Nosy Crow's Blog, page 191

Soundbites about apps from London Book Fair's Tech Tuesday

Kate with Made In Me’s Erik Huang

Yesterday evening, Tom and I went to the heart of start-up London to the Hoxton Hotel to a London Book Fair Tech Tuesday event sponsored by Made In Me.

The question of the evening was, “Are Apps Complementing or Cannibalising Publishers’ Content?”

The speakers were:

Dean Johnson from Brand Width

Stuart Dredge from The Guardian and Apps Playground, guest blogger for Nosy crow and author of the iBook, 100 Best iPad Apps for Kids

James Huggins from Made In Me

Louise Rice from Touch Press.

Rather than attempt to pull together a blow-by-blow account of the evening, I thought that it might be interesting just to share verbatim soundbites from each of the speakers.

Dean Johnson:

“We’re quite happy to move on without [publishers], but we’d like you to catch up.”

He told a story about going to the Bologna Book Fair a couple of years ago, and, at the end of the conference before the fair (at which I spoke, actually) an Italian publisher had rounded off the conference by saying that apps were a waste of money. The publisher had invested 50,000 Euros. He said they had “failed to make a good product; failed to understand their audience; and failed to tell their audience about the app they’d made”.

“The app market wants nearly everything for nearly nothing.”

“You can have an amazing reading experience with a paperback.”

“You can’t immediately think that people who buy books will buy apps.”

Stuart Dredge:

Stuart emphasised how young the app market was and how much opportunity for experimentation and new kinds of creativity lay ahead, predicting that we’ll see a generation of children who will choose to tell their stories through websites, apps and games, saying he’d visited a school where primary school children were learning basic coding using Hopscotch.

“Rather than asking how can we take a book and turn it into an app, how do we tell a story in a new way? Can an app deliver a story itself differently, not deliver a story and some additional stuff round the story. The [new] starting point will hopefully be storytelling, conceived as an app from the beginning: it’s not over yet.”

He said that children’s apps were a particular “melting pot” involving story and games, and he cited Rovio and Nosy Crow as developers blurring the story/game line.

Stuart said that he saw “children as creators” as an important trend in apps, citing Me Books as an example of this, and suggesting that Julia Donaldson, who opposes app versions of her books, might find an app that allowed children to retell the Gruffalo story themselves more interesting.

Stuart said that it just a question of whether apps were cannibalising publisher’s content. Outside the industry, the fear was that apps were cannibalising reading.

“Reviews don’t generate as many downloads as App Store promotion, which doesn’t generate as many downloads as word of mouth.”

“It’s maybe better to talk to 50 mum bloggers than to talk to 3 journalists.”

“400,000 of Tesco’s Hudl tablets were sold in the run-up to Christmas.”

Stuart said that this was the first Christmas he’d heard parents say they were planning to by tablets not for the family to share, but specifically for their children.

Stuart spoke about the following apps which were new kinds of storytelling: Blackbar; Papers, Please; Papa Sangre 2; Device 6.

He also spoke about examples of online storytelling such as Black Crown.

He touched on opportunities for social reading, asking what the book equivalent of Rap Genius would look like.

James Huggins:

“Everyone – in film, in music, in books – wants to know what the future is of the industry they’re in… The future of the book is… the book.”

“It all starts with the story. Even marketing. Marketing is the story of the story.”

“An app is not a broadcast channel.”

“Apps end up in the marketing budget because that’s where you put the things that don’t make any money.”

“You see a lot of, ‘there’ll be a new kind of reading experience’, but there are no different kinds of reading experience. I see people running into the space saying they will redefine the book and floundering.”

“Ever since we started, we have been trying to solve the commercial riddle of the [app] space.”

“In many cases, publishers are quite right to be cautious about investing in the app space.”

“Initially, Made In Me was a content proposition, but now Made In Me sees itself as a channel: apps not as content but as a route to a customer.”

“The app space will be seized upon for distribution and marketing rather than for content development.”

He lamented the vagueness of the term “app”: “A book is a format – you know what to expect. An app is not a format – you don’t know when you download an app how it might work. From one app to another, it’s hard to learn the rules. We need to educate the market with consistent experiences.” This is why, I guess, each Me Book works the same way as every other Me Book.

“When it comes to cannibalisation, it isn’t about [a battle of] formats, it’s more a question of competition for their time.”

James recounted that when he was playing at making a story with his seven year-old daughter, rather than writing a back cover blurb, she wrote an app description, and gave it five stars, so his daughter is part of a generation who might, as Stuart suggests, tell stories differently, perhaps using apps technology, or a successor of apps technology.

James acknowledged that analysts talk about the app space favouring casual gaming rather than creative content, but, said, that though there were, of course, high profile examples talking about the very high-profile success of some games, points out that “people forget about the commercial mortality rate of games” – i.e. how few of the ones thrown at the wall actually stick.

On marketing apps, he says, “The more we have tried to understand the app space, the more we see that it is similar to print”.

He spoke about the way that, in the experience of Made In Me, App Store promotion worked, saying that it was “tap-on, tap-off, with no echoing effect”, so the sales spike was sharp and short.

Louise Rice:

Quoted a McGraw Hill executive at the Digital Book World conference in New York this month quoting a teacher: “My school has bought an iPad for every pupil. What am I expected to do wth it?”

“The app, the iPad, does things that the book can’t do.”

Touch Press hadn’t made an Android version of Disney Animated “because the marketplace and the technical capability aren’t there”.

“Apple keeps all the customer information, so that make it hard to understand who the audience is.”

I know that this blog post is a bit fragmented, but I thought that there were some really well-expressed nuggets here. I don’t agree with all of them by any means, but I found them provocative and interesting and useful, even if just to clarify my own thinking. I hope you do too.

Soundbites from London Book Fair's Tech Tuesday

Kate with Made In Me’s Erik Huang

Yesterday evening, Tom and I went to the heart of start-up London to the Hoxton Hotel to a London Book Fair Tech Tuesday event sponsored by Made In Me.

The question of the evening was, “Are Apps Complementing or Cannibalising Publishers’ Content?”

The speakers were:

Dean Johnson from Brand Width

Stuart Dredge from The Guardian and Apps Playground, guest blogger for Nosy crow and author of the iBook, 100 Best iPad Apps for Kids

James Huggins from Made In Me

Louise Rice from Touch Press.

Rather than pull together a blow-by-blow account of the evening, I thought that it might be interesting just to share verbatim soundbites from each of the speakers.

Dean Johnson:

“We’re quite happy to move on without [publishers], but we’d like you to catch up.”

He told a story about going to the Bologna Book Fair a couple of years ago, and, at the end of the conference before the fair (at which I spoke, actually) an Italian publisher had rounded off the conference by saying that apps were a waste of money. The publisher had invested 50,000 Euros. He said they had “failed to make a good product; failed to understand their audience; and failed to tell their audience about the app they’d made”.

“The app market wants nearly everything for nearly nothing.”

“You can have an amazing reading experience with a paperback.”

“You can’t immediately think that people who buy books will buy apps.”

Stuart Dredge:

Stuart emphasised how young the app market was and how much opportunity for experimentation and new kinds of creativity lay ahead, predicting that we’ll see a generation of children who will choose to tell their stories through websites, apps and games, saying he’d visited a school where primary school children were learning basic coding using Hopscotch.

“Rather than asking how can we take a book and turn it into an app, how do we tell a story in a new way? Can an app deliver a story itself differently, not deliver a story and some additional stuff round the story. The [new] starting point will hopefully be storytelling, conceived as an app from the beginning: it’s not over yet.”

He said that children’s apps were a particular “melting pot” involving story and games, and he cited Rovio and Nosy Crow as developers blurring the story/game line.

Stuart said that he saw “children as creators” as an important trend in apps, citing Me Books as an example of this, and suggesting that Julia Donaldson, who opposes app versions of her books, might find an app that allowed children to retell the Gruffalo story themselves more interesting.

Stuart said that it just a question of whether apps were cannibalising publisher’s content. Outside the industry, the fear was that apps were cannibalising reading.

“Reviews don’t generate as many downloads as App Store promotion, which doesn’t generate as many downloads as word of mouth.”

“It’s maybe better to talk to 50 mum bloggers than to talk to 3 journalists.”

“400,000 of Tesco’s Hudl tablets were sold in the run-up to Christmas.”

Stuart said that this was the first Christmas he’d heard parents say they were planning to by tablets not for the family to share, but specifically for their children.

Stuart spoke about the following apps which were new kinds of storytelling: Blackbar; Papers, Please; Papa Sangre 2; Device 6.

He also spoke about examples of online storytelling such as Black Crown.

He touched on opportunities for social reading, asking what the book equivalent of Rap Genius would look like.

James Huggins:

“Everyone – in film, in music, in books – wants to know what the future is of the industry they’re in… The future of the book is… the book.”

“It all starts with the story. Even marketing. Marketing is the story of the story.”

“An app is not a broadcast channel.”

“Apps end up in the marketing budget because that’s where you put the things that don’t make any money.”

“You see a lot of, ‘there’ll be a new kind of reading experience’, but there are no different kinds of reading experience. I see people running into the space saying they will redefine the book and floundering.”

“Ever since we started, we have been trying to solve the commercial riddle of the [app] space.”

“In many cases, publishers are quite right to be cautious about investing in the app space.”

“Initially, Made In Me was a content proposition, but now Made In Me sees itself as a channel: apps not as content but as a route to a customer.”

“The app space will be seized upon for distribution and marketing rather than for content development.”

He lamented the vagueness of the term “app”: “A book is a format – you know what to expect. An app is not a format – you don’t know when you download an app how it might work. From one app to another, it’s hard to learn the rules. We need to educate the market with consistent experiences.” This is why, I guess, each Me Book works the same way as every other Me Book.

“When it comes to cannibalisation, it isn’t about [a battle of] formats, it’s more a question of competition for their time.”

James recounted that when he was playing at making a story with his seven year-old daughter, rather than writing a back cover blurb, she wrote an app description, and gave it five stars, so his daughter is part of a generation who might, as Stuart suggests, tell stories differently, perhaps using apps technology, or a successor of apps technology.

James acknowledged that analysts talk about the app space favouring casual gaming rather than creative content, but, said, that though there were, of course, high profile examples talking about the very high-profile success of some games, points out that “people forget about the commercial mortality rate of games” – i.e. how few of the ones thrown at the wall actually stick.

On marketing apps, he says, “The more we have tried to understand the app space, the more we see that it is similar to print”.

He spoke about the way that, in the experience of Made In Me, App Store promotion worked, saying that it was “tap-on, tap-off, with no echoing effect”, so the sales spike was sharp and short.

Louise Rice:

Quoted a McGraw Hill executive at the Digital Book World conference in New York this month quoting a teacher: “My school has bought an iPad for every pupil. What am I expected to do wth it?”

“The app, the iPad, does things that the book can’t do.”

Touch Press hadn’t made an Android version of Disney Animated “because the marketplace and the technical capability aren’t there”.

“Apple keeps all the customer information, so that make it hard to understand who the audience is.”

I know that this blog post is a bit of a mess, but I thought that there were some really well-expressed nuggets here. I don’t agree with all of them by any means, but I found them provocative and interesting and useful, even if just to clarify my own thinking. I hope you do too.

The application period for our Design Assistant role has now closed

Thank you very much to all of you who have expressed an interest in joining the Nosy Crow team.

We have had a very high number of applications for the Design Assistant role, which is very exciting.

I now have to read through all the CVs and make a selection for the first round of interviews. I will be arranging interviews from the week commencing 3rd of February onwards.

Due to the large number of applicants, it may not be possible for me to respond quickly to all the candidates who have not been successful: our focus will be making contact with the people we’d like to interview. So if you don’t hear from me within the next couple of weeks, you’ll have to assume it’s bad news, I am afraid.

Many Thanks

Stephanie

The Nosy Crow Guardian Reading Group verdict on Liar and Spy by Rebecca Stead

Last week the Nosy Crow Guardian Reading Group met to discuss Rebecca Stead’s Liar and Spy, winner of last year’s Guardian children’s fiction prize. In his review of the book for The Guardian, Philip Ardagh called Liar and Spy “very short, very American and very enjoyable … Rebecca Stead makes writing this well look easy.”

And there was, I think, fairly unanimous agreement with this assessment from the members of our group: this was a book that everyone enjoyed – though for a variety of quite different reasons, on which more in a moment. For anyone who hasn’t read the book yet, beware – there may be spoilers ahead!

Who’s it for?

Broadly speaking, this was a book that we all felt would “work” for a core audience of 8-10 or 9-12 year olds… though we also agreed that it could be an excellent book to read at bedtime to younger children (6+), and one person had spotted it on display in the teen section of Blackwells in Oxford (and although we largely felt that teenagers would find a lot to enjoy, it seemed like it might be a harder sell for this age group).

It was, then, the book with probably the widest perceived audience of any title we’ve discussed at the Reading Group – and the reasons for this are a large part of what we liked about. Its broad potential age range was largely thought to be down to its canny mix of parent-friendliness – there’s no sex, drugs or bad language – balanced against sophisticated language and ideas: overall, it has a rather timeless quality. It is a book that takes place on several levels, and – we all agreed – successfully juggles a set of quite subtle, clever themes that older children (and adults!) will find a lot to enjoy in, with very good depictions of school and home life with which younger readers would happily identify. And for younger children, we also thought that the fact that it was very child-centred was a real strength: the novel takes place entirely through the eyes of a child, and reflects his concerns, his worldview, and a set of well-drawn environments to which other children could easily relate.

That being said, it did not feel particularly plot-driven to anyone (the ostensible “plot” of the novel, concerning an investigation into a neighbour, Mr X, by Georges and Safer, is deliberately undermined by the story’s end) which disappointed some of us, who felt that for younger children it would not be a satisfying conclusion… but pleased other members of the group, with one person saying that the ending felt like it rang very true – that being denied adventure, and having “reality knocking on the door”, was an essential part of childhood. And some of us also felt that the plot (or lack thereof) cleverly mirrored the book’s key themes of boredom and loneliness.

Those who felt that the lack of plot was a problem also saw the “obstacles” of the story as being rather too slight to sustain the narrative – and that, when held to any sort of close scrutiny, these obstacles sort of fell apart… but again there was some disagreement here, with the book’s defenders enjoying the fact that it was more-character driven, and that, treated on its own terms, the obstacles felt perfectly appropriate – the sort of things that children worry about lots.

Style

Perhaps the most striking element of Liar and Spy is its style: as Philip said in his review, the book is very short, and contains the sort of writing that looks effortless. It’s a very pared down style, which members of our group felt was both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it’s a kind of writing that is very flattering to its reader’s intelligence: we are left to fill in a lot of the gaps ourselves, and there are jokes, metaphors and recurring themes to spot which don’t immediately call attention to themselves. Some of us, however, thought that the lack of physical description in a book that is so character-driven was a real problem: Stead seems to go out of her way to provide as little concrete description of the characters as possible, and a few members of the group found it hard to get much of a grip on them without at least some basic physical detail – and also felt that a lack of description made some narrative elements (like the school bullying) harder to accept: why exactly was Georges being bullied?

The end

The aspect that proved to be most divisive was, I think, the novel’s end. Although the actual spying plot itself is one that really becomes more of an afterthought, a number of us still found the ending a satisfying and surprising one: one person compared it to The Sixth Sense for the way that Stead drops clues throughout the novel. There was quite a lot of debate as to the most surprising element of the ending: for some of us, it was the true nature of Mr X, for others, it was Safer’s agoraphobia, for others, Georges’ mother’s illness. I think that everyone felt that every aspect had been emotionally “resolved”. And several people were quite happy that the spy plot “undermined” itself – happy that the story didn’t descend into “Grand Guignol horror”.

What’s it about?

Although we all enjoyed it a great deal, I don’t think there was any real consensus as to what Liar and Spy is “about” (and I’m still not sure that I know what I think). There’s certainly an element of growing-and-learning, but I don’t think this could be described as the novel’s central theme. For some of us, it was about learning about rules. For others, it was ALL about lying (no-one could agree on exactly who the biggest liar in the book is, though). Some people saw it as being about loneliness and isolation. I think that the novel’s greatest strength could well be that we all cared about different things: it really was a novel that spoke to us all differently.

Have you read the book? What did you make of it? We’d love to hear your thoughts! Do please leave your comments below.

And if you’d like to take part in next month’s book group, we’ll be meeting a week earlier than usual to discuss the Costa-winning Goth Girl by Chris Riddell, on Thursday February 6 at 6.30pm, here in the Crow’s Nest – if you’d like to come along, send an email to tom@nosycrow.com.

Can you say it too?

Babies start to communicate with the world around them from the very moment that they are born. At first they use crying as their main signal: it can mean that they are tired, hungry, or uncomfortable, and though it’s a fairly blunt instrument, it does usually get the point across. By three months they have developed a more sophisticated set of communication tools: they will make eye contact, smile, and coo as well as having a whole range of small signs of unhappiness that they use before they actually start yelling. At this age, many babies will even have a go at ‘chatting’ with you by babbling in conversational turns, which can be very charming. By six months they often start to repeat the same sounds over and over again – “ba” and “ma”, are popular choices, probably because they are easy sounds for humans to produce – and they may even be sitting up unaided, if slightly unsteadily. At around about 12 months their fine motor skills will be improving and they will now be able to attach sounds to objects in a meaningful way. This may well mean that they can say “moo” and “baa” and “miaow” before they can say ‘Mummy” or “Daddy”, but that’s just the way it goes!

What’s clear is that we are preconditioned to communicate and use language, and will do so from a very early age, especially if given lots of encouragement from parents and siblings. Talking to a baby and listening to them as they reply is a wonderful way of helping their speech develop, but sharing books with them is also fantastic too. The great thing about books is that they give both baby and partner reader (be it parent, grandparent or sibling) a script to follow, a set of visual images to which words are attached, and prompts for the baby to talk. After just a few readings of a book, both reader and baby will have learned the book almost by heart, giving the baby both the chance to learn new words and the confidence to join in with the story. Card flaps on the page are particularly great for getting a child involved in the story (because they KNOW what’s under it, and they can show you, and this is wonderful for helping them to feel that they are reading the book to you, not the other way round), as does the prompt to make animal noises, for example.

The Can You Say It Too series was conceived with these early developmental milestones in mind, and can be actively enjoyed by babies from as early as 9 months. Each left-hand page has a question, for example, “Who’s that in the barn?” and each right-hand page has a sturdy board flap, from behind which the ears or tail of an animal is glimpsed. Pulling back the flap reveals the whole animal and, of course, its sound: “It’s friendly cow! Moo! Moo!”. It’s pretty simple stuff, but it’s the sort of thing that babies just love to read again and again.

The series is illustrated by the wonderful Sebastien Braun, who has filled the books with charming, child-friendly characters and plenty of detail for little eyes to look out for. Starting with Can You Say It Too? Moo! Moo! and Can You Say It Too? Woof! Woof!, two more titles follow in June (Growl! Growl! and Roar! Roar!) with a further two in 2015 (Quack! Quack! and Twit! Twoo!). With co-editions publishing in the US, Australia, Brazil, Portugal and the Netherlands we hope this will be the start of a fantastically successful new series!

Can You Say It Too? Moo! Moo! and Can You Say It Too? Woof! Woof! are out now! You can order Moo! Moo! online here and Woof! Woof! online here.

The Three Little Pigs is available on the App Store for just 69p/ 99¢!

Today we’re launching a special price promotion – from now until next Thursday, our highly-acclaimed first app, The Three Little Pigs, will be available on the App Store for just 69p/ 99¢!

The Huffington Post described the app as “nothing short of a masterpiece” and The New York Times called it “one of the best renditions of the classic story in the app store.”

You can find it on the App Store here.

And here’s our trailer for the app:

If you enjoy reading The Three Little Pigs, you might like our other fairytale apps, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, as well – and if you sign up to our apps mailing list, you’ll be the first to know whenever we release a new app (including our upcoming Jack and the Beanstalk fairytale app, out in the next few weeks). And if you do enjoy the app, please consider leaving a review on the App Store – it really makes a difference!

Enjoy The Three Little Pigs!

Join in with our Liar and Spy reading group tomorrow

Tomorrow the Nosy Crow Guardian Reading Group will be back for its first meeting of 2014, to discuss the Guardian children’s fiction prize-winner Liar and Spy by Rebecca Stead – and we’d love for you to join in!

Although places for the physical event are all gone, if you’d like to take part you can follow our progress on Twitter with the #NCGKids hashtag, and by leaving your comments underneath this blogpost. There’s a particularly insightful review of the book by The Grunts author Philip Ardagh on The Guardian website here, and as usual we’ve prepared a few discussion points to get you thinking in advance – here’s some of what we might talk about:

1) Who do you think this book is for?

2) What do you make of Stead’s portrayals of school and home life?

3) While a number of the themes in Liar and Spy are present on the surface, many only exist as subtext. How successfully do you think the book balances each of its ideas? What do you think it is “about”?

4) How important do you think “plot” is in the book?

5) A recurring theme in Liar and Spy is rejecting (or subverting) orthodoxy and authority. Who do you think the eponymous Liar is? And who (or what) is Georges and Safer’s chief adversary?

You can buy Liar and Spy from the Guardian Bookshop here – and you can also read an extract from the book on The Guardian’s website here.

We hope you can join us!

What's your Baby Alien moment?

An exciting new voice is launched onto the children’s fiction scene this month in the form of Baby Aliens Got My Teacher! by Pamela Butchart. Told from the point of view of Izzy, it’s the snort-in-your-apple-juice-funny story of four primary school friends who become convinced that their teacher has been turned into an alien, and wants to change THEM into aliens too! Grabbing the wrong end of several sticks and with their imaginations turned fully on overdrive, the friends set about saving the school from a full-blown alien invasion. A good deal of hiding in toilets and screaming ensues but, happily, the friends realise their misunderstanding before things spiral completely out of control and ‘normality’ is ultimately restored to the school. Wittily illustrated throughout by Thomas Flintham, this is a warm-hearted and thoroughly engaging story that’s just perfect for children who are building their reading confidence.

The Sunday Times has made Baby Aliens this week’s children’s book of the week, and keep an eye out too for GIRL TALK magazine this month: Pamela will be the issue’s star author and there will be a review of the book inside. And Izzy and her friends are back in July with the publication of The Spy Who Loved School Dinners, the hilarious sequel to Baby Aliens – another equally silly tale of mild paranoia and loopy mix-ups.

Baby Aliens Got My Teacher! strikes a chord with both children and parents because it so brilliantly captures the expressions of primary school children, and the craziness that can sometimes grip their lives. In celebration of the book’s publication, we thought it might be fun to share recent ‘Baby Alien’ moments from our own children’s lives. Mine comes from my eight-year old who, when asked what happened at school that day, instead of the customary “Nothing”, cheerily replied:

“We were just sitting in a circle on the carpet, taking it in turns to say what we had done in the holidays, when Josh O was sick RIGHT next to me! And, guess what?! His sick had BANANAS in it! Yes, really! And then Kate [the teacher] said that if we are ever sick, we can be sick in the bin, OR the recycling bin, OR in the corridor outside, but NEVER, EVER on the carpet!”

Kirsty’s story comes from her (clearly bonkers) decision to accompany her son’s class on a Year 4 school trip. She describes the health and safety nightmare of watching the entire year descend the spiral stairs at Tufnell Park tube station, forcing innocent Tube users to squash themselves against the wall or run for their lives. Then came the moment that a train went past at the bottom, sending a vast gust of cold air up the stairwell and causing sixty children, caught in the updraught, their hair billowing en masse, to start screaming and flapping their packed lunch in uncontrolled hysteria. Ear-bleedingly horrible!

We hope you enjoy Baby Aliens Got My Teacher! and would love to hear your ‘Baby Alien’ anecdotes – so please feel free to share them with us!

Baby Aliens Got My Teacher! is available to buy in bookshops and online now – and you can read the first chapter for free below.

Looking back at 2013: our third year of publishing

We’ve been publishing books and apps for three years.

Sometimes it seems like a lifetime since we founded the company, but at other times it seems as if I have only had time to blink since we got the keys of the first Crow’s Nest (we’re now in the third).

I wrote a blog post looking back on 2011, and one looking back on 2012, so I feel I’ve rather started a tradition. As is often the case with our blog posts, while we really hope that you’ll like reading them, they also serve an important kind of diary function for us, marking milestones and reminding us of what we felt and thought about things at different stages in our development.

RECOGNITION FOR NOSY CROW

We were more delighted than we can say – and very, very surprised – to win the Independent Publishers Guild’s Children’s Publisher of the Year award for the second year running in March 2013. At the same ceremony, we won their International Achievement award, and we were shortlisted for their Digital Publishing and Digital Marketing awards. We were also shortlisted for the Bookseller Industry Awards Children’s Publisher of the Year and Digital Strategy of the Year awards.

Our awards from our first three years of publishing, for Nosy Crow as a company and for individual books and apps, now require two shelves

SOME INNOVATIONS IN 2013

We decided that we’d give away a free digital audio book with every one of our paperback picture books: it’s a modern take on the Fisher Price cassettes my own kids used all the time as children, it works for parents, and it enables every bookshop to offer a digital component packaged with a print sale. So we launched Stories Aloud, and downloads, within the year, topped 100,000.

Art by Sarah Massini that illustrates all of our Stories Aloud marketing material. You can scan a code to hear a story buy using the QR code on the Stories Aloud tab on the website (see the link above)

We ran our first conference, attended by 150 people.

We launched a (usually seriously oversubscribed) monthly children’s book reading group, which has, so far, met six times at the Nosy Crow offices, and which is covered by The Guardian on its website.

And we launched an ambassadors’ programme, The Nosy Crow Crew.

SELLING OUR BOOKS AND APPS

Nosy Crow’s sales in 2013 were over £3.4 million, comfortably more than a million pounds up on 2012 sales… which were over a million up on 2011’s sales (2011 was our first year of publishing). The back-of-the-envelope sums we did while we were founding the company back in 2010 turned out to be pretty accurate.

Adrian with our just-completed 2013 management accounts pack

In 2013, according to the book data experts Nielsen, we broke into the top 20 biggest children’s publishers by UK sales to customers – which I think is a really remarkable achievement for a publisher without a backlist and without a YA list. In the top 25, we were one of two publishers with growth of over 100% (the other was Phidal). Excluding sales to John Lewis, who don’t choose to contribute to the data, we ended the year the 13th biggest publisher of picture books. And we were the the 17th biggest for children’s fiction. We’re grateful to Bounce, whose enthusiastic, knowledgeable and hardworking sales team gets our books everywhere from the post office and general store in the Herefordshire village of Longtown (population 543) to national bookshop chains, independent bookshops, supermarkets, toy shops, galleries and museums and online retailers.

As well as attending the London, Bologna and Frankfurt Book Fairs, this year we also attended the Warsaw Book Fair and the first Chinese International Children’s Book Fair in Shanghai. We sold rights for the first time in Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Bulgarian, bringing the total number of languages in which we’ve sold rights up to 22. We’re hugely grateful to our international partners, Candlewick Press, Allen and Unwin, Gallimard Jeunesse, Gottmer and Carlsen Germany, who continue to support us and whose editorial insight and specific market knowledge inform our publishing.

Kate in Shanghai with Yolanda Tang from our Chinese agents

When the Apple App Store launched its kids’ category in October, one of the main sections was Interactive Kids Stories. Of the 38 titles featured in on the US store on launch day, 10 were Nosy Crow’s (our only other app – at the time – isn’t a story). This kind of support from Apple – combined with the excellent review coverage that each of our apps receives and the enthusiastic word-of-mouth they produce – generates unusually strong sales on the store, despite the relatively high price of our apps.

WHAT WE PUBLISHED

In 2011, we published 23 books. In 2012 we published 35 books. In 2013 we published 51 books. Roughly half were fiction titles and the other half were picture books, board books or pop-up/pull-tab books.

We launched a few notable debut illustrators (or author/illustrators) in the year – Nicola O’Byrne, Elys Dolan and Steven Lenton – and we launched one debut author, Michaela Clarke. It’s a privilege to be entrusted by an author or illustrator with any book, but a particular pleasure and privilege to be entrusted with a debut. We were also very chuffed to publish for the first time on the Nosy Crow list other respected authors and illustrators – among them Emma Dodd, Sarah Massini, Alison Murray, William Bee and Fleur Hitchcock – who had already been published elsewhere. But it’s worth saying that almost two thirds of the books we published in 2013 were by authors and illustrators that we’d published in our first two years of publishing: 2013 was a year in which we – very happily – kept the faith.

We released two apps in 2013 (though it’s worth saying that our Rounds: Parker Penguin app, which won the 2013 Futurebook Best Children’s Digital Book Award, was only a 2012 release by the skinniest skin of its teeth). We decided that we would focus on creating a small number of really remarkable apps. In April, we released Little Red Riding Hood, which led to USA Today saying that we were “the Steven Spielberg of apps” and which is currently shortlisted for a Digital Book World award. In September, we released Axel Scheffler’s Flip Flap Farm, shortlisted for the Futurebook Best Children’s Digital Book Award.

Following the success of The Snowman’s Journey, the own brand book we created for John Lewis for Christmas 2012, we published a second own brand Christmas book for John Lewis, The Bear Who Had Never Seen Christmas, and a Christmas gift book for Radley London, Radley’s Twelve Days of Christmas.

The Bear Who Had Never Seen Christmas book, made for John Lewis and based on their Christmas 2013 TV advertisement

WHAT WE SIGNED UP

Of course, while we were busy publishing the 2013 titles, we were also acquiring books for 2014 and beyond. 2014 was planned as a year of consolidation, in which we didn’t increase our title count. At the moment, we plan to publish 55 books, so actually we did increase the size of the list a little… but what can you do when you’re faced with great books that you want to publish? 2015 is planned as – and is already shaping up to be – another year of rapid growth.

In the early part of 2014, we are particularly excited that we’re launching two debut novelists, Pamela Butchart, whose Baby Aliens Got My Teacher publishes this month, and G. R. Gemin whose Cowgirl publishes in March. Meanwhile, we have picture books from Chris Mould, Lawrence and Catherine Anholt and novels by Holly Webb to look forward to, all of whom are publishing with Nosy Crow for the first time this year. But we are, of course, still keeping the faith: there are new books by Philip Ardagh, Axel Scheffler, Benji Davies, Penny Dale, Ros Beardshaw, Joe Berger, Paula Harrison and Tracey Corderoy among other creative talents who are the backbone of the Nosy Crow book list.

As in 2013, and in line with our “year of consolidation” plan, we’re going to focus on releasing a few very ambitious apps this year, the first of which, Jack and The Beanstalk, a spectacular addition to our roster of fairy tale apps, will be released in the next few weeks.

Jack and his cow, Daisy, meet “Mr Bean”

PRIZES, SHORTLISTINGS AND PRAISE FOR OUR BOOKS AND APPS

I mentioned a few of our app prize wins earlier, and posted our shelves of awards. We were particularly proud of our UK regional award wins and many shortlistings this year. Chris Edge won his category in The Stockport Schools Book Award with Twelve Minutes To Midnight. Caryl Hart and Sarah Warburton won their KS1 category in The Oldham Brilliant Book Award and, on the same day, Jo Lodge won the Sheffield Children’s Baby Book Award category with Icky Sticky Monster.

We published three of the 12 books on the Roald Dahl Funny Prize shortlist: Weasels, Troll Swap and The Grunts All At Sea.

(L to R) Axel Scheffler, Elys Dolan, Philp Ardagh and Leigh Hodgkinson, our Roald Dahl Funny Prize shortlistees, at the ceremony

Two of our books were chosen for Booktrust’s Bookbuzz programme in 2013: Dear Scarlett and My Best Friend and Other Enemies. Two of our books were chosen for Booktrust’s Best Book Guide: Weasels and Books Always Everywhere.

Three of our books were included in The Reading Agency’s Summer Reading Challenge 2013: Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam, Vulgar & The Spooky School Trip and Shadows of The Silver Screen.

Over the Christmas holidays, Shifty McGifty was a Bookaboo book.

We have had another great year of reviews and mentions in traditional national press from The Wall Street Journal to The Sunday Times; in specialist press from Kirkus and The School Library Journal to The Bookseller; and in many terrific children’s book, parenting, technology and app blogs. You can see some of our most recent high-profile reviews and mentions here.

CONNECTING ONLINE

In 2013, we had 173,000 unique visitors (up by over 50,000 on 2012) to the Nosy Crow website. As well as using the website to provide information and news about our company, our books and apps, our events, and our submission guidelines, we blogged every weekday this year, with blog posts like Deaths in children’s literature that we will never get over drawing comment not only on the blog but also on Twitter.

As I write, @nosycrow has 14,172 followers on Twitter, @nosycrowapps has 4,242 followers and @nosycrowbooks has 2,075 followers. There’s a bit of overlap between these, but overall, that’s over 20,000 followers – up almost 7,000 on last year. We’ve 3,560 likes on Facebook – 1,000 more than last year.

Nosy Crow authors and illustrators were at numerous literary festivals, including Hay, Edinburgh, Bath and Cheltenham, and staged countless events in schools, libraries and bookshops.

THE NOSY CROW TEAM

We welcomed two babies this year.

Giselle gave birth to Amelie in May, but has decided that being an out-of-London-based mum of two is even more compelling than being a senior designer for Nosy Crow, so she is leaving us, which makes us sad, but we understand.

And in July AJ’s third child, Lily Grace, was born… and he’s not going anywhere, we are happy to say.

Zoe Bennett, who covered Giselle’s maternity leave and has now taken on the role of senior designer, was our only new member of the Nosy Crow team in the year (I said that 2014 was supposed to be a year of consolidation…) but Ola and Kristina were both promoted in the course of the year and we are about to announce a vacancy or two in addition to the design assistant that we’re currently recruiting.

Though I, for one, felt my energy stocks were slightly depleted by the end of the year (nothing a sofa, a few books and industrial quantities of Christmas cake couldn’t remedy, of course), 2013 was a very good year.

Steven Lenton (who did the picture at the top of this post), Ola, Zoe and Kristina celebrating 2013 at the Nosy Crow Christmas Party

2014

Here’s to 2014, and to your health, happiness and success, as well as our own. Thank you if you published with us; supported us by reviewing, blogging about or talking about us or our books or apps; bought something we published for your shop or your library; or bought one of our books or apps to share with or give to a child. We hope they enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed making it.

Dinosaur Rescue - the agent's tale (a guest blog by Caroline Sheldon)

Today’s guest post is by agent Caroline Sheldon, founder of the Caroline Sheldon Literary Agency on the joys of Penny Dale’s Dinosaur books.

My story starts in March 2010 when the sort of project that makes an agent’s life a joy arrived on my desk. Carefully wrapped in tissue paper, three full colour pictures lay before me which featured in glorious realism a triceratops driving a loader, a tyrannosaurus operating an excavator and a stegosaurus crouched over the wheel of a dumper truck. This was the birth of the bestselling Dinosaur Dig series, created by writer and artist Penny Dale. For me, as for the many children who have since become enraptured by Dinosaur Dig and its successors, it was love at first sight.

I’d represented author and artist Penny Dale, as her agent, for over fifteen years when this new parcel arrived and had previously gloried in the two million copy bestselling success of her gentle classic Ten in the Bed. Dinosaur Dig was a complete departure: a full-on celebration of the macho world of dinosaur brawn and a fantastical flight of fantasy about the way such creatures would interact with heavy machinery, all served up with Penny’s delicious wit. This fresh new world seemed to need a fresh new publishing approach and Nosy Crow, the vibrant new kid on the children’s publishing block, seemed the perfect home. Kate Wilson and Camilla Reid shared all my enthusiasm and within three days of my showing them the material the dinosaurs and their trucks had a home.

Dinosaur Dig was published in May 2011; Dinosaur Zoom in August 2012 and Dinosaur Rescue) now in January 2014. Each book has its favourite moments for me – the insouciance of the megalosaurus as he drives his convertible though the Arizona desert with all the cool of Hunter S. Thompson; the care with which the tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops organise the backing of lorries in the forest glade; the dormitory scene of dinosaurs sleeping in their bunks at the end of Dinosaur Rescue. Nothing in either text or illustration talks down to the child. The dinosaurs are gloriously realistic and questions such as how to fit five dinosaurs in the front of a rescue truck are tackled by the artist with exactly the same seriousness as that with which a child would address such a problem. The books represent a rare conjunction of fantastical flamboyance and minute attention to detail which precisely reflects a child’s mind.

I knew the books would be a success: had the hairs not stood up on the back of my neck when I first saw Dinosaur Dig? But it was still thrilling to check in every bit of good news as it arrived from the Crow’s Nest. First co-edition sales of over 70,000 copies for Dinosaur Dig to Candlewick in the USA, Carlsen in Germany, Gallimard in France, Makela in Finland and Heibei in China. Strong retail support for each new book on the high street with particular enthusiasm from Waterstones and WH Smith. Promotional attention from wholesalers such as Gardners and Peters. The emergence of chunky board book editions for each title. Stellar sales in Australia where the publisher made its own promotional video. Success in America, often rare for a UK-originated picture book. Fabulous reviews including ‘a roaring delight’ from The Guardian and a description as a winner in ‘the nighttime battle over bedtime stories’ by the Sunday Telegraph. And watch this SPACE because in the not too distant future those dinosaurs will be cramming their heavy bodies into rockets. One small step for a dinosaur, one giant leap for dinosaurkind!

Caroline Sheldon runs the eponymous Caroline Sheldon Literary Agency and represents a bestselling roster of writers and illustrators for children. Dinosaur Rescue is out this month – you can take a look inside below, and order the book online here.