” in writing, and about the fact that, even if there are plot issues with a novel (and, by the way, there really weren’t in the case of My Brother is a Superhero), they can be fixed, but a “voice” that doesn’t work is altogether trickier, sometimes irredeemably so. And it was the voice – the warmth and the humour and the naturalness of it – that had us at hello when we first read the manuscript of My Brother is a Superhero. We fought hard for the book: we weren’t the only company to recognise a terrific new children’s book writer. Having persuaded David (and his agent) to take a punt on Nosy Crow, we were particularly determined to bring this book to the really wide audience we knew it had the potential to reach. With an inventive marketing campaign, including cinema sampling, a free game app and vox-pop videos of children talking about what they loved about the book, we gave the book the best possible start.
From the beginning, though, Waterstones were fantastically enthusiastic supporters of My Brother is a Superhero.
Florentyna Martin, Waterstones children’s buyer, said: “My Brother is a Superhero is that rare thing; a hugely funny book for young readers that is also rip-roaringly exciting. It is infused with the spirit of larger than life heroes and colourful comic book trivia that enthrals younger readers and delights superhero fans of all ages, yet at its heart is a touching relationship between siblings. Given the author’s background it’s no surprise it is hugely cinematic, but it is also full of wonderful writing and so brilliantly plotted that one never knows what to expect next.”
James Daunt, Waterstones managing director, said: “The quality of the books on the shortlists this year was exceptional, reflecting the vibrant health of the children’s book market. That our winners were all first books, and each from a flourishing independent publisher, reflects how blessed we are currently by the breadth of creative talent in this country.”
It is the job of a publisher to discover new talent and bring it to market, but it’s not always easy to persuade retailers to support you when you do it. As a new publisher, we publish a disproportionate number of new authors and illustrators, and Waterstones is always particularly open to the fresh and interesting things that we bring to them. To have a supportive, energetic, powerful, prestigious partner working with you in the launch of a debut talent is invaluable. We’re really grateful to the brilliant team at Waterstones HQ, James Daunt, Kate Skipper, Melissa Cox, Florentyna Martin, Gary Deane and Peter Saxton to name just a few of them and every Waterstones staff member who engages so enthusiastically with My Brother is a Superhero and with so many of Nosy Crow’s titles every day.
You can take a look inside My Brother is a Superhero below – and you can buy the book from Waterstones here.
Thank you, Waterstones, and congratulations, David!
David with his trophy for the overall prize and the younger fiction category
March 17, 2016
Bid for original, signed artwork by Axel Scheffler and help raise money for Doctors of the World
Earlier this month, Pip and Posy illustrator Axel Scheffler led a fantastic live-drawing and storytelling session at the National Trust Children’s Book Festival at Wray Castle. And today we’re very pleased to say that we’ll be auctioning some of the work that Axel produced on the day in aid of charity. There are four different pieces available to bid on, with all proceeds going to the urgent Doctors of the World Greece Appeal.
Here are the four pieces being auctioned:
Doctors of the World UK is part of the global Médecins du Monde network, which delivers over 350 projects in more than 80 countries through 3,000 volunteers. Their vision is of a world in which vulnerable people affected by war, natural disasters, disease, hunger, poverty or exclusion get the healthcare they need regardless of income or status. Their urgent Greece appeal will provide healthcare for thousands who need it. More than 12,000 refugees are stuck after being refused entry to Macedonia, with huge numbers arriving every day. Most are in cold, rain-sodden tents. Doctors of the World has volunteer doctors and nurses providing urgently needed medical care in clinics in Idomeni, Chios, Lesvos, Athens as well on the ferries travelling between these locations.
The auctions will run for 10 days, and will end next Sunday. So if you’ve always wanted to own a unique piece of artwork by Axel, now’s your chance! Please do bid generously – and good luck!
March 16, 2016
There’s a Bear on my Chair by Ross Collins has been shortlisted for the Greenaway medal
The shortlists for the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway awards have been announced today, and we’re incredibly proud that There’s a Bear on my Chair by Ross Collins has been shortlisted for the Greenaway Medal!
The Greenaway Medal is, along with the Carnegie prize, the UK’s oldest and most prestigious children’s book award. Established in 1955, for distinguished illustration in a book for children, and named after the popular nineteenth century artist known for her beautiful children’s illustrations and designs, the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal is awarded annually for an outstanding book in terms of illustration for children and young people.
It’s an incredible honour to be shortlistlisted – we are so thrilled for Ross’s incredible book.
There’s a Bear on my Chair is a joyously illustrated picture book – with a clever single rhyme echoing Dr Seuss, it’s perfect for sharing.
Here’s a look inside the book:
You can also buy beautiful, limited edition, signed and numbered giclee prints featuring artwork from There’s a Bear on My Chair exclusively from the Nosy Crow shop – here’s a look at the prints on offer:
The Greenaway winner will be announced at an awards ceremony in June. Congratulations, Ross – and good luck!
March 15, 2016
To Wee or Not to Wee
This coming April will see the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and we are marking the date with To Wee or Not to Wee: hilarious retellings of four of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays – Macbeth, Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, by the Blue Peter Award-winning Pamela Butchart and Thomas Flintham.
When Izzy (star of The Spy Who Loved School Dinners series) is asked to tell her friends some exciting stories, she thinks of Macbeth – there are battles, loads of gore, excellent witches and even walking trees! Soon her friends want more, so she moves on to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a man with a donkey’s head called Bottom!), Hamlet (who left that skull lying about?) and Romeo and Juliet (loads of people pretending to be dead) and now everyone wants to know more about the Bard!
Izzy’s version of Macbeth originally appeared on the BBC Radio series ‘Shakespeare Retold’ – and today, you can read this Macbeth story online, with this special excerpt taken from To Wee or Not to Wee:
The full book will be published in April – to find out more, you can sign up to our newsletter here, or with the form below.
Brilliantly illustrated by Thomas Flintham, this is modern storytelling at its finest. Shakespeare would have loved it…
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March 14, 2016
It Takes a Room Full of People to Make a Book – a guest post by Penny Dale
A busy day in the Nosy Crow office
Today’s blog post is by Penny Dale, creator of the Dinosaur picture book series, on the collaborative nature of publishing.
For a while I have wanted to write something about the practice of publishing from an author’s point of view and how the process brings so many skills together, skills that in my view are not celebrated enough, but are vitally useful to an author. So when the great news of Nosy Crow’s Children’s Publisher of the Year, and Independent Publisher of the Year, IPA awards came out last week I thought that it would be a good moment to do so.
For the last five years I have been published by Nosy Crow. I have watched them grow from the very beginning, and it’s been lovely to see how they have developed and flourished. They have opened out the process of publishing and shared and explained and demystified from the start, so there’s a feeling of friendliness and accessibility about the company.
I think this counters, in a refreshing way, what I have often suspected is a tendency, on the part of people writing about books, to concentrate almost exclusively on the subject matter of the books and the biographical associations relating to the author, rather than exploring practically how the work is produced, and how an idea turns into a book…and the fact that there are many people involved along the way other than the author and illustrator.
Nosy Crow have made a priority of openness via these blogs, of speaking about the process of publishing, how they work and how writers and illustrators work, as well as at actual events like their masterclasses, conferences and Illustrator Salons.
Just look through the Nosy Crow blog archives to see. I particularly like the ‘Where I work’ series, with pictures of desks and studios, like this by Elys Dolan.
Even more unusual is to hear about how writers work with editors and designers. When I was working on my first picture book at Walker Books, I was amazed – because it was my first experience of it – to have input from a brilliant editor and designer, who helped with shaping text and story pacing… getting words and pictures to work together without over explaining or adding too much complication. I still need reining in on that front, as I tend to see a book like an epic film and have to remember to keep things as simple as possible. It’s an ongoing balancing act between achieving clarity and straightforward storytelling while including the sort of detail children appreciate, detail that I loved as a child. Being able to work alongside editorial and design experience and expertise is one of the great pleasures of being published. This continues to be so today with the series of dinosaur books for Nosy Crow.
When an idea for a book emerges, the first text drafts and thumbnail sketches are the starting point, followed by weeks of sending scans of drawings and text tweaks back and forth to my editor and designer, as the content of the book takes shape. This is often the most interesting and exciting part. Often there’s an element of a story that resists a solution, sometimes the right word for a tricky bit is found just before the book goes off to the repro house or even to the printer. Editor and designer are the key people involved throughout the process. My editor Camilla has an incredibly visual mind as well as being brilliant at zoning in on apposite phrasing. Designers adapt and enhance and contribute all the time during the rough and artwork stages, and often add or see something that I’ve missed. Others contribute too. My agent Caroline is excellent at thinning and selecting from all sorts of early ideas that I run past her. She has known me for ages, and can deftly steer me away from over-elaborate or convoluted waters with just a mild, “Might that be a little complicated?”
Practical help also comes from nearer home. My husband does scanning and photoshop work on the artwork and sketches, as well as making the occasional model for me to draw from, like this for my next book, Dinosaur Pirate!
My grandson, now 7, is an all round vehicle and dinosaur expert and consultant. Here he is adding suggestions to the early roughs for Dinosaur Pirate! He thought the ‘baddy’ pirate’s captain in the story should be a Spinosaurus, that they should have Pterodactyl air support and a shark escort. All these were excellent ideas and became incorporated into the finished book.
So although our current media and culture seem to favour the romantic idea of the inspired and driven, passionately committed to their muse, individualistic and possibly solitary writer or artist, most I know are far more involved team players than this notion suggests. I have also learned and received great encouragement, and confidence from people involved in sales and marketing, publicity, and production, hearing from people in publishing who really know what they’re talking about. And what I am sure of, is that for established authors and illustrators, and particularly for those starting out, this openness and enthusiasm about the whole business of publishing is an entirely good thing.
Thank you, Penny! You can take a look inside the latest book in Penny’s dinosaur series, Dinosaur Rocket!, below – the fifth fantastic book in the series, Dinosaur Pirates, will be published later this year.
If you’d like to stay up to date with all of our book news (and want to read more great pieces like this one by Penny), you can sign up to our books newsletter here, or with the form below.
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March 11, 2016
Nosy Crow is shortlisted for four British Bookseller Industry Awards
We are incredibly happy – and somewhat shellshocked! – that, just a week after winning two IPG Independent Publishing Awards, Nosy Crow has been shortlisted for FOUR British Bookseller Industry Awards.
We’re shortlisted in the Children’s Publisher of the Year category, against an incredibly strong shortlist (of much bigger, and older, publishing houses): Bloomsbury Publishing, DK, HarperCollins Children’s Books, Macmillan Children’s Books, Penguin Random House Children’s, Scholastic Children’s Books, and Usborne Publishing.
We’re also shortlisted for Independent Publisher of the Year, sponsored by Firsty Group, against another very impressive shortlist of children’s and adult publishers: Andersen Press, Faber & Faber, Head of Zeus, Laurence King Publishing, Michael O’Mara Books, Oneworld, and Pavilion Books.
We’re very proud of Ola Gotkowska, Nosy Crow’s Rights Manager (recently shortlisted for the IPG Young Independent Publisher of the Year award), who is recognised in the Rights Professional of the Year category, sponsored by Frankfurt Book Fair – up against Lisa Baker (Faber & Faber), Kate Cooper (Curtis Brown), Kate Hibbert (Little, Brown), Andrew Sharp (Hachette Children’s Group), Mary Thompson (HarperCollins), and Michele Young (Pan Macmillan).
And finally, we are thrilled that My Brother is a Superhero by David Solomons has been shortlisted for the inaugural Children’s Book of the Year award – up against heavy-hitters David Walliams and Tony Ross (for Grandpa’s Great Escape), J. K. Rowling and Jim Field (for the illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone), Judith Kerr (for Mog’s Christmas Calamity), Terry Pratchett (for The Shepherd’s Crown), Frances Hardinge (for The Lie Tree), Matt Haig and Chris Mould (for A Boy Called Christmas), and Joe Sugg, Matt Whyman, and Amrit Birdi (for Codename: Evie).
You can read the full list of categories and nominees here.
Congratulations to everyone who’s been shortlisted!
March 10, 2016
A brand new Pip and Posy book for 2016 – take a look inside Pip and Posy: The New Friend
We have some VERY exciting news to share today: we are enormously, enormously happy to say that this Spring, we’ll be publishing Pip and Posy: The New Friend – a brand new Pip and Posy story by Axel Scheffler. Finished copies have just arrived in the office, and they look absolutely BEAUTIFUL – and today you can take a look inside the book for the first time!
In the seventh book in the series, Pip and Posy are having a lovely day at the seaside, but when Posy has a nap, Pip makes friends with a boy called Zac. Zac is very cool, and to her dismay, when Posy wakes up, she finds that Pip is more interested in playing with Zac than with her…
The New Friend has all of the wonderful qualities that have made the Pip and Posy series so beloved: a funny and dramatic story, it is perfectly pitched and brilliantly-observed on the highs and lows of pre-school life – and, of course, beautifully illustrated by Axel.
Here’s a look inside The New Friend:
Pip and Posy: The New Friend will be out in May – and if you’d like to stay up-to-date with all of our book news, you can sign up to our books newsletter below:
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March 9, 2016
An update on our open call for children’s fiction submissions from debut BAME writers
Last December I wrote on this blog that I was looking for children’s fiction submissions from debut BAME writers.
Here’s part of what I said at the time:
“I think that it’s incredibly important that our industry represents a wide range of voices, not only so that children from every background can recognise their own lives and experiences in the books that they read, but also simply to enrich the body of children’s literature that we publish, by moving out of a monoculture and embracing a wider world of ideas.
It’s an area in which we could definitely do better, which is why today I’m posting this open call for children’s fiction submissions (so, anything in the 5 – 12 age range, but I’d be especially interested in 9 – 12, aka “middle grade”) from BAME writers. I’m very happy to receive submissions from agented and un-agented authors – and although I’d particularly like to see children’s fiction submissions from debut writers, if you’ve already been published, I’d still be very pleased to hear from you!”
I didn’t give a closing date for this call for submissions (and I don’t intend to): I don’t think that the problem of a lack of representation in children’s books is one that could be solved in a four-week window, and I wanted this to be an ongoing, open-ended project. But I did think it might be interesting (to some people, at least) to give an update on what’s happened since the initial call for submissions, and what’s happening next.
Since the first blogpost, I’ve received over 250 submissions from BAME authors from all sorts of backgrounds – and while working my way through that many manuscripts felt like a slightly overwhelming task at times, it was one I hugely enjoyed: it was a real privilege to hear from so many people who trusted us with with their ideas.
And while I haven’t found anything yet that I felt was quite right for the Nosy Crow list, I have been hugely impressed by the overall standard of the submissions that I’ve received – and of those 250-ish submissions, I’ve requested full manuscripts for five. Those figures may seem dispiriting to an aspiring author, but actually, I’d say that they’re very good, and certainly better-than-average, odds: we receive several thousand submissions every year through our general submission policy (what’s known as the slush pile), and in Nosy Crow’s five years of publishing (and six years of existence), we’ve found a grand total of three fiction authors that way… so to request a full manuscript for one submission in fifty actually felt very positive to me!
And I’m absolutely not giving up on finding that special text through this project: the call for submissions from BAME debut authors is still very much open.
So, to reiterate, I’m looking for children’s fiction (not picture books) – from BAME authors. I can’t consider texts that have already been published, and although I’m particularly interested in seeing texts from debut authors, if you have already been published, I’d still be happy to hear from you. You can be agented or un-agented. I’ll consider writing in any genre.
If you’d like to submit something, you can email me at tom@nosycrow.com – ideally with a synopsis and the first three chapters of your manuscript. I’ll reply to everyone who submits something, but it might take a week or so before you hear from me, so please don’t be discouraged if it takes a while!
If you have any questions, please do send me a message. And if you’ve written something, please send it in!
March 8, 2016
A look inside our incredible new colouring book format
This month we are incredibly proud to publish the first title in an INCREDIBLE new colouring book format – The Colouring Book of Cards and Envelopes: Nature. And to showcase this fantastically innovative book, we’ve made a beautiful, stop-motion animation trailer!
Each book in the series is full of beautifully-designed cards and envelopes to tear out and colour. The twenty four gorgeous designs in The Colouring Book of Cards and Envelopes: Nature include woodland animals, flowers, butterflies and birds. and are perfect for all ages to decorate and send to family and friends. Take inspiration from nature, or get experimental – try unusual colours and different materials to make each card truly unique! With enough blank space inside for a message, envelopes to customise and cute stickers to seal your card – this is the complete creative package!
You can watch the stop-motion trailer for The Colouring Book of Cards and Envelopes: Nature at the top of this post, or here.
And if you’d like to stay up-to-date with other books in the series, you can sign up to our books newsletter below:
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March 7, 2016
Take a first look inside The Invincibles: The Piglet Pickle – a brand new series from Caryl Hart and Sarah Warburton
Next month, we are INCREDIBLY pleased to launch The Invincibles, a brand new, two-colour illustrated fiction series by Caryl Hart and Sarah Warburton, the incredible author-illustrator duo behind the Princess and the… picture books. The series will begin with The Invincibles: The Piglet Pickle – finished copies have just arrived in the office, and today you can take a look inside for the first time.
In this first story, troublesome twosome Nell and Freddie go on a school trip to a farm, where they pet the animals and learn about how they live, and Freddie smuggles a piglet out in his backpack. Nell keeps it in her bedroom, gives it a bath and involves it in bringing a local crime wave to an end (with the help of her hilariously teenaged big brother, Lucas). The they all go home for tea!
Gorgeously illustrated throughout, hilarious, and true to life (just about), these books have the perfect amount of detail and adventure to keep kids coming back to read and read again.
Here’s a look inside The Invincibles: Piglet Pickle:
And if you’d like to hear all about how The Piglet Pickle was illustrated, and get a signed copy of the book, you’re in luck! Sarah Warburton will be the special guest at the next Nosy Crow Illustrator Salon, taking place on April 18 at The Book Club in London – you can find out more and book tickets here.
The Piglet Pickle will be out in April – and if you’d like to stay up-to-date with all of our book news, you can sign up to our books newsletter below:
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