Nosy Crow's Blog, page 168

"Just keep swimming" - persistence and running a small publishing business

Yesterday, I wrote about winning the Young Company of the Year award at the Growing Business Awards. It’s one of those moments when you feel – really – privileged to be part of a community of small business owners and managers, and when you’re struck by the enthusiasm and expertise they bring to things that might not seem in any way glamorous or even interesting.

Running a small business can be great, and days when you win awards make you love it unreservedly. I am happier owning and managing a small, independent business than I was working for a conglomerate. But when I think about running a small business the image that comes into my head is often one of swimming. I say “image” but it is sort of more of a feeling. I feel, as, as I think about the day ahead, or the business trip ahead, or the meeting or presentation ahead, that it’s going to be like swimming in the sea off the UK. It’s something I’ve 100% chosen to do, it’s challenging and it’s exhilarating, but it’s quite cold, and a little bit dangerous, and I have a sense of being in an element I can’t entirely know or predict. It’s an effort, but it probably looks less effortful from a distance. There are waves, some bigger than others, and there are currents to negotiate, and sometimes it’s hard to keep sight of land or where I am going.

In explaining this, I am making it seem much more of an intellectual metaphor than it seems to me to be when the image/feeling comes into my head. At the time, I just think of myself as doggedly swimming and don’t deconstruct the image/feeling at all.

The image/feeling is about persistence, of course. And, though I am not a huge fan of motivational quotes, I do like this from Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” When we talk about Nosy Crow’s business in our blog posts, we inevitably talk a lot about the good bits of running a small independent publishing business: the books we’ve managed to acquire; the deals done; the high sales ranking; the prizes won. We don’t, really, talk about our failures, disappointments and annoyances. But, big and small, they happen: times that sales don’t meet our hopes or even our expectations; times when books emerge from production late or faulty; the times that cash is really tight; the times that the author or illustrator can’t (or, infrequently, won’t) make the changes to the book that we believe would make it even better; the promotional slots we aim for but don’t get; the experienced and great picture book designers we look for but can’t find to employ; the constant battle with the publishing schedule and the need to move books and apps because we don’t have finished material when we hoped we would; the emails from editors outside the UK telling us that, despite their enthusiasm for the project at Frankfurt, they’ve been unable to persuade their sales team to take on one of our books in translation; the handful of books that, despite our enthusiasm, get sold to another publisher; the times we don’t win the award.

Earlier this year, Daniel Menaker allowed us to quote in a blog post from his memoir a section detailing the challenges of corporate publishing culture. Nosy Crow is free of many of the specific frustrations he details, but that sense of how challenging, and sometimes rather arbitrary, publishing and business life can be rang true to me. And his marine metaphor – a shipping one, not a swimming one, but still… – rang true too: “Somehow, by luck or word of mouth, these books navigate round the rocks and reefs upon which most of their fleet – even sturdy vessels – founder.”

When I am cycling to work, or on my way to the airport for a business trip (within the last seven weeks I have been in as many cities outside the UK: Frankfurt, Cannes, Boston, New York, Harlem (in The Netherlands), Shenzhen and Shanghai), or going through the door to the big meeting or presentation, the theme tune that runs through my head to accompany my swimming image/feeling is Dory’s song from Finding Nemo, which was released on DVD, or maybe video, when my children were tiny and was a huge favourite of theirs. It feels a bit grandiose to lay claim to a Winston Churchill quote as my business mantra, so maybe I’ll settle for Dory’s “Just keep swimming.”

It’s a good thing I like wild swimming.

Nosy Crow wins Young Company of the Year award at the Growing Business Awards

Last night, Nosy Crow was awarded the Young Company of the Year Award at the Growing Business Awards last night.

The gold envelope and the card inside it that I nicked from the podium

The Growing Business Awards are managed by Real Business and the CBI in association with Lloyds Bank, and, as they say, they celebrate the very best of British business and the entrepreneurs that power some of the fastest-growing UK companies. The awards are in their 16th year. 63 companies were shortlisted by 25 business leader judges for 12 awards.

In the Young Company of the Year Award category, sponsored by Citroen, Nosy Crow won against Lovespace, the self-storage business; Anesco, a provider of energy efficiency services; Captify, an advertising tech firm; cement manufacturers Hope Construction Materials; and ProperCorn, the upmarket popcorn brand.

The judges praised Nosy Crow’s creativity and innovation, but I wasn’t, of course, able to jot down what they said about us as I went up to the award (I went on my own: the tickets were spenny), so, rather embarrassingly, I will have to quote what they said in the printed guide to the awards about me, rather than the company: “Kate Wilson is an exceptional entrepreneur. Her extreme focus and maximum personal effort is evident in everything she does.” I came back from the Frankfurt Book Fair for 12 hours for the shortlist interviews, which took place on 9 October 2014.

This is Nosy Crow’s third business award in as many months: on 3 September, Nosy Crow was named Nectar Business Small Business of the Year; and on October 6 Nosy Crow was named one of the Smarta100 companies – the 100 most resourceful, inspiring and disruptive small businesses in the UK.

I know that I’ve said this about our other business awards over the last few months, but at a time when press coverage of the publishing business is full of gloom and doom, it’s a great triumph not just for Nosy Crow, but I sort of feel for the industry, to win against such a strong and varied shortlist. Winning industry-specific awards is GREAT, but there’s something special about being recognised in a wider arena.

And winning is, of course, a great tribute to Nosy Crow’s staff and to our authors and illustrators, and makes us all the more grateful for the support of our many customers in the UK and elsewhere.

The Award on the messy, post-dinner table

When I accepted the award, I talked about my sense, as a corporate refugee, of privilege about being welcomed into the world of small, entrepreneurial business. I am endlessly impressed and intrigued by the ways that people find to make money for themselves and for others; to employ other people; and to delight their customers. I sat next to a lovely man whose company lays temporary aluminium roads for festivals and film sets among other things. He talked about his motivation – “loving my customers” – just as we talk about our motivations: to make and market great books and apps that children will want to return to and that parents will trust.

Comedian Ed Byrne did something for Nosy Crow that he didn’t do for any of the other winners: he said to the audience that, when he’d met me earlier (I’d gone in error to the VIP drinks reception instead of the normal one – don’t ask…) he hadn’t known what company I came from but that he and his kids knew and loved Nosy Crow books, so it was great that we’d got the prize.

All of the Real Business Awards winners

Christmas is coming to the iBook Store!

Just in time for Christmas, we’ve launched some beautiful, enhanced iBook editions of some of our most festive and wintery picture books. You can now find Pip and Posy: The Snowy Day, by Axel Scheffler, and Just Right for Christmas, by Birdie Black and Rosalind Beardshaw, on the iBook Store, complete with audio and text highlighting – and for only £2.99 ($4.99) each.

In The Snowy Day, Pip and Posy can’t wait to go out and play in the snow. They have all sorts of fun, until they decide to build a snowman… when things start to go a bit pear-shaped. Pip wants a snowRABBIT, but Posy wants a snowMOUSE. An argument erupts and very soon both friends are cold and wet – and very sad. Oh dear! Happily the friends resolve their differences over a cosy craft sessions indoors. Here’s the book on the iBook Store:

And here’s a look inside the book:

And in Just Right for Christmas, one snowy Christmas Eve the king buys some soft red cloth to make a cloak for the princess. Little does he know that the left-over cloth will be used to make presents for many more of the kingdom’s inhabitants, right down to the last teeny bit of cloth, which is just right to make a scarf that will protect the smallest mouse from the winter chill. Rhythmical writing and heartwarming, charming illustrations from renowned Rosalind Beardshaw make this lovely story with a perfect Christmas message a joy to give to your loved ones. Here’s the book on the iBook Store:

And here’s a look inside the book:

And that’s not all! We have some more seasonal iBooks on the way – and in the meantime, Merry Christmas from Nosy Crow!

Be the first to try a brand new feature in the Nosy Crow Jigsaws app!

This Thursday we’re launching an update for the Nosy Crow Jigsaws app, which will include a very exciting new feature: you’ll be able to make jigsaws from ANY of your own photos!

Any images saved in the Camera Roll of your iPad or iPhone can be turned into jigsaws and used like any of the existing artwork in the app – you can turn your pictures into puzzles from 4 to 300 pieces.

The new feature will be available as an in-app purchase for $4.99/ £2.99 – and once you’ve unlocked it, you can make unlimited jigsaws from your photos.

And this week, we’re giving subscribers to our apps mailing list early access to the feature – and giving it away to for free!

If you’d like an exclusive early look at the app update, email apps at nosycrow dot com with Jigsaw Update in the subject heading to subscribe to our mailing list, and we’ll send you a promo code to download the Nosy Crow Jigsaws update and get the new feature for free, before it’s available on the App Store!

This new feature really unlocks the full potential of our jigsaw app – the possibilities are VERY exciting. You can make jigsaws of your children’s artwork, like Ed has done in this video:

OR, you can create your own extra-challenging jigsaws, with patterned images, maps, or even piles of Lego – have a look at these:

And of course, you can make jigsaws from whatever else catches your eye. I thought it’d be fun to make some jigsaws from some of the fantastic Axel Scheffler envelopes that I blogged about recently. Here’s an envelope that Axel sent to me last week:

And here’s a VERY quick look at the jigsaw:

The update will be available to download from Thursday, but if you’d like to take a look at it before everyone else, and use the new feature for free, send us an email!

How to Write Children's Fiction: A Nosy Crow Masterclass

As some of you may know, this September we held our second conference, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Children’s Publishing (But Were Afraid to Ask) – a sold-out, all-day event with a great atmosphere, a packed house, fantastic speakers, and lots of cake.

One of the things we learnt, from the questions that were being asked on the day, and from some of the feedback that we received, was that there was an appetite for other sorts of events, too – more focussed ones, addressing particular parts of the publishing process. In particular, we felt that the sessions on writing fiction and picture books could EACH have taken up a whole day by themselves.

And so today, we are very pleased to announce the first Nosy Crow Masterclass: How to Write Children’s Fiction.

This will be an intensive, all-day writing masterclass, with sessions from authors, editors, agents, staff at Nosy Crow, and more – all focussed on writing fiction for children. There’ll be practical suggestions, advice on every aspect of writing, from shaping your story structure to drafting a synopsis – and guidance about what comes after – finding an agent, understanding a contract, and more. The focus of this event will be largely on what’s referred to by some as “middle-grade” fiction – we are planning a separate masterclass for writing picture books.

As part of the day, there’ll also be one-on-one manuscript critiques for every attendee (for anyone who has sent along writing samples in advance). Our first confirmed advisors for these sessions are Nosy Crow’s Managing Director Kate Wilson, Editorial Director Camilla Reid, and Fiction Editor Kirsty Stansfield.

The masterclass will take place here at the Crow’s Nest – 10a Lant St, London, SE1 1QR – on Saturday February 7th.

Ticket price includes tea and coffee breaks throughout the day, lunch, and a glass of wine – and cake! – at the end of the day.

Early Bird tickets are available now – you can buy them here, or with the form below.

Online Ticketing for How to write Children’s Fiction: A Nosy Crow Masterclass powered by Eventbrite

And, to celebrate #NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month), we’re offering a further 10% discount on ticket prices (on top of the Early Bird rate) until the end of November – just use the code nanowrimo at the check-out page!

We’ll be announcing more details about the day, with speakers and a list of sessions, very shortly. Places are extremely limited for the first masterclass, so if you’re interested, get yours now – we hope to see you there!

Come and work for Nosy Crow: we're hiring a Sales Executive

We have an incredible opportunity for a hardworking, bright individual with the right to live and work in the UK to join our team at Nosy Crow.

We’re looking for a new member of the team: our new sales and marketing department needs a Sales Executive. The key functions of the role will be:

· Liaising with retailers and wholesalers

· Supporting key account presentations

· Supporting Nosy Crow’s UK, Ireland and Export field sales teams

· Liaising with Nosy Crow’s distributors, GBS

· Analysing and reporting on sales

We expect that you will have had some experience in a publishing sales environment. It’s a key job in a dynamic and rapidly growing company which enjoys and is successful at what it does. You’ll need to be flexible, determined, with a keen eye for detail, and good at getting on with a tightly knit team and its customers. You’ll report to the Head of Sales and Marketing.

Please send Kate Wilson your CV, accompanied by an application letter, as soon as possible via email (kate at nosycrow dot com).

The closing date for applications is Monday December 1st at midnight (UK time).

A new crow in the nest - welcome to our new publishing assistant

Hello! I’m Ellie and I’m very excited to be joining the Nosy Crow team as Publishing Assistant today! After a bit of a whirlwind interview process two weeks ago (which involved speaking some rather rusty Spanish…) I’ve finally arrived at the Crow’s Nest, and am really excited to start working with all the great books and apps made here. I’m also looking forward to spending time in the lovely Nosy Crow office here in Borough which already seems like it’s going to be a great place to work (two cups of tea and a slice of cake by 11am on my first day is a good sign I think).

I’m coming to the job pretty much straight out of a French degree at the University of Oxford with some experience in the French publishing house Flammarion and also with the great team at the Caroline Sheldon Literary Agency, which is where I first encountered Nosy Crow’s fantastic picture books such as Penny Dale’s Dinosaur Dig! series.

I’m thrilled to be going into such a diverse job where I’ll be assisting Ola, the Rights Manager, and Tom, the Business Development Manager. At the moment I’m most excited to get involved with the latest fairytale app, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which will be coming out in early 2015, and also to see the great things that are bound to come from Nosy Crow’s new partnership with the National Trust. I’ll also be updating this blog quite a bit too, so this probably won’t be the last you hear from me!

Nosy Crow announces the creation of a new in-house Sales and Marketing Department and the appointment of Catherine Stokes as Head of Sales and Marketing

As part of the planned development of our sales strategy, today we are very pleased to announce the transfer of Catherine Stokes from her current job as Sales and Marketing Director of Bounce Sales and Marketing to become Nosy Crow’s first Head of Sales and Marketing.

Nosy Crow has outsourced its selling to Bounce Sales and Marketing since the launch of its first list in 2011. From the beginning of 2015, Nosy Crow will create an in-house Sales and Marketing Department under Catherine Stokes. A number of key accounts will, as a result of this, be represented solely by the new Nosy Crow team, but Bounce Sales and Marketing will continue to represent the company to a wide selection of accounts.

Kate Wilson, Nosy Crow’s Managing Director, said:

“We are delighted to have been able to attract Catherine to Nosy Crow to lead sales and marketing, and we’re so pleased to be able to combine this important step in Nosy Crow’s growth with an ongoing relationship with Bounce. It’s a testament to how well the relationship with Bounce is working for us that we looked to Catherine when we decided that the time had come to bring some of our key account selling in-house. She combines a depth of knowledge of the market with terrific publishing sensibilities and a wealth of marketing experience. We hugely look forward to building our sales and profile with her support.”

Catherine Stokes said:

“The opportunity to join such a fast-growing and dynamic publishing company, that has made such an impact on the children’s market, was one I couldn’t miss. And I am so pleased to be able to continue working closely with Robert and the rest of the Bounce sales team.”

Robert Snuggs, Bounce’s Managing Director, said:

“Everyone at Bounce is proud to have helped in the spectacular growth of Nosy Crow over the last four years. There is a great relationship between the two companies and we’re delighted that we will continue to support Kate, Catherine, the rest of the team at Nosy Crow and in particular their authors in the years to come.”

Catherine Stokes will join Nosy Crow on 19 January 2015. Until then, all sales enquiries should be directed to Bounce, and we will be in touch directly with those key accounts that Nosy Crow is planning to move in-house.

Bounce Sales and Marketing is the UK’s leading sales and marketing agency for children’s publishers. Founded in 2002, Bounce has one of the largest specialist sales teams in the country representing more than 30 children’s publishers.

Envelopes from Axel Scheffler

One of the great joys of working in children’s publishing comes from seeing artwork arriving in the office for the first time – and it’s especially pleasing when it appears in unexpected places… like on an envelope. For me, the undisputed king of the envelope illustration is Pip and Posy illustrator Axel Scheffler: from a simple crow illustration with some nicely-drawn lettering, to an abstract masterpiece riffing on figures from history and stamp design, Axel’s envelopes are invariably beautiful, witty and imaginative (so much so that many of them end up framed on our walls).

Receiving post from Axel makes any day a happy one (it certainly brightened up my Monday last week, when the piece at the top of this post appeared), so today I thought I’d share some of my favourite envelope art from Axel.

This envelope, addressed to Kate, was featured in a retrospective of Axel’s work in Troisdorf, Germany. I think it is HILARIOUS – a surreal, brilliant stroke of genius.

Even Axel’s simplest envelopes are charming.

The biggest crow in the whole world.

This chap’s looking pretty thoughtful.

I really love this trail of crows.

This one, featuring Pip, is on display on our wall of crows.

Another envelope from the crow wall in our office – this gigantic creature has pushed our address almost off the page…

Camilla was wearing a dress almost EXACTLY like this one on the day this arrived in the office.

A very friendly looking leopard.

A pretty stylish pair.

Quite the odd couple.

It’s a good thing Axel was around to feed those crows…

“Napoleon After Leipzig”. This is strange and incredible and I love it.

This just gets funnier and funnier the more I look at it – I love how Axel has captured the EXACT pose of the stamp man.

My name provides a very convenient perch for agitated crows – I particularly like the goggly eyes on this one.

One of our most recent crows – it is autumn, after all.

And finally, another very simple envelope, with some wonderful hand-lettering.

For more envelopes from Axel, sign up to our books newsletter, and we’ll share some of the incredible artwork that arrives in our office.

Nosy Crow wins two FutureBook Awards: Children's Fiction Digital Book of the Year and Inspiring Digital Publishing Person of the Year

On Thursday night, we celebrated being one of the UK’s most impressive 100 businesses at the Smarta100 awards.

On Friday night, we won two FutureBook Awards. Jack and the Beanstalk won the Digital Children’s Fiction Book Award. I was so surprised that I didn’t write down what the FutureBook judges said, but this is an app that has already had many accolades. The Sunday Times said, “Nosy Crow’s latest fairy tale remake is a new high in the British publisher’s blending of storytelling and gameplay,” and gave it five stars, while The Guardian said, “The latest storybook app from children’s publisher Nosy Crow is its best yet: a wonderfully rich retelling of the famous fairy tale, with nine mini-games but also a strong emphasis on narrative and reading. It’s a real showcase for the potential of children’s apps,” and USA Today said, “Jack and the Beanstalk cleverly creates an intersection where gaming and reading meet”. In what Nigel Roby, the owner of The Bookseller, said was a particularly hard-fought category, another of our apps, Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Safari, was also shortlisted. Tom (on the left, in the photo above, while I’m on the right) accepted the award for Nosy Crow, and named Ed, Will and AJ, our brilliant apps-building team, as the real winners of the prize in his acceptance speech. We have FutureBook form, in fact: our Cinderella won Best Children’s App in 2011 and our Rounds: Parker Penguin won Best Children’s Digital Book in 2013.

In even more of a turn-up for the books, I was named Inspiring Digital Publishing Person of the Year. I had – really – not considered this a possibility, so my acceptance speech was unprepared to say the least. Frankly, I was also a bit nervous about going on stage with Nigel Roby, since my embarrassing attempt to accept an award we hadn’t won (but were highly commended for) at The Bookseller Awards earlier this year. Stefan Nickel, Marketing and Communications Director of The Frankfurt Book Fair, which sponsors this award, wrote a speech which there wasn’t time to deliver, he said, but which he gave to me on two bits of card torn from the notebook in his hotel. The authenticity of the provenance of this makes me feel almost OK about quoting it in full.

Stafan (would have) said: “We are delighted that Kate Wilson is this year’s winner. Not only is Kate a very inspiring person, but her company, Nosy Crow, is widely recognised for its innovative digital products. It also fits perfectly with the Frankfurt Book Fair: Nosy Crow’s business, like ours, is global – three quarters of its app revenue and two thirds of its print revenue comes from outside the UK. And Nosy Crow’s success story isn’t only about digital: by September 2013, its third year of publishing, it had become the 19th biggest publisher of children’s books in the UK and the 13th biggest publisher of picture books in the UK. What makes Nosy Crow so successful is that it seems to be perfectly mixing its traditional publishing skills with new business skills and products.”

If ever there were a case of an individual winning a prize that really belongs to many people, this is it. I am hugely proud of founding a company and hiring a team that produces remarkable digital products and marketing from our story apps to Stories Aloud and our latest app, Nosy Crow Jigsaws, but I rely, every day, on the technical skills of the team for our success.

I am not 100% clear how this award is awarded, but I know that there’s a public voting component. If you voted for me, thank you very much: this prize means a lot to me, and, more importantly, it’s a tribute to the Nosy Crow team.