Nosy Crow's Blog, page 169

"The novel is gloriously open": Ali Smith on non-linear storytelling

This week, Ali Smith was named the winner of the second Goldsmiths Prize, awarded for “boldly original” fiction, for her novel How to be Both.

It’s an extraordinary book (which the judges of the Goldsmiths prize have said “pushes the novel into thrilling new shapes”), and one that’s remarkable for its daring, unconventional form: it’s been published in two versions, both with the same cover but with the main halves switched.

And I was very struck, listening to Smith being interviewed on BBC Radio4’s Front Row programme a couple of evenings ago, how much the construction of this interesting, unconventional narrative sounded familiar to me – and in particular, to the way we make our interactive, non-linear fairytale apps.

Here’s what Smith said to Front Row about the inspiration behind the form in How to be Both:

“It’s inspired by the ‘fresco form’ – the idea that there’s this one thing you can see, flat on the wall … and if you take the surface off, and find the picture behind it, you realise you’ve been looking at two things all along.”

To me this sounded exactly like the way we construct our fairytales: not just with layers of artwork that reveal themselves as you explore more of each scene, but also, for the dialogue that can be triggered and the interactive elements that can be found as you delve deeper into the story.

And here’s what she said about the effect of splitting the novel into interchangeable pieces:

“There’s a relation and narrative to things which come first or come next – it’s a consequence narrative, really. It became a really good way to examine what consequence is in the novel and sequence works in the novel.”

Hearing Smith describe her book in this way was the point at which I really gave up cooking supper and devoted my full attention to what had, until that point, just been on in the background in my kitchen. I’ve talked about our Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk apps in very similar (albeit less eloquent) ways in the past: they are absolutely versions of the traditional stories which explore consequence and sequence. In our Little Red Riding Hood app, the path you take through the forest to grandma’s house determines the ending of the story, and the nature of your encounter with the Big Bad Wolf. And in Jack and the Beanstalk, you can explore the giant’s castle in a different order every time, and wake up the giant at different points in the story, with very different outcomes.

What I thought was really interesting – and quite heartening – about the way Smith expressed these ideas was partly that they were being discussed in relation to a piece of adult fiction (I am used to reading about non-linear storytelling in children’s fiction), but also, even more interestingly, that they were about a print project, rather than a piece of digital storytelling. I thought it was fascinating to see an author take the natural “constraints” of a format – a bound and printed book with a fixed, linear narrative – and find ways of embracing and transcending that format to create an entirely new kind of reading experience.

And on a final, inspiring note, here’s what Smith said about the future of the novel:

“The novel is gloriously open … we haven’t even began to look at what we can do with the form.”

You can listen to the full interview on Front Row here (starting at around 19.30 minutes in).

How to Innovate

If you pick up a copy of The Times today, you’ll find a profile of Nosy Crow in the latest edition of their SME supplement. This issue focusses on the question of how companies can innovate – Kate was interviewed about what makes an innovative business, and what Nosy Crow is doing in the digital reading space to innovate in children’s publishing.

Here’s what Kate said on digital reading:

“‘Publishers have been slower to embrace the possibilities of creating enhanced books and only a few of us are really active in this space,’ Wilson says. At all costs she is keen to avoid reading becoming ‘the most boring thing a child can do on a touch-screen device’.”

You can read the full piece here – and you might also be interested in this business profile in the Evening Standard, and this blogpost, by Kate, on “life after CEO”, and reflections on being fired (written after her appearance on The Bottom Line with Evan Davis).

Join in with our Flora and Ulysses reading group next week!

November’s Nosy Crow Reading Group is taking place next week – and we’d love for you to join in!

We’ll be discussing the Newbery Medal-winning Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo, which the Boston Globe called “a truly inventive and appealing children’s middle-grade novel”.

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. Is Flora really a cynic?

2. Who is this book “for”?

3. What does the style add – or detract – from the book? How important is plot, do you think?

4. Does Flora’s mother really have Flora’s wellbeing at heart? What sort of parents are the Buckmans?

5. How do the illustrations interact with the text in Flora and Ulysses?

We’ll be meeting on Wednesday, November 19 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!

Divided by a common tongue

The male Red Cardinal

This afternoon Kate and I have been occupied with finding EXACTLY the right renditions – from the many, many versions that exist – of The Wheels on the Bus on YouTube.

Specifically, we’ve been looking for versions which use the British version of the tune, and separate versions using the subtly-but-significantly-different American melody (sing it to yourself and see if you can tell).

We need them to send to a composer, who’ll record versions that we can then use ourselves (and that we own, rather than the Youtube ones, which are just for inspiration) for the Stories Aloud recording in our upcoming Sing Along With Me board book, illustrated by Yu-hsuan Huang.

Normally we don’t have to worry about this British/American divide for books with our Stories Aloud audio, but this is a sort of unusual case: in this instance, we’re also recording a version for our American partners Candlewick, who’ll publish the US edition of the book… and unlike most of our Stories Aloud titles, which use originally-composed music as a title tune, for this book we’re recording a well-established song which has a different tune in Britain and America.

It’s an interesting reminder of the challenge we sometimes face when selling books to the US. There’s so much which the British and American markets have in common that it’s often easy to be fooled into thinking that they are the SAME market… but of course this is not the case: they are, in truth, two entirely distinct markets which simply overlap, perhaps more often than others do, but nonetheless, with very specific and unique sets of cultural and social conventions.

It’s something that we’ve been thinking about quite a bit recently, as we found ourselves facing the same challenge with one our upcoming, winter-y Can You Say it Too books by illustrator Seb Braun, Can You Say it Too? Jingle! Jingle! The plan for this book was for a robin to feature on the cover… until we learnt that, in the US, the robin is a very different bird, which heralds the start of spring, rather than winter: their iconic winter bird is, we have learnt, the red cardinal.

The “internationalisation” of books – the problem of appealing simultaneously to many markets, which publishers are increasingly finding to be a commercial imperative – is something that we’ve written about before, and it’s a challenge that never goes away. But learning about these different cultural conventions – and finding ways of accommodating them – is also one of the things that ensure that working in children’s publishing is never boring!

Our Nosy Crow Jigsaws app has received an Editor's Choice Award from Children's Technology Review!

We’re about to launch a very exciting update for our free-to-download jigsaw puzzle app, Nosy Crow Jigsaws (more news soon…), and so, in the meantime, we’re incredibly happy to see that the app has received an Editor’s Choice Award from Children’s Technology Review!

In their review for the app, Children’s Technology Review award Nosy Crow Jigsaws an overall score of 92% (along with the prestigious Editor’s Choice Award), and say, “Free jigsaw puzzle apps abound, but this is the first we’ve seen to combine in-app purchases (IAP) model with a menu system that lets you pick which puzzles you want to unlock. … As a jigsaw puzzle experience, this one is well designed, with good controls and the ability to toggle between difficulty levels, from 4 to 300 pieces.” You can read the full review here.

One of the very best, most thoughtful reviews for the Jigsaw app (or, indeed, for any of our apps) has come from Kids App Central, who write, in their “final thoughts” on the app:

“There are very few apps that are actually appropriate for all age groups, but this is one of them. Toddlers should love the pictures and the stories, and they will be able to assemble the most basic puzzles. And everybody up to adults can be challenged by the 300 piece puzzles.

The pictures are great for young kids, and a parent can engage them with the whole story that the picture comes from. I also really liked that this is an app that parents can truly share with their kids. If you use the app on your tablet, you and your kids can put the puzzle together and spend some quality time as a family.”

You can read the full, excellent review here..

And if you’ve not yet discovered Nosy Crow Jigsaws, you can watch a short preview video of the app at the top of this post, and see a longer in-depth look at some of the app’s great features in the video below:

Nosy Crow Jigsaws is free to download, and you can find it on the App Store here. We’ve got lots of new artwork and some special features that’ll be added to the app in updates over the next couple of months, so if you’d like to stay up to date with all of our app news, you can sign up to our apps mailing list here.

What Lies Beneath

The very first book that Nosy Crow published was Small Blue Thing, in January 2011 – the first volume in a fantastic paranormal romance trilogy.

It feels like a very long time ago now – and it’s amazing (and slightly overwhelming…) to think about all of the books that we’ve published since!

And one book that we’re particularly looking forward to publishing next year is The Beneath – a compelling and absorbing novel for 12+ readers by none other than Small Blue Thing author S.C. Ransom.

It’s an ordinary school day, but Lily is about to step into a nightmare. The girl rushing out of the Tube tunnel tells a crazy story about an underground community and a charismatic leader with an evil plan. How can Lily trust her? It’s only when Lily finds herself in the labyrinth beneath London that she learns the horrific truth – about the Farmer, the Crop and about herself…

Here’s the STUNNING cover for the book – this little animation doesn’t really do the fantastic spot-UV finish justice:

And here, for the first time, is a look inside the book – you can read the first chapter below:

The Beneath will be published in March – and you can pre-order it now. If you’d like to hear more about the book, sign up to our books newsletter here, and we’ll keep you up to date with all our new book news, competitions, giveaways, events and more.

Making Monty's Christmas: Nosy Crow partners with John Lewis to create the picture book of John Lewis's iconic Christmas Ad for 2014

Today, we’ve announced that, for the third year in a row, we’ve published a rhyming hardback picture book based on this year’s John Lewis’s iconic Christmas television advert.

John Lewis soft-launched the ad, Monty’s Christmas, today on social media (the ad launches on TV tomorrow). At the time of writing, seven hours after the ad appeared on YouTube, it had been viewed 870,000 times.

The book, also called Monty’s Christmas, is priced at £8.99 and sold exclusively by John Lewis in shops and online. John Lewis is donating £1.20 from each sale to Barnardo’s, a charity with which they have many links.

The book follows the success of our previous collaborations with John Lewis: the picture book The Snowman’s Journey, based on John Lewis’s 2012 Christmas advert, which Nosy Crow wrote and designed within 48 hours of the release of the advert on 9 November 2012; and the picture book The Bear Who Had Never Seen Christmas, based on John Lewis’s 2013 Christmas advert, which has now been viewed on YouTube over 13 million times.

This year, as last year, we were able to work with advertising agency, Adam and Eve DDB. We had access to specially-created art and character images created by Catalina Echeverri and Arn0 (who created the penguin for the ad and for the book). The book was written by Louise and me, using the pseudonym Lucy Feather (it turned out that not having an author name was tricky from a signing point of view at events last year…!). Louise was also the editor on the project and the book was designed by Steph. The book was printed by Italian printer, Lego, with production support from Imago.

Because the ad is live-action and Adam and Eve decided they wanted an illustrated look for the book, we weren’t able to use images from the ad itself. And, while we followed the story of the ad very closely, we weren’t able to replicate, in book form, the switch in perspective from the boy to the mum at the end of the ad, so though we had a bit more time than last year, this was another fantastic team effort involving hard work, speed and flexibility: it’s a good thing that we seem to thrive on those! It’s really interesting to see John Lewis are realising the potential of its unique advertisements with, this year, a real range of advert-related products, including our book.

We really enjoy working with John Lewis, who are respectful and collaborative partners – something that’s all the more impressive given how big they are and how small we are in comparison. Ian Ellis, the company’s toy and book buyer said, “Nosy Crow has once again translated our iconic, wordless Christmas advert into a compelling book for children. Nosy Crow`s standout quality is their ability to go above and beyond to achieve a high-quality result in a short time. We can always rely on them to deliver.”

Here’s a look inside Monty’s Christmas:



Buy the book online.

How to apply for a job in publishing

We received a record number of applications for our recent publishing assistant vacancy (the period for application has now ended) – which meant reading a record number of CVs. And we were absolutely overwhelmed by the quality of submissions – reading through everyone’s applications was an exhausting but quite heartening process.

We also spotted a few issues coming up – mistakes that were made, areas to avoid, or things that we wanted to see more of – and so we thought it might be interesting and helpful, particularly for anyone looking for a first role, to post a guide with the essential things to check when you’re applying for a job in publishing. These may seem obvious, but they’re all things that we encountered on several occasions!

A guide to applying for a job in publishing

- Send the correct CV and covering letter! You may be a BRILLIANT candidate, but if your opening line explains why you should be employed by Bloomsbury or HarperCollins, I’ll probably stop reading.

- Address your covering letter to the right person. Not all job adverts give a named contact, but if you know who you should write to, use their name, rather than beginning your letter “Dear Sir/ Madam” – and make sure you’ve spelled that name correctly!

- Get the job title right! There’s nothing more off-putting for me (other than being called Madam) than reading an application for a Publishing Assistant position which refers to a non-existent Editorial Assistant position instead.

- Double-check the closing date for a vacancy and make sure you get your application in with plenty of time.

- Maintain a consistent style and format in your CV. Don’t switch between chronological and reverse-chronological lists, for instance – it will become very confusing.

- Tailor your covering letter to the position you’re applying for. When we’re reading dozens of applications, we can tell the generic cover letters that have been re-used for lots of other jobs at twenty paces. Talk about what interested you in this position, this company, this industry.

- That being said… make sure you get the details right! It’s great when applicants mention particular authors or illustrators on our list that they admire, but it’s easy to spot when someone has picked names at random (by referring to books that haven’t been published, or the long and illustrious careers of authors with only one book to their name, for instance).

- Read the job description really carefully and try to address all of the requirements and functions that it lists – tell us why you’d be suited to each aspect of this position.

- When you talk about the particular skills and qualities that you possess, try to give examples that demonstrate them.

- Try to keep your covering letter to a page and your CV to no more than two pages in length.

- Remember that your CV and covering letter are different! Don’t just repeat the details of your CV in the letter.

- Use your letter to try and convey some sense of your personality (particularly if the role requires copy-writing skills, where wit and character will be welcome).

- …But remember to stay professional, too.

- Read your letter aloud to ensure that it makes sense.

- Check, double-check and triple-check everything – spelling, punctuation, grammar – and if you can, get someone else to read through it too.

And good luck!

We're making lovely, physical picture book editions of our award-winning fairytale apps

If you’re a fan of our award-winning fairytale apps, we have some EXCELLENT news for you: from next year, we’ll be releasing the fairytales as beautifully-made physical picture books – starting with The Three Little Pigs and Cinderella.

This isn’t really the normal way of doing things – typically, publishers have tried to make apps out of books, rather than the other way around. But we’ve found that actually, making an app out of a book is neither a particularly easy or satisfying process: you rarely have all the material you’d need to make a fully-realised app, and you’re often very limited in the forms of interactivity that you can employ (there are exceptions to this rule, of course). We’ve always said that we don’t want to try and “squash” books onto phones.

This process – of creating a physical book out of an app – has actually turned out to be quite a natural one. We had simply buckets of beautiful, detailed, charming artwork from Ed Bryan, the illustrator and animator behind the fairytale apps, which sat just as happily on a page as on a screen. The stories are – of course – fantastic ones. And the overall package – the physical, lovingly-finished book – is extraordinarily satisfying. We simply could NOT be happier with how these books have turned out.

Here’s a look inside The Three Little Pigs:



Pre-order the book.

And here’s a look inside Cinderella:



Pre-order the book.

And if you’ve not yet discovered the original, highly interactive app versions of the stories, here are the trailers for The Three Little Pigs and Cinderella:

Both books will be available in bookshops from January – with Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk out later in 2015. And if you’d like to stay up to date with all of our book news, you can sign up to our books newsletter here.

What do you get when you cross a bear and a shark?

…Why, a Shark-Headed Bear-Thing, of course!

That’s the subject of the HILARIOUS new book from the author-illustrator dream team of Barry Hutchison and Chris Mould, The Shark-Headed Bear-Thing (when you have an idea this good you put it right there in the title), coming in February.

Benjamin Blank is in search of adventure… so when the eponymous Shark-Headed Bear-Things starts terrorising a nearby village, Ben grabs his magic gauntlet and sets off! But the course of true adventure does not run smoothly. And it’d be good if Ben knew how his gauntlet actually worked.

This is a completely BRILLANT, very, very funny new book that’s perfect for 7-9 year olds who love amazing monsters, total heroics, and a bit of running away. And, incidentally, it also boasts my favourite title of any book, ever.

And here, for the first time, is a look inside The Shark-Headed Bear-Thing!

The Shark-Headed Bear-Thing will be in shops from February – you can pre-order it online here, and if you’d to like to be the first to read more excerpts, and find out about more books in the series (look out for The Swivel-Eyed Ogre-Thing), you can sign up to our books newsletter here.