Nosy Crow's Blog, page 165

Surviving on the App Store

It is with some sadness that I read this week that Kirkus Reviews will no longer be featuring any book apps – because they feel that there’s not enough digital innovation taking place any more:

“In an environment in which a $2.99 – $3.99 price point is the norm, it’s hard to make both a profit and a great interactive book at the same time”.

And while we wouldn’t entirely agree with this idea ourselves, you can see their point. The empowering, democratic principles on which the App Store is built – allowing almost anyone to create and distribute their own content – mean that, like other digital self-publishing platforms that do not face the same constraints, and curatorial necessities, of physical shops, it is awash with almost identical products for each and every category, whether it is clones of Flappy Birds or learn to read ABC apps. App templates for these are widely available and in some cases a ‘new’ app can be submitted to Apple in a matter of minutes. Some weeks there are dozens of new ABC apps alone, all providing pretty much the same interactivity as the old ones. As Steve Jobs said “We don’t need any more fart apps”.

At Nosy Crow we have always strived to produce the best app we can, not just another clone! Come February, our The Three Little Pigs app will be four years old, yet it still stands out amongst all the Three Little Pig based apps as one of the best. Kirkus says:

“The very best digital narratives are hand-coded, tailoring interactivity to each individual story.”

This is what I joined Nosy Crow to do, plain and simple. This is what the whole apps team at Nosy Crow does on a daily basis. We have the luxury of really enjoying the work we do and our passion to produce the best app we can means doing it the hard way.

When we choose which app to make next, we look for the opportunities for new types of fun interactivity it might offer up; Blowing on the device to help the wolf destroy the straw house, guiding the spider through the web to Little Red Riding Hood’s basket, jumping Jack back and forth as he escapes the reach of the angry giant on the beanstalk. These all take time to design, illustrate, animate, code and compose, which is why our fairy tale apps are all $4.99. You’ve probably never noticed how the music blends seamlessly in our fairy tale apps as you interact with it. The most beautiful soundtracks go unnoticed.

We cannot compete in the race to the bottom, but we do not want to. The race to the bottom would kill off the passion we have for our jobs. Four years ago my father asked how we would sell our Three Little Pigs app, when a quick search of the App Store showed there were already at least 30 apps with similar names. I already knew my response “People won’t search for ‘Three Little Pigs’, they’ll be searching for ‘Nosy Crow’”.

So thank you very much, Kirkus, for all of your thoughtful reviews of our apps over the years – we’re very sorry to see you go. And thank you, too, to all of the journalists around the world who continue to review book apps – we’re more grateful than ever before for what you do!

You can help keep innovation alive: Tell your friends about the apps your children enjoy. Rate or review them on the App Store. Share a link to one of our preview movies. Spread the two magical words ‘Nosy Crow’.

Join in with next week's Nosy Crow Reading Group

The first Nosy Crow Reading Group of 2015 is taking place next week – and we’d love for you to join in!

We’ll be meeting to discuss the The Imaginary, written by A.F. Harrold and illustrated by Emily Gravett, which The Guardian described as “beautiful and strange […] about imagination, love, loss, new starts and old endings”.

As usual, we’ve prepared a few questions in advance to get everyone thinking – here’s some of what we might be talking about:

1. How well do you think the illustrations in The Imaginary interact with the text?

2. Do you think this is a book that places ideas above “plot”? What is it really about?

3. Who do you think The Imaginary is for? Is this a book whose ideas rely on an adult perspective? How do you think children and parents will read it differently?

We’ll be meeting on Tuesday, January 20 at 6.30pm, here at the Nosy Crow offices – 10a Lant Street, London, SE1 1QR. There are still some places if you’d like to join us – if so, send an email to tom at nosycrow dot com. And if you can’t make it here, but would still like to take part, please do join in online, either on Twitter with the #NCGKids hashtag, or in the comments section of this post.

We hope you can join us!

UK children's book sales increased in value in 2014

Police outside Waterstones Piccadilly controlling crowds of fans keen to have The Pointless Book signed by Alfie Deyes, one of the children’s book hits of the year

Good news, people!

The Bookseller reports on Nielsen Total Consumer Market figures that show the UK children’s print book market up by 9.1% on 2013, after a really strong Christmas built on strong sales all year. This means that the market for children’s print books sold from bookshops is £336.5 million pounds, which is both the highest value for the children’s books market since records began, and means that it’s now bigger than the market for adult fiction. It’s worth bearing in mind that the biggest title of the year, John Green’s The Fault in our Stars is classified by its publisher, Penguin, as adult fiction.

Overall print book sales declined marginally by 1.3% in 2014 compared to 2013 – so children’s print book sales helped to buoy up the market significantly, and, though this is the seventh consecutive year of falling sales, overall sales decreased less than they had in 2013 (6.5% down on 2012), 2012 (4.7% down on 2011) and 2011 (7.8% down on 2010).

If you count The Fault in our Stars as a children’s books (and, frankly, I think we should), then seven of the year’s ten print bestsellers by volume were children’s booksellers. If you think that The Guiness Book of Records is more likely to be a book enjoyed by a child than an adult, you could bump that up to 8. (Because children’s books tend to be cheaper, the picture’s not quite the same if you rank books by the pounds they generated).

Our own sales of print books out of bookshops – a tiny, tiny fraction of total UK sales, of course! – were, as I mentioned in my summary of 2014 – up by 41%. Nielsen estimates that it tracks 90% of book sales. It’s worth saying that John Lewis doesn’t supply figures to Nielsen, and they are a particularly important customer for us, not just because of Monty’s Christmas, but because they’re strong supporters of a number of illustrated books on the list.

It's our first publication day of 2015!

Today our first books of 2015 are published – a very happy day here at Nosy Crow. And we’re starting as we mean to go on with January’s new titles: this is, if I say so myself, a very strong selection. It’s also one of our biggest-ever months for publication – so big, in fact, that some of this month’s books won’t officially publish until the 22nd. But here’s what’s in shops today:

It’s publication day for Dinosaur Rocket! by Penny Dale.. Regular readers of this blog will know how much I love this book: it is one of my favourite picture books of next year, and my absolute favourite in Penny’s dinosaur series so far. Here’s a look inside:



And here’s a special trailer for the book, created by Penny:



Buy the book online.

Love Always Everywhere, illustrated by Sarah Massini is out today – a joyful, inspirational book celebrating love in its many forms. Whether quiet, loud, shy or proud, the lyrical text champions love for a faithful pet, a best friend or simply your most favourite person in the WHOLE world. Heart-warming and tender, with charming artwork from Massini, this is a perfect book to share and read aloud. Here’s a look inside:



Buy the book online.

And the first paperback edition of Because I Love You, written by David Bedford and illustrated by Rebecca Harry, is also out now. It’s bedtime for Little Bear, but as his mummy tucks him into bed, he wonders if he’s had enough love that day. So Mummy Bear takes Little Bear on a journey, reminding him of all that they’ve done that day – of the laughter, the discovery, the joy – but most of all of the love they’ve shared. And Little Bear goes to bed happy, warm – and loved. This is an absolutely charming story, beautifully illustrated (and foiled throughout!), about a mother’s love – here’s a look inside:



Buy the book online.

For newly-independent readers, we’ve published Zoe’s Rescue Zoo: The Pesky Polar Bear, the seventh brilliant story in the phenomenally successful Zoe’s Rescue Zoo series by Amelia Cobb. These are a great introduction to chapter books for 5-7 year olds – brilliantly-written series fiction with a fantastic premise. Zoe loves living at her uncle’s rescue zoo because there’s always something exciting going on. And Zoe also has an amazing secret… She actually TALK to the animals. These books have wonderfully broad appeal – here’s a lovely recent review by a 10-year-old-boy who loves the series. And here’s a look inside the book:



Buy the book online.

My Headteacher is a Vampire Rat by Pamela Butchart is out now – the hilarious third book in the sequence begun with the Red House Children’s Book Award-shortlisted Baby Aliens Got My Teacher and continued with the Blue Peter Book Award-shortlisted The Spy Who Loves School Dinners. This time, Izzy and her friends are SHOCKED when they meet their new head teacher. He has black hair, wears a cape, and has horrible, wormy lips. One time, they even hear him hissing in his office, and sunlight makes him go bright red. But it’s when he bans garlic bread on Italian Day that they KNOW. Their new head teacher is a vampire and his army of vampire rats are going to take over the school. EEEK! These are brilliantly funny books for 6 – 9 year olds – and they capture school life PERFECTLY. Here’s a look inside My Headteacher is a Vampire Rat:



Buy the book online.

And finally, today sees the release of Emily’s Dream by Holly Webb – the fourth and final novel in a fantastic sequence of novels about four friends who want to make the world a better place – entertaining, inspirational and ideal for 8+ year olds. Emily loves animals. But she comes from a big family and there’s no room for any pets. So she decides to help at the local animal-rescue centre instead. But the rescue centre is under threat. Can Emily and her friends make sure all the animals don’t end up homeless? Here’s a look inside the book:



Buy the book online.

Congratulations to all of this month’s authors and illustrators – and here’s to a 2015 filled with lots of brilliant new children’s books!

A meteoric new voice in children's fiction

Just before Christmas, some very exciting post arrived in the Crow’s Nest: proof copies of My Brother is a Superhero, the laugh-out-loud funny debut novel by David Solomons. This is one of the books I’m MOST excited about for 2015 – it is just a fantastically witty, warm, brilliantly written book, with buckets of charm. Fans of Frank Cottrell Boyce will LOVE it. And one early admirer, a Mr Steve Coogan, called it, “A brilliantly funny story about growing up, sibling rivalry and saving the world. You’ll laugh until you fall out of our tree house.”

And next week, we’ll be giving away some copies of the proof on Twitter! We’ll be alerting our books newsletter subscribers how to win a copy, so if you’re interested, you can sign up here.

In the meantime, here are the opening two chapters of the book to whet your appetite:

And here’s an early video review from one of the book’s very first readers (when it was still just a manuscript):

If you’re interested in the story of how we came to be publishing the book, you can read Kirsty’s nail-biting account here.

My Brother is a Superhero will be published in July, and you can pre-order it online now, here.

Happy Feast of the Epiphany

Today, as Kate was very keen to point out to me, is the Feast of the Epiphany, otherwise known as the twelfth day of Christmas, or the day on which the three kings visited the baby Jesus.

“What are you going to blog about today?” Kate asked me this morning. “Why not write about the Feast of the Epiphany?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told her. “That is far too recherché a subject, and what’s more, there is no way of connecting it to any of our books.”

“Of course there is!” Kate insisted. “Kings? Royalty? Feasts? There’s plenty there.”

And then, as I was mid-way through doing the biggest eye-roll in the world, I remembered that next month we ARE publishing a book with a slightly royal theme (let’s ignore the fact that they weren’t really kings) and hastily beat a retreat.

Which is all a very long-winded way of saying that in February, we’re publishing a VERY exciting new picture book (with kings, princesses, and knights galore): Princess Daisy and the Dragon and the Nincompoop Knights, written and illustrated by none other than Steven Lenton, illustrator of the absolutely brilliant Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam.

We’re immensely proud to be publishing Steven’s first solo picture book – and WHAT a book this is.

When a truly terrifying sound wakes the inhabitants of a fairytale kingdom, it takes clever Princess Daisy to realise that the culprit of this dreadful din is a dragon, but the three knights who answer the king’s call prove to be nothing but NINCOMPOOPS!

But what’s this? Riding a cow and armed with a book rather than a sword, a fourth mystery knight dares to enter the dragon’s den. But who can it be…? Plucky Princess Daisy of course!

This is a FABULOUSLY funny picture book – witty, charming, and brilliantly illustrated – that demonstrates that anyone can be brave.

Fans of fairytales, strong female characters and – of course – those two robber dogs, Shifty and Sam, will absolutely LOVE this book.

Princess Daisy will be in bookshops next month, and you can pre-order it online here. And for the very first look inside the book, sign up to our books newsletter, and we’ll give you an early peek inside before the book hits the shelves.

…And, of course, a very happy Feast of the Epiphany to you all!

Looking back at 2014: our fourth year of publishing

Happy 2015!

2014 was Nosy Crow’s fourth year of publishing. It’s maybe a bit indulgent and navel-gazey, but we’ve done a retrospective blog post at the beginning of each new year as a sort of diary for ourselves as much as for anyone else (here’s last year’s).

WHAT WE DID

In 2014, we published 55 original print books (so I am not counting ebooks or iBooks separately, counting paperbacks or board books of previous hardbacks, for example) and three apps. This wasn’t really an increase on 2013, when we published 51 books and two apps. But as I said in my review of 2013, 2014 wasn’t planned to be a year of growth: we hadn’t increased our staff numbers in 2013 which is what we’d have had to do to increase our output in 2014.

HOW WE GREW

But despite our small increase in output, the business grew in terms of sales. We finished the year with revenue of £3.8m – up 12% on last year. And we had a particularly good year in the UK trade: based on Nielsen BookScan figures tracking sales by value out of bookshops to UK consumers, our sales were up 41% on the previous year (in a context of an overall drop in UK trade book sales to consumers by 1.6%). Based on the same figures, we ended 2014 the 16th biggest children’s publisher in the UK. More specifically, we were the 10th biggest publisher of (non-licensed-character) picture books and the 14th biggest publisher of children’s fiction (excluding YA). The gap between the biggest publishers and us is very big, and there was some industry consolidation last year, but, given how small our list is, and how little time we’ve been going (so we don’t have a long backlist), we are very pleased with our continued move up the rankings: it means that our books are doing disproportionately well.

We created two own-brand books in the year: we are proud to have made a book for Unicef which was given to every new-born baby in Scotland from the launch of the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games onwards. We were also really pleased to publish Monty’s Christmas, the book of the John Lewis Christmas TV advertisement for the third year.

Monty’s Christmas, our John Lewis Christmas ad book for 2014

Internationally, we continued to sell our books and apps abroad, and have now sold books in 27 languages other than English.

Li Yin, 18, from Hunan Province, works on the fold-out page – which has to be tipped-in by hand – in the Dutch edition of Use Your Imagination in a factory in Shenzhen

SOME AWARDS WE WON IN 2014

This was a big year for awards for Nosy Crow.

Our books and apps won several prizes and were shortlisted for many others. We were so proud of all of our shortlisted and winning authors and illustrators. Among the highlights, we were particularly proud that Open Very Carefully won the Waterstones Picture Book of the Year, that Jack and the Beanstalk won the FutureBook Best Children’s Fiction Digital Book Award, and that Little Red Riding Hood won the Best Tech Stuff Award at the Booktrust Best Book Awards.

Nicola O’Byrne with her Waterstones Children’s Book Prize

Tom, AJ, Ed and Will with their Best Tech Stuff award

As a business, we won many awards this year. We won a number of business awards open not just to publishers but other businesses:

Nectar Business Small Business of the Year

Growing Business Awards Young Business of the Year

Stationer’s Company Innovation Excellence Award

We were named a Smarta 100 company

Receiving the Nectar Business Small Business of the Year award

Also this year, we won several book industry awards:

Independent Publishers Guild Digital Marketing Award
Independent Publishers Guild International Achievement Award

We were also highly commended in the Bookseller Industry Awards Independent Publisher of the Year category

Our award shelves – not including book awards – at the end of 2014

In terms of personal accolades, I was very proud to win the FutureBook Award for Most Inspiring Digital Publishing Person, and to be included in The Bookseller 100 and Hospital Club 100; Ola was named a Bookseller Rising Star; and both Ola and Tom were shortlisted for the Young Independent Publisher of the Year Award.

OTHER STUFF WE DID

We were kept pretty busy with publishing and planning for the future, but we found time to run a second conference and to continue to run our Book Group. We launched enhanced iBooks for our picture book list, and we were really proud to have launched a highly innovative way of marketing our apps and picture book iBooks through our Nosy Crow Jigsaws app, launched in the summer, to which we’ve added other features – you can make jigsaws of your own photographs now, for example – since.

Screenshot from our Nosy Crow Jigsaws app

We got around this year. We visited France, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, China, Poland, the USA and Australia to sell our books and speak at conferences.

Fish and chips break during a late evening preparing material for the 2014 Bologna Book Fair

Queue for our “Illustrators’ Surgery” at the 2014 Bologna Book Fair: we have 10 minute appointments with illustrators to critique their work and assess its suitability for our list

We sent, and accompanied, authors to all of the major UK literary festivals including Hay, Edinburgh, Cheltenham and Bath.

Pamela Butchart signing books for a fan at the 2014 Edinburgh Book Festival

Tracey Corderoy and Steven Lenton performing at the 2014 Hay Festival

Philip Ardagh performing at the 2014 Hay Festival

And where there was no festival, we created events… well, Pamela Butchart did, when she took time out of her wedding reception to sign books at J & G Innes

We continued to enjoy our engagement with our friends on social media. At the time of writing, we have a total of 28,000 Twitter followers (18,241 for Nosy Crow, 5,249 for Nosy Crow Apps and 4,442 for Nosy Crow Books – we know there’s some overlap) – up 40% on last year. We have 4,600 Facebook likes – up 30% on last year.

We continued – thanks largely to Tom – to blog every weekday (except around Christmas and New Year). In 2014, our website had 227,000 visitors – up an impressive 31% on last year. The visitors came from over 200 countries – hello, people from Vanuatu! – and we saw particular jumps in traffic from the USA, Australia, India, Poland, Russia and China.

THE NOSY CROW TEAM

The Nosy Crow team grew in the year. Sophie joined the design team in February, and we’re very glad she did, particularly because, though we looked throughout the year, we couldn’t ever quite find the right person to become Senior Designer on the Nosy Crow team, despite interviewing a lot of people, so the design workload is heavy. In another attempt to ease it, in a few days, Giorgia Chiaron will join the design team as a junior designer from Penguin Random House Children’s Books. We expanded our editorial department when Ruth joined us in May from QED Publishing and then again when Victoria joined us in November from Penguin Random House Children’s Books.

Ellie joined us in November too, replacing Kirsten, who joined us and then decided within a couple of months that Nosy Crow was not the right place for her. We were very sad to lose Kristina Coates, who was our very talented designer, but she made a big career jump when she joined Bloomsbury as senior designer in June. I still miss her.

I am aware that all this team talk is about women, and so do want to say that, at the time of writing, a third of the staff on the payroll are men, which I think probably compares favourably with other UK children’s publishing teams.

A full house: Nosy Crow’s Christmas lunch

LOOKING AHEAD

I said that we didn’t plan for 2014 to be a year of increased output. But 2015 is. We plan to publish 78 original print titles in 2015, from board books to young YA fiction. I thought that it was interesting that of the 12 authors and illustrators we published in 2011 (our first year of publishing), we will, in 2015, have new books from 8 of them (and a ninth will launch a new series in 2016): where we can keep the faith with authors and illustrators, we do! But in addition to the authors and illustrators who have formed the backbone of our list, we have a number of new authors and illustrators on the 2015 list, from established names like Ross “Elephantom” Collins, whose There’s a Bear on my Chair we publish in June, to voices that are entirely new to children’s publishing like David Solomons, whose My Brother is a Superhero we publish in July. We’ll publish, too, our first buy-ins from a publisher outside the UK when we release our first two of Gallimard Jeunesse’s remarkable board books with multiple sound chips in October.

Louise, Steph and Ola at the day of the arrival of Ross Collins’ artwork for There’s A Bear on My Chair

David Solomons at our Christmas party a few weeks ago with Camilla

We plan to release another three or four apps this year, starting with the fifth of our widely acclaimed, highly interactive fairy tales, Snow White, in February 2014.

The first scene from our Snow White app, which will be released next month

January 2015 marks another important change for us: we’re bringing several of our key UK trade accounts in-house, though we will continue to sell to other UK customers through our friends at Bounce. Catherine Stokes joins us from Bounce in the middle of this month as head of sales and marketing, and she’ll be supported on the sales side of her job by Frances Sleigh, who joins us as sales executive from Penguin Random House Children’s Books in January too.

2016 is earmarked for further growth: quite apart from our ambitions for the rest of the list, 2016 marks the launch of our children’s list with The National Trust.

This all sounds great, but it’s a hard slog, as I tried to capture in this recent blog post. We’re hugely grateful to everyone who works with us to make it possible for Nosy Crow to exist, let alone flourish: our authors; our illustrators; their agents when they have agents; booksellers big and small; scores of publishers around the world who buy our books to publish them in their languages; librarians; teachers; journalists, and, of course, every single person who’s bought and enjoyed a Nosy Crow book, app or ebook. Thank you.

How Nosy Crow got its name

Five years ago today, we registered the domain name nosycrow.com.

I’d been fired in the October of 2009, and had pretty much immediately decided that I wanted to set up a children’s publishing company. Adrian, my husband, was part of the plan from the beginning, and I’d asked Camilla, who I knew from my time running Macmillan Children’s Books and who was combining writing children’s books with looking after her young family, if she’d like to join us.

While working on the details of our business plan, I spent time, in December 2009, looking for a company name.

I ideally wanted a company name with an animal in it: I wanted a logo with a face – something with a bit of character and something that we could animate, because we’d decided that we wanted to create digital products as well as print products. For my previous fifteen years in children’s publishing, I’d worked with perfectly elegant and classic logos, but ones that weren’t terribly characterful.

I wanted a dot com URL: we knew that we well our books and digital products internationally.

I wanted a URL that didn’t have “books” or “publishing” or “press” in it: we knew that we wanted to create digital products as well as print books.

If you try – and you do this at home easily – entering any common adjective (and we couldn’t have anything too recherche: this was to be a children’s publishing company) plus the name of any animal into a domain name registration site you will discover that pretty much any combination you come up with, from brown bear to purple pangolin, will be unavailable as a dot com URL.

Discouraged, we started considering non-animal names, but nothing really stuck. After lunch on 28 December 2009, I was sitting with my laptop at the kitchen table in my parents’ house in Edinburgh crossly punching into a domain registration site adjective and animal combinations to find them all taken, and my brother came in to make tea and asked what I was doing. I explained our frustration, and he suggested Nosy Crow. This was the name of a children’s book character he’d suggested in the course of a wine-fuelled Christmas dinner several years previously, that’s I’d laughed out of court. When he suggested it as a company name, I sighed, told him it was a stupid name, and said that the dot com URL would be taken anyway. I entered the name to demonstrate my point. But Nosycrow.com was available.

The more I thought about the name, the less ridiculous it seemed and the more I liked it. It felt as if it could span the age-group (0-14) we were publishing for in a way that Fluffy Bunny or something similar would not. It had assonance. It had a face. It felt distinctive. That afternoon – I’ve just looked up the correspondence – I sent Camilla a two word email: “Nosy Crow?”. She replied, “I like it. It has a cheekiness and feels modern.” Later that afternoon, after more exchanges, she said, “I think older children would be turned off by [some of our other animal suggestions] – I think they sound too safe. Nosy Crow has an energy and a humour.”

On 29 December 2009, we registered the name.

In the New Year of 2010, Camilla and I met in the cafe of The Wellcome Collection, which was to become the office of the company for the next few months. We’d agreed on the name, though one of our potential shareholders – who didn’t end up investing – didn’t like it. In my notebook, I scribbled an impression of what I thought a logo might look like. Camilla looked quizzical – I am not an artist – and said that she thought that the logo should look more like the picture she then immediately drew on a page of her notebook – which I’ve reproduced at the top of this blog post.

Though neither of us could quite believe that it could be that easy to create a logo, I loved what she’d drawn – it had the cheeky freshness that we liked about the name. It wasn’t quite right, though. We flipped the image so that the crow’s beak pointed left; we elongated the beak using Photoshop; and Axel Scheffler redrew the legs – and did the logo lettering.

We still had a year to go before the company started publishing, but we felt that we were on our way.

Our Jack and the Beanstalk app is The Guardian's #1 iPad Kids App of 2014

Today The Guardian published its list of the best iPad apps for kids of 2014 – and we were absolutely THRILLED to see our Jack and the Beanstalk app take the number one spot! It’s an absolutely huge honour for the app, and honestly I feel a bit speechless.

Here’s what journalist Stuart Dredge had to say about Jack and the Beanstalk:

“British books and apps publisher Nosy Crow has made a succession of beautiful fairytale apps, all with a strong eye on encouraging reading, not just tapping on interactive whizziness. Jack and the Beanstalk was their best effort yet, blending storytelling and light gaming with the company’s now-familiar voice narration from children, not grown-ups.”

It’s been a pretty fantastic couple of months for Jack and the Beanstalk, which has also won the FutureBook Innovation Award for Best Children’s Fiction Digital Book, been shortlisted for a Digital Book Award, and been included on USA Today’s list of the top 10 kids apps of 2014.

You can read The Guardian’s full list of this year’s best iPad apps for kids here – and here’s the trailer for Jack and the Beanstalk, if you’re new to the app:

Come to the first Nosy Crow Reading Group of 2015!

The Nosy Crow reading group will return in 2015… and we’d like you to join in!

In January we’ll be meeting to discuss the The Imaginary, written by A.F. Harrold and illustrated by Emily Gravett, which The Guardian described as “beautiful and strange new […] about imagination, love, loss, new starts and old endings.”.

We’ll be meeting on Tuesday, January 20 at 6.30pm, here at the Nosy Crow offices – 10a Lant Street, London, SE1 1QR. If you’d like to come to the physical event at our office in London, send an email to tom at nosycrow dot com and we’ll try to fit in as many people as possible. If we can’t save a place for you this time, we can, if you’d like, keep you on our waiting list for cancellations and add you to our mailing list for future events.

You can order the book online from Waterstones here – and take a look at a gallery of illustrations from the book here.

If you can’t make it here, we’d love for you to join in online, either on Twitter with the #NCGKids hashtag, or in the comments section of our blog for the evening.

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