Nosy Crow's Blog, page 177

Our new app is out today!

We’re incredibly pleased to say that our new app, Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Safari, is out today!

The follow-up to last year’s glorious Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Farm, the app features brand new animal artwork from Axel, along with new poems, music, sound effects and read-along audio – and all for just 99¢/ 69p! What do you get when you cross a zebra with an antelope? Why, a zebelope, of course! What about a buffalo with a flamingo? Well, that would be a buffingo, naturally!

Here are some of the great combinations you can make:

The app uses the same wonderfully intuitive, user-friendly interface as Flip Flap Farm: you can swipe any part of the screen to create 121 different combinations of animal halves, rhymes and silly, hybrid animal names – all read aloud and set to safari music. You really have to use it yourself to see just how satisfying it is – you can keep swiping for hours!

Here it is on the App Store for 99¢/ 69p.

And here’s what to look for on the Store:

And if you like the app, you’ll love the book! We’re publishing a print edition of Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Safari next week, in a wonderful split-page, spiral-bound board-book format – you can find out more here.

If you enjoy Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Safari, or one of our other apps, we’d be incredibly grateful if you’d consider leaving a review on the App Store – it’s so important to us. And if you’d like to stay up to date with our upcoming apps, you can sign up for our Apps Announcement Mailing List here.

We hope you enjoy Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Safari!

Have you heard about our upcoming children’s publishing conference? Early Bird tickets are available now.

Win copies of of our August books!

It’s time for our monthly books giveaway! If you’re a resident of the UK or Ireland, you can win any of our new August books simply by subscribing to our Books Newsletter and sending us an email with the book you’d like to win. Here’s what’s up for grabs…

We’ll be publishing the phenomenal Playbook Castle, illustrated by Britta Teckentrup with truly brilliant paper engineering by Corina Fletcher – an ingenious novelty package comprising a pop-up storybook, which then unfolds and transforms into a 3D playmat, with cut-out cardboard pieces for hours of fun!

You can win Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Safari – the fantastic follow-up to last year’s Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Farm. With its sturdy, split pages and spiral binding, 121 possible combinations, silly names and animal noises to make you giggle, this hilarious rhyming flip-flap book in a fun format is perfect for pre-schoolers. Little readers will adore flipping Axel Scheffler’s animals again and again to see what crazy creatures they can create – and to find out what strange noises they make too!

Use Your Imagination by Nicola O’Byrne is up for grabs – the brilliant new picture book from the illustrator of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize-winning Open Very Carefully. Rabbit is bored, but luckily Wolf has the perfect solution. “Why not write a story?” he suggests. “I am a librarian, you know.” And so Wolf teaches Rabbit to use his imagination to create an exciting story. Rabbit is DESPERATE to know what happens, when it suddenly becomes clear that Wolf is very, very hungry… Here’s a look inside the book:

You could win My School Musical and other Punishments, the third HILARIOUS novel by Catherine Wilkins, author of My Best Friend and other Enemies and My Brilliant Life and other Disasters. When Jessica gets roped into the school play she finds herself strangely allied with arch-enemy Amelia when her best friend Natalie becomes crazed with stardom. Meanwhile, Jessica’s dad is concerned at plans to build a new road through nearby parkland and is now living up a tree. So far, so normal! Here’s a look inside:

And finally, you could win The Palomino Pony Rides Out by Olivia Tuffin, the second volume in this fantastic new series that’s absolutely PERFECT for pony-mad 9+ year olds – an exciting sequence of soon-to-be-classic pony books, shot through with action, adventure, and a genuine love of horses. Here’s a look inside:

To win any of these books, all you have to do is subscribe to our books newsletter (if you’ve already subscribed you’re still eligible for this competition) and send an email to tom@nosycrow.com with “Newsletter competition” in the subject heading and the title of the book you’d like to win in the body of your email. So have a good think about which book you’d like to win (we can only accept one entry per person), and good luck – we’ll pick the winners at random next week.

Have you heard about our upcoming children’s publishing conference? Early Bird tickets are available now.

The Bride Who Loved School Dinners

They’re an old married couple of three weeks now but on 3rd July, Pamela Butchart, author of Baby Aliens Got My Teacher!, married her boyfriend, Andrew Cunningham, in a beautiful old byre in Fife. By coincidence, and as something of a very good sign for both ventures, Pamela’s second book with Nosy Crow, The Spy Who Loved School Dinners, was published on the same day. And best of all (for me) is that I was lucky enough to be invited to the wedding.

Both Pamela and Andrew are teachers, and Pamela’s books are all about the crazy things that happen at primary school, so it could be said that the wedding had a natural theme. The invitation threatened detention for those not RSVPing in a timely fashion, and on the morning of the wedding, I caught a school bus from Dundee along the amazing coastline to St Andrews. It was a lovely service in a lovely place, and I felt very honoured to be there.

Sadly, Pamela and Andy’s cats, Carlos and Bear, couldn’t make it in person, but they made it in standee.

There were lots of firsts on the day. It’s not unusual for people, when they find out what I do, to admit to having a children’s book in them, but it’s never been a vicar who’s just officiated at a wedding before. I’ve never been offered what I thought was a cup of camomile tea only to discover it was in fact Prosecco, and I’ve never been more delighted. And I’ve never found myself sat in the back of a bridal car with the bride and groom (though not in the middle, that would have been intrusive) whizzing off to a bookshop in St Andrews, as the bride takes half an hour out from her wedding to go and sign copies of her new book.

Having newly weds sweep through their door was a first for J & G Innes, and I don’t think the small girl who was busily drawing in a corner has ever been handed a bridal bouquet and asked to hold it for a minute. And it was a really-very-lovely-to-witness first for Andy, when Pamela showed him the dedication and illustration printed in the front of the THE SPY WHO LOVED SCHOOL DINNERS, something that she had kept a very stressful secret since the advance copies came through.

I’m also fairly certain that while it might have been the first time that Andy became a human signing table, it won’t be the last.

Back at the wedding, (school) dinner was served. And it was delicious (unlike the shepherd’s pie so beloved by the ‘spy’ in Pamela’s book).

Thank you, Mr and Mrs Cunningham, for inviting me to your wedding and I hope your photographer took better pictures. I had a lovely time, and we all send our love and best wishes for the future (and for future books).

Have you heard about our upcoming children’s publishing conference? Early Bird tickets are available now.

Nosy Crow is shortlisted for the Nectar Small Business of the Year Award

I don’t do it often.

But when I do, it usually happens late at night. Sometimes early in the morning.

I decide to do a quick internet search for free-to-enter. awards that Nosy Crow might be eligible to enter. Our track-record on award-winning has been remarkably good… but all that does is work up our appetite for more.

Besides, I’ve never filled out an entry form for an award without learning or thinking something new about Nosy Crow, particularly about how someone, or an organisation, outside the business might think about ourselves: filling in an entry form is an exercise in trying “to see oursels as others see us”, to quote Robert Burns.

Anyway, what tends to happen when I find an award for which we’re eligible is either that I realise that it is a day or two to the deadline for entries and I scrabble about to put an entry together, or that I see that the deadline is months off… and so promptly forget about it, only to kick myself when I do another search and realise that I have missed the deadline date. There must be a better way than this (Google calendar?), but so far I have not found it.

The Nectar Small Business Awards happily fell into the first category, and the deadline was very close, and, so, as usual, I had to pull something together in real haste. But – houpla and kazam! – on Friday evening we were told that we were shortlisted for the Small Business Of The Year Award.

And while we welcome any industry-specific prize or shortlisting going, I think it’s great for us to be flying the flag for independent publishing, and for book businesses in general, by being shortlisted, or winning prizes, in competitions against other kinds of business. This was one of the things that made winning a Stationers’ Company award recently so great.

The announcement about the Nectar shortlisting is here. If we win, I might get to meet Karren Brady. And we’d get cash and Nectar points.

Our fingers are firmly crossed.

Have you heard about our upcoming children’s publishing conference? Early Bird tickets are available now.

Some exciting news about our conference on children's publishing

Tickets have been on sale for our upcoming conference, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Children’s Publishing (But Were Afraid to Ask), for just under a month now, and we’ve been absolutely overwhelmed by the response so far – it’s shaping up to be a fantastic day!

If you’ve written a book and don’t know what to do next, or you’re interested in beginning a career in publishing, or you want to know the best ways of marketing your books (and yourself) online and in the real world, or you’re just generally interested in everything to do with children’s books, then this conference is for you! We have a day’s worth of experts who’ll be sharing their knowledge on every aspect of the industry and the publishing process – editors, agents, journalists, retailers, social media experts, and, of course, authors.

You can find out more about the day and book tickets here.

Next week, we’ll have a new speaker to announce… and we’ve got some more exciting news today!

Firstly, we’ve decided to extend our Early Bird ticket rate for another two weeks, to give as many of you as possible the opportunity to come at the best possible price.

And that’s not all!

Every day, we rely on the knowledge, support and enthusiasm of librarians up and down the country to spread the word about our books, introduce children to our authors and illustrators, and be cheerleaders for children’s reading. And so we’d like to show our gratitude by offering any librarians interested in coming to our conference a further 20% discount on both the Early Bird and Full Price ticket rates.

If you’re interested in taking advantage of this offer, just email tom@nosycrow.com (ideally from a library email address, or with some other proof of identification), and I’ll send you a discount code that can be redeemed at the check-out.

The conference is taking place on Saturday, September 13, at the St Bride Foundation in London, near Fleet Street – it’s an all-day event and the ticket price includes morning and afternoon tea and coffee breaks, lunch, and a glass of wine (and homemade cake) at the end of the day, when you can chat to us all.

We hope you can join us!

Event Registration Online for Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Children’s Publishing… powered by Eventbrite

A first look inside the hilarious new novel from Catherine Wilkins

Next month we’re publishing My School Musical and other Punishments, the third HILARIOUS novel by Catherine Wilkins, author of My Best Friend and other Enemies and My Brilliant Life and other Disasters. And today, for the first time, you can read an exclusive extract of the new book!

Jessica can’t wait to tell her friends about her brilliant new idea for their comic. Not that she’s an actual genius, or anything… But they’re all too busy stressing about the school musical to listen. ACTORS!

At least designing the best scenery ever is going well. Until Amelia and Harriet VanDerk fall out over a pot of yellow paint. Now Jessica has to choose between her frenemy and her enemy. Who knew the entertainment business was so tricksy?

Clever, knowing, and wonderfully true-to-life, these books are brilliant for 9+ readers who love funny books. Here’s the first three chapters of My School Musical:

The book will be published in a fortnight, but you can pre-order it now here. And if you’d like to stay up to date with all of our book news, you can sign up to our books newsletter here.

Have you heard about our upcoming children’s publishing conference? Early Bird tickets are available now.

Some reflections on corporate publishing from Daniel Menaker's memoir, My Mistake

For my birthday a few months ago, Tom kindly gave me a copy of My Mistake by Daniel Menaker. The book is a memoir. Menaker, now in his 70s, worked at The New Yorker as a fact-checker, a copy-editor and then as fiction editor for 26 years, before, as he describes it, being palmed off by editor Tina Brown to her husband, Harry Evans, who was then running Random House US. He worked in book publishing for the next 13 years, mainly at Random House, acquiring and publishing literary poetry, fiction and non-fiction books, by Joe Klein, Billy Collins, Nassim Taleb, Scott Spencer, Elizabeth Strout, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Colum McCann among others. He is a writer of fiction as well as other non-fiction himself.

I really enjoyed the whole book, which manages to be self-deprecating while making it clear that the author knows what epiphenomenalism is, and that the correct spelling of a key evolutionary biologist’s name is “Dobzhansky” rather than “Dobzhinsky”… and that such knowledge is important. It’s witty and sad and ultimately rather joyful. There were a lot of people mentioned in it that I didn’t know of, and it’s very much a book by someone who’s a literary America insider, but I, for one, didn’t find that a problem. I particularly enjoyed his insights into and his perspective on the business of corporate publishing of the kind he was engaged in at Random House.

There are several sections that I could have used as examples. There’s a conversation explaining the arithmetic of acquisition that was awfully like one I have had many times – in fact, here’s a version of the same sort of stuff, but from our own, rather than a corporate, perspective. But the section – with omitted parts marked by ellipses just so that it more or less fits our blog post format – that I asked the author for permission to quote (permission he kindly gave) was this one:

“Oh, publishing! Publishing is an often incredibly frustrating culture. And a negative one. If you are an acquiring editor and want to buy a project – let’s say a nonfiction proposal for a book about the history of Sicily – some of your colleagues may support you, but others will say, ‘The proposal is too dry’ or ‘Cletis Trebuchet did a book for Grendel Books five year ago about Sardinia and it sold, like, eight copies’ or, airily, ‘I don’t think many people want to read about little islands.’

[…]

Three streams feed this broad river of negativity. Most trade books don’t succeed financially. Three out of four fail to earn back their advances. Or four out of five, as I think I said somewhere back there, or six out of seven, depending on what source you consult. Some books that do show a profit show a profit so small that it only minimally darkens a company’s red ink.

This circumstance in turn increases the usual business safety strategy of self-protective guardedness. You’re more likely to be ‘right’ if you express doubts about a proposal’s or a manuscript’s prospects than if you support it with enthusiasm. And, finally, the inevitable competitiveness among acquisitions editors will incline them to cast a cold and sometimes larcenous eye on others’ projects.

[…]

Those three acquisition-time negativities are only the beginning of the negativities that editors must face. Barnes & Noble doesn’t like the title. The author’s uncle Joe doesn’t like the jacket. The writer doesn’t like the page layout and design. The publisher tells you that the flap copy for a book about a serial killer is too ‘down’. The hardcover doesn’t sell well enough for the company to put out a paperback. The book has to wait a list or two to get printed. […] The New York Times isn’t going to review the book.

And so on.

If you work in the Editorial Department of a publisher, you usually don’t know much about what goes on in Sales. That is, you can love a book you’re working on, all your colleagues can – maybe uncharacteristically – share your admiration, your boss can talk the book up in marketing and sales meetings, but you don’t know what sales reps say about that book when they make their sales calls. I’ve always suspected that salespeople’s and wholesale buyers’ biases and preferences play a greater part in a book’s fortune than most editorial people want to allow themselves to understand. Reps and buyers are subject to their own ‘results’ pressures, after all.

Further, genuine literary discernment is often a liability in editors. And it should be – at least when it is unaccompanied by a broader, more popular sensibility it should be. When you are trying to acquire books that hundreds of thousands of people will buy, read, and like, you have to have some of the eclectic and demotic taste of the reading public. […] It’s not enough for you to be willing to publish The Long Sad Summer of Our Hot Forsaken Love by Lachryma Duct, or Nuke Iran, and I Mean Now! by Generalissimo Macho Picchu. You have to actually like them, or somehow make yourself like them, or at least make yourself believe that you like them, in order to see them through the publishing process.

To make matters worse, financial success in front-list publishing is very often random, but the media conglomerates that run most publishing houses act as if it were not. Yes, you may be able to count on a new novel by Surething Jones becoming a big bestseller. But the bestseller lists paint nothing remotely like the full financial picture of any publication. Because that picture’s most important color of commerce is the size of the advance. The second most important color is the general level of book buying. I’d bet that the volume sales of, say, the number 6 hardcover book on the New York Times fiction bestseller list in 2013 is, partly but not entirely owing to the advent of ebooks, significantly lower than the volume of the number 6 bestseller five years ago.

[…]

It is my strong impression that most of the really profitable books for most publishers still come from the mid-list – ‘surprise’ big hits bought with small or medium advances […]. 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. This is an old story but one that media giants have not yet heard, or at least not heeded, or so it seems.

Because let’s say you publish a fluky blockbuster about rhino-viruses in Renaissance Italy, The Da Vinci Cold, one year. The corporations will see a spike in your profits and […] automatically raise the profit goal for your division for some corporately predetermined amount for the following year. (The sequel to or second book after that blockbuster will usually command an advance so large as to dim a publisher’s profit hopes for it.) This is close to clinically insane institutional behaviour and breeds desperation rather than pride and confidence in the people who work for you.”

Cover image for The Da Vinci Cold?

You can order My Mistake online here, or, if you’re in the US, here.

Have you heard about our upcoming children’s publishing conference? Early Bird tickets are available now.

The 10 Top Kindergarten Apps from Tech With Kids

Tech With Kids is (and I say this entirely in the spirit of objectivity, despite whatever self-interest such a statement might demonstrate, as will become momentarily apparent) one of the very best sites for reviews of kids apps. Run by USA Today’s Jinny Gudmundsen, it’s knowledgeable, thorough, and fair – an invaluable resource for any parents, teachers, or other grown-ups looking for the best apps for children.

And so it’s incredibly gratifying to see three Nosy Crow apps in the site’s list of the 10 Top Kindergarten Apps – Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rounds: Parker Penguin.

Here’s Tech With Kids’ full review for Jack and the Beanstalk. Jinny writes:

“This classic fairy tale is presented in an innovative way that blends gaming and reading so that reluctant readers will be intrigued […] What makes this version special — besides the lovely illustrations and lively animations — is the addition of game-like elements into the story […] By adding games inside this popular story featuring a little boy on an adventure, Jack and the Beanstalk draws in little boys who are reluctant to read […] Like Nosy Crow’s Little Red Riding Hood, this version of Jack and the Beanstalk also puts kids in charge of the outcome of the story. This is empowering to kids, making this book an easy favorite. Jack and the Beanstalk by Nosy Crow cleverly creates an intersection where gaming and reading meet.”

Here’s our trailer for Jack and the Beanstalk:

Here’s Tech With Kids’ full review for Little Red Riding Hood. Jinny writes:

“A modern version of the classic tale where Little Red is the heroine, and she saves her granny from the wolf. The app lets you choose your own path through the woods, so when you replay it, you can experience several different endings […] In addition to this delightful choose-your-own-adventure aspect of this fairy tale, the app also shines for its user-generated narrative. In addition to hearing a narrator, kids tap the characters to hear more of the story. The app also contains fun mini-games played with the fully-animated characters you meet in the woods […] It’s refreshing to see Little Red Riding Hood depicted as a brave, quick-thinking and resourceful character who gets rid of the wolf herself and saves her Grandma.”

Here’s our trailer for Little Red Riding Hood:

And here’s Tech With Kids’ full review for Rounds: Parker Penguin. Jinny writes:

“Presented with rich artwork full of round shapes and accompanied by music that varies when you touch the penguin, this is an intriguing way for kids to learn science […] Rounds: Parker Penguin is a great read for all children. Because this book app is so interactive, kids are drawn into the learning as they help Parker through each stage of his growth.”

Here’s our trailer for Rounds: Parker Penguin:

Thank you, Tech With Kids, for this kind recognition!

You can read Tech With Kids’ full list of the 10 Top Kindergarten Apps here. If you’d like to stay up to date with all of our app news (we have a couple of very exciting announcements to make soon…), you can sign up to our apps newsletter here.

Have you heard about our upcoming children’s publishing conference? Early Bird tickets are available now.

A letter-eating crocodile

Today’s guest blog is by Daniella Jamois, a class teacher at Charles Dickens Primary School who has been teaching in the early years for the past 10 years, on using Open Very Carefully with nursery-age children.

Yesterday we based our literacy session on Open Very Carefully.

The spread of Open Very Carefully that inspired the class

The children in nursery are so inspired by the text and have been drawn into analysing the letters, words and sentences. We found the book to be a brilliant tool to use for tackling early phonics. After reading part of the book, our children wrote letters, words and sentences to feed our enormous crocodile we had made earlier in the week.

Feeding words to a crocodile

We even filled a fridge with words for the croc to snack on later! (The children were excited to take their words and sentences home to show their parents so they are missing from the photos!)

The ‘word fridge’

We will be revisiting this text again and again as it is a wonderful way into the world of reading and books.

Thank you, Daniella, for sharing Open Very Carefully with your class! If you haven’t explored Open Very Carefully yourself yet, you can take a look inside the book below, or buy it online here.

Working with UNICEF on Baby, I Love You: a book for every newborn in Scotland

Though not quite as speedy as the three-weeks-from-idea-to-books-in-the-shops creation of our book based on the 2012 John Lewis Christmas ad, Baby, I Love You, the book we have just made for UNICEF, which was launched this month, had a pretty fast turn-around too.

Baby, I Love You is published by UNICEF and will be given to every newborn baby in Scotland by health visitors at their first home visit, spreading the UNICEF message, “You can’t spoil your baby with love”, and introducing families to the idea of sharing books with babies at the earliest possible stage in a baby’s life.

From my earliest involvement with Booktrust’s Bookstart programme, I’ve pursued opportunities to support the introduction of reading to babies whenever I possibly can, and we leapt at this project when we found out about it in discussion with UNICEF in December 2013, despite the fact that we knew that we had just six months to create, print (in China), ship and deliver tens of thousands of copies of a board book.

Though conversations started in the run-up to Christmas 2013, things only really got going in January, by which time Camilla had come up with a first draft of the text, and, crucially, the idea that the words should fit the tune we know as Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, which is familiar to so many people throughout the world.

After a discussion about possible artwork styles – we considered photography too – we were really delighted to be able to sign up multi-award-winning Helen Stephens in February. She had to work to a tight brief in a short period to create something that combined what we thought would make the best book with the messages that UNICEF wanted the book to communicate and with real humanity and warmth. We think she rose to the challenge.

The final cover

To reinforce the idea that this could be either read aloud or sung to a baby – the parents among us at Nosy Crow remembered making up, or adapting, lots of rhymes and songs when we were rocking our own babies – we decided we could use our Stories Aloud audio innovation to deliver a sung and instrumental version of the Twinkle Twinkle Little Star melody.

I’m a Scot myself, and I was really keen that we should have a Scottish voice singing. After asking around, one of my more musical family members suggested that we consider Mairi Campbell. She agreed that she would sing, and, better still – and brilliantly appropriate given that parent-child relationships are what the book is all about – her teenage daughter, Ada Francis, would accompany her on the clàrsach. We recorded the music on a sunny March day in a studio in the countryside just outside Edinburgh.

Ada Francis and Mairi Campbell

Ewan McGregor, a UNICEF Ambassador, also recorded a read-aloud audio version (you can hear this in the video at the top of this post).

The book was printed and – nice touch this – each copy was individually wrapped in China and delivered to Scotland earlier this month.

We are really proud and happy to have been part of this project. Helen Fraser, when she was running Penguin, is supposed to have said that, for a book to be taken on by Penguin, it should make them proud, it should make them happy, or it should make them rich. As Meat Loaf said, two out of three ain’t bad.