Nosy Crow's Blog, page 33

Take a look inside I’m Thinking of a Farm Animal

Next week we’re delighted to be publishing I’m Thinking of a Farm Animal – the first book in a brilliant new non-fiction board book series, perfect or animal lovers. With vibrant artwork, friendly rhyming text, and fun sliders, these interactive books are great for reading aloud.

And today you can take a look inside the book! You can watch the video preview for I’m Thinking of a Farm Animal below:

Each child is thinking of a different animal. What do they look like? What do they eat? And what noises do they make? Follow the simple clues, make a guess, then pull the slider to reveal the animal hiding in the beautifully illustrated scene.

You can buy your copy of I’m Thinking of a Farm Animal here. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all of our book news, sign up to our newsletter on this page.

 

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Two Nosy Crow books featured in the 2021 Read for Empathy Collection

We’re absolutely delighted that Talking to the Moon, by S.E. Durrant, and The Suitcase, by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros, have been featured in EmpathyLab‘s 2021 Read for Empathy Collection!

Founded in 2017, Empathy Day aims to drive a new empathy movement around the world – and each year the organisation publishes the Read for Empathy collection, made up of books that enhance empathy skills, with themes covering family dynamics, relationships, emotional intelligence amongst others. And we’re so pleased to see two of our books included!

This year, Empathy Day will take place on June 10th, with schools, libraries, young people’s organisations, publishers, and booksellers joining forces to emphasise the importance of empathy and the empathy-building power of books. By reading, we can learn to better understand each other and the world we live in.

Talking to the Moon, selected for this year’s Read for Empathy collection, is a beautifully written story of family, mental health, and memory. This moving book is a brilliant selection for the guide – and a great empathy-building read.
Buy the book.

The Suitcase, also selected for the collection, is a simple yet powerful story about kindness,  understanding and friendship, written in response to the refugee crisis. We’re thrilled to see this wonderful picture book included in the collection, too!
Buy the book.

You can find out more about Empathy Day and view the Read for Empathy collection, here.

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An open call for submissions from writers and writer-illustrators of colour

Today I’m very happy to announce a call for open submissions from writers and writer-illustrators of colour.

Here at Nosy Crow, we publish brilliant and talented authors and illustrators from a diverse range of backgrounds. But we want to increase that diversity. It’s incredibly important to us that children are able to see themselves in the books we publish, and also that our books allow children to experience worlds and hear voices that are not like their own. And these worlds and voices need to be authentic. If you’re a writer or writer-illustrator of colour, we need your picture book stories!

Please send no more than three picture book texts to submissions2021@nosycrow.com, along with a synopsis of each story and a short biography in the body of the email. The window for submissions is for a limited time only, from the 21st January 2021 to the 18th February 2021. I’m afraid any submissions received after this time will be deleted. If you miss the deadline, don’t despair; we would like to run the open submissions window again in the future.

With the help of my colleagues in the picture book team, I will review all submissions sent within this window. We are hoping for a large volume of submissions, so it may be a few weeks before we get back to you. If you haven’t heard from us by the 31st of April 2021, I’m afraid your submission has not been successful.

It’s completely free to submit, and we welcome submissions from around the world, but they must be in the English language and unpublished anywhere in the world. Writers and writer-illustrators must be aged 18 or older.

Picture book texts should be no more than 1,000 words each and submitted as a Microsoft Word document (or similar document that can be opened in Microsoft Word) or Adobe PDF document. They should be sent as an email attachment (no paper submissions).

If you are a writer-illustrator, texts can be accompanied by your artwork. PDFs should be no more than 5MB in total. If you’re a writer-illustrator, please also include a link to your website and/or social media where we can view more of your artwork.

If you’re not a writer-illustrator, you don’t need to include any illustrations. Feel free to include illustration notes if needed, but keep these to a minimum.

Don’t worry if you forget to attach something to your email. Please resend the entire submission with an alert at the top to let us know to delete your earlier submission.

If you’re new to writing picture books, we strongly advise you to immerse yourself in the genre and read as many current picture books as you can before submitting your texts to us, in order to give you a richer understanding of what makes a great story. Texts should be suitable for children aged around 3–5 and can be in rhyme or prose. They can feature human characters, animal (or fantasy!) characters, or a mixture – and they can be about anything you can imagine!

If you have any questions, email submissions2021@nosycrow.com – please don’t ring our office. I’m looking forward to hearing from you, either via your agent, or directly from you if you don’t have one.

Good luck!

Alice Bartosinski

Senior Commissioning Editor, Picture Books

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Take a look inside Make Tracks: Farm

Last week we published Make Tracks: Farm – the first in a chunky board book series featuring things that go and sliding counters, from Johnny Dyrander! Discover five farm vehicles, from tractors to combine harvesters, in this interactive book, learn the vocabulary and trace the vehicles around the tracks with the moving counters.

You can watch a video preview of the book below:

Make Tracks: Farm is available now – you can buy a copy from Nosy Crow here, Waterstones here, or Amazon here. If you’re looking for more interactive board books for babies and toddlers, we’ve also published Peekaboo Love this month – a new addition to the series from the bestselling Felt Flaps creators.

Don’t forget to sign up to our books newsletter here to be the first to know about all of our new books, as well as awards news, giveaways and much more!

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Friendship is magic: Louie Stowell’s favourite friendships in fiction

Today’s guest post is by Louie Stowell, author of the highly-acclaimed Dragon in the Library series – the third book in the series, The Wizard in the Wood, is out now.

I’m not interested in lone wolf heroes, forging ahead on a silent quest. Even The Witcher has someone to say “Hmmm” at a lot.

Heroes are at their most interesting to me when they’re embedded in a friendship group, or at least a pair. Like in life, you find out most about yourself through your relationships with other people. And, when you’re on a magical adventure, friends are often how you stay alive.

My Dragon in the Library series is as much about Kit’s friendship group as it is about Kit herself. But that doesn’t mean it’s all about holding hands skipping through the fields singing tra la la. In The Wizard in the Wood, Kit makes mistakes and hurts her friends. If they forgive her… well, that’s a spoiler. But friendship isn’t just about togetherness, it’s also about arguments and tension. It’s about secrets and unspoken truths. That’s where the power comes from – the complexity.

One of the most joyful things about writing this series has been to think about heroes as a community – a group of people with contrasting strengths and weaknesses. Your friends help you be a better version of yourself, and you help them back. Alita helps Kit be honest with herself. Kit helps Josh step outside his comfort zone. Kit helps Alita boost her self-confidence. But they also argue like cats in a sack and make fun of each other. They’ve been SO much fun to write.

So here’s to fictional friends – and here are a few of my favourites, in the order I encountered them…

Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

This is a deeply problematic friendship – a servant and master with wildly unequal power dynamics. Sam’s clearly in love with Frodo too, so it’s unequal in that way too. But  I’ve always loved that pure loyalty from Sam in the face of suffering and despair. As a child, reading Lord of the Rings, I re-wrote the ending so that Sam went west with Frodo at the end. I couldn’t bear them being apart.

The Scooby Gang in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“I guess I’m starting to understand why there’s no ancient prophecy about a Chosen One… and her friends.”

I’ve been re-watching Buffy over lockdown, and we recently watched the end of season four, which has the vampire Spike sow discord between Buffy and her friends. He pushes on all their points of tension to split them apart. But their friendship’s stronger than that, and they find a way back to each other. Part of what makes Buffy the Vampire Slayer such a great show is the way it messes with the Chosen One myth, and embeds her in a community. She’s not the big lonely brooder – she has fun with her friends, she squabbles, she gets cross when they borrow her clothes and spill food on them. I definitely had this gang in mind when creating Kit and her friends. That mess, and the strength that comes from a group of people who all love each other.

Daisy and Hazel in the Murder Most Unladylike series  by Robin Stevens

Two awesome girls who solve crimes. I love the mirroring of Holmes and Watson, but the books take them SO far beyond that. It’s not a simple friendship, and there are power dynamics at play, but it grows and grows through the books in the most wonderful way.

Amira and Leo in Moonchild: Voyage of the Lost and Found by Aisha Bushby

Aisha is one of the most emotionally astute writers out there and, as someone with next to zero self knowledge of my own emotions, reading her books can sometimes feel like being personally called out. But, personal discomfort aside, she gives good friendship. In Moonchild we meet Samira, an angry, messy person who can see the emotions of others, and Leo, a quieter presence. I love the contrast between them, and the way they navigate the (literal and metaphorical) seas together, finding answers and themselves.

Sami and Joseph and Sami and Adam in Boy, Everywhere by AM Dassu

Yes, I’m cheating. But it’s a book so rich in relationships that I couldn’t pick just one. The main character, Sami, has to flee his home because of a war. Joseph is his best friend from his old life. Adam is a boy he meets when he’s fleeing danger. Both are some of the most convincing child friendships I’ve read in a very long time.

Thank you, Louie! The Wizard in the Wood is out now – you can take a look inside the book below, and you can buy the book online from Waterstones here, from Bookshop.org here, from Amazon here, and directly from Nosy Crow here.

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Nosy Crow’s tenth anniversary

Ten years ago this month, in January 2011, Nosy Crow published its first book – one of 23 published in that first year of publishing.

We’d actually started with a financial plan and a lot of hope the previous February. Looking back at that plan, it’s interesting to think how much of what we planned and hoped for came true, and is still true. What has stayed the same? What has changed?

The publishing idea has stayed the same… but also been added to. In the plan, we said we would “focus on the publication of books illustrated in colour (picture books and board books) and for younger children (0 to 7), but will also publish novels, but only those for which we can acquire a wide portfolio of rights.” We have, of course, held true to our sense of ourselves as a children’s publisher, and we publish what we’d describe as child-focussed, parent-friendly books for children aged 0-12. In addition to the categories we said we’d publish, we have added non-fiction, mainly illustrated, after we became the exclusive children’s publishing partners of the National Trust in 2014, and then the British Museum in 2015. Some of our earliest picture books – books like the Pip and Posy series – and board books – books like the Bizzy Bear series – remain growing series for us and have sold millions of copies. While we launch new writing and illustration talent every single year – among last year’s debuts was Waterstones’ January Children’s Book of the Month, The Girl Who Stole an Elephant by Nizrana Farook – our backlist, and those authors and illustrators who work with us regularly, are our backbone. Last year, our then nine year-old backlist represented 70% of our sales.

Those millions of copies of Pip and Posy and Bizzy Bear, like so many of our other titles, have been sold throughout the world. In the plan we said we “will sell foreign-language and American rights and co-editions to overseas publishers”. International rights and co-edition selling has been a key element of Nosy Crow’s success through the years. I started my publishing career in rights selling, and the love of crafting books that work for as wide a range of markets as possible and travelling to sell those books at book fairs and on sales trips, while learning about markets and cultures on the way, is one of my favourite things, so an international outlook was always going to be part of Nosy Crow’s culture. We established, early on, strong relationships with three publishers in particular – Candlewick Press, who continue to publish many of our board and picture books in the US; Gallimard Jeunesse in France; and Gottmer in the Netherlands. Their support as we have grown has been invaluable, but we now sell to other publishers in the US, France and the Netherlands… and, now, have sold rights in 43 languages. Like Candlewick, Gallimard and Gottmer, the publishers we sell to produce books in their own languages (including US English), but we also sell our own British English-language editions throughout the world. Our first partnership in this area was with Allen and Unwin, who continue to sell our books in Australia and New Zealand. Initially, we sold our export copies to countries other than Australia and New Zealand through agents, but a few years ago, we brought export sales in-house, under our head of sales and marketing, Catherine Stokes, who has grown this part of our business exponentially… and this blog post is written on the day that our new export manager, Damon Greeney, starts working for Nosy Crow. Almost three quarters of Nosy Crow’s business comes from outside the UK.

Initially, our sales within the UK were managed by Bounce Sales and Marketing, and we are so grateful to them for all they did to build our business. But with growth comes a desire for independence, and over the years, we have increasingly taken responsibility for selling to UK bookshops and wholesalers in-house, culminating, in July of last year, with the launch of our own field sales force. To launch a UK sales force in the middle of a pandemic, just a fortnight after the first lockdown ended was… optimistic. But the response we’ve had from independent bookshops has been extraordinarily positive and validating. While we, along with all children’s publishers, have seen a significant growth in online selling, we know that it’s much easier for children, and their parents and teachers, to discover new books in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop than it is online, where everything is available, but where sales tend to concentrate around known names and loved classics. Nosy Crow is now the 11th biggest publisher of children’s books in the UK, measured by Nielsen’s figures, which track book sales to consumers.

In the initial plan, we said that if we were really successful, we might achieve £10 million of annual sales after ten years. This proved to be an underestimate. Last year, our sales were £22 million. Of course, our sales aren’t the only thing that have grown fast. We will publish 119 books this year, compared with the 23 we published in the first year, and we start the year with 54 members of staff – 50 more than the four people gathered round the table when we started.

Imogen Blundell, now head of operations, with the founders, Kate, Camilla and Adrian at the very start of Nosy Crow.

The initial plan said that we would publish digital books in the form of apps. When we made this commitment, the iPad had yet to be launched (it was launched in May 2011), but we felt that it was inevitable that children would be spending more time with screens and we wanted some of that time to be reading time. We are proud to have published the brilliant collection of prize-winning, cutting edge, interactive apps that we made. But each app took our in-house app team around 9 months to produce, and, as the years went by, it became clear that consumers weren’t willing to pay enough – or in many cases, at all – for digital products for young children. And so we closed the business. But the experience left a legacy: the experience of creating audio for the apps made us consider other audio products, and Stories Aloud was born: every Nosy Crow paperback picture book and some of our board books come with a QR code that links to a free professionally recorded reading of the book, complete with music and sound effects. It’s been used millions of times, and it’s proved a brilliant form of digital marketing.

A commitment to digital marketing was a hallmark of Nosy Crow from the beginning: the first version of our website predated our publishing by almost a year. It’s something we’ve continued to invest in: we’re currently recruiting a digital content designer to join the team. We’ve won prizes for our digital marketing, which has been a hugely important contributor to developing brand awareness. And brand awareness is something we feel we’ve built particularly well: we so often hear booksellers and parents talking positively not just about individual books, or series, or authors, or illustrators that we publish, but of Nosy Crow books in general. Building a brand is hard. It’s not just about sticking a logo on a front cover (though we did that early and did that consistently). It’s about having integrity, and clarity about the edges of your publishing, and not acquiring things that don’t fit the company vision and culture… however tempting!

The plan was agreed by the three founding partners – me, Adrian Soar and Camilla Reid – to raise the additional money that we calculated that we needed to start the company. It worked. Axel Scheffler and Sean Williams became shareholders and non-executive directors and the company is still owned by the same five people who were there at the beginning. It’s an achievement we are very proud of: it means that the company has generated sufficient cash and profit not to require additional investors. We have retained our independence, and with it, we think, our distinctive culture and way of doing things, answering only to one another and individuals who have been with us for our whole journey.

This all looks great, doesn’t it? It looks as if it’s been pretty much plain sailing. But of course, it hasn’t been. There have been failures and mistakes. There has been anxiety and sadness and disagreements. Individual books sometimes haven’t done as well as we’d hoped they’d do. Books we’d hoped we might buy have been sold to other publishers. Books that are key to our budget have had to be moved because the author or illustrator hasn’t managed to meet deadlines. Misprints and production errors of one kind or another, sometimes our fault, sometimes that of the printer, have occasionally and painfully required the expensive, wasteful and discouraging pulping of whole runs. Hugely valued members of staff have left us either voluntarily or, most distressingly in the case of Ola Gotkowska, because of illness, or, in the case of the apps team (and only in the case of the apps team), redundancy. We’ve come terrifyingly close, more than once, to running out of cash. And, of course, this is a birthday, not an obituary: Nosy Crow is not done. Publishing is a long game. That’s true about the journey from the inception of a book to its publication, though that often takes too many months and years for an impatient person like me to bear easily. But building a team, building a list, building a brand, building a publishing house… well, that’s a journey that takes decades. And we’ve only had one. To everyone who’s accompanied us along the way so far, thank you, and stick with us: it’s an exciting road ahead!

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The inspirations behind Out of Nowhere – a guest post by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros

This month we’re delighted to have published Out of Nowhere, by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros – a touching new tale about enduring friendship, from the bestselling author-illustrator of The Suitcase.

And today we’re very pleased to share a piece by Chris on the development of the story, which you can read below.
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Thinking of a good story isn’t easy. I need to have a lot of ideas because most will end up unworkable or underwhelming. Very occasionally a good one will pop up almost fully formed and that makes me happy. But mostly they’re neither really bad nor really good, they’re often just interesting set-ups, characters or a situation. So I bark up lots of proverbial trees, asking lots of ‘what ifs’ and ‘how abouts’ until ideas open up or close down. Sometimes I spend ages thinking about a thing and getting quite optimistic, thinking it’s going somewhere, only to realise all I’ve got is a series of consecutive events but no real story.

Out of Nowhere started like this. I’d imagined two friends and one of them is taken away or lost and the other has to go and find or save them and then maybe there’s some sort of twist. But that would’ve just been a simple adventure with a really obvious goal and wouldn’t mean anything beyond that.

Original beetle and butterfly sketch

But the premise kept bouncing around (possibly for a year or so). Eventually I thought about metamorphosis rather than disappearance. Someone or something changing rather than going away, and the remaining person feeling confused and alone. And hoping they’d be able to find what they had before or overcome it and move on.

Around this time my daughter had moved on from the tiny village school to the very big one near town and a lot of things had changed. Her group of friends had got split up and she was feeling a bit lost and nostalgic for the previous year and even for times and friends from way before. I felt really sad for her too and could empathise with her longing for what seemed like simpler, happier times.

It only occurred to me after Out of Nowhere was finally worked out and written that that’s what the story was really about. But conveying it was completely subconscious and it really showed me how you sometimes have no idea what your mind is up to or what you’re really thinking about when you think you’re trying to write a story. At the time I was constantly mulling over this idea and I didn’t realise that a particular preoccupation in the real world had seeped in again (I suppose they always do) and told me what the story should be.

Character development

In essence it’s about friendship and how it changes and how we think we might have lost it. And how we can’t always know what’s going on in others’ lives and may never do. Hopefully friends can find each other again, maybe not quite the same as they were before, but still friends.

The story as published is pretty much as it was when first sent to Nosy Crow, but it took at least a year beforehand of thinking and scribbling to get to that point. The artwork took its lead very much from the initial sketches I sent with the text. They were really quick pencil roughs and, without the pressure of being ‘The Artwork’, felt natural and not overdone.

 

Rough sketches of the crow and frog

Lou and Nia at Nosy Crow really liked this sketchy style, so we tried to develop that look without it becoming too sophisticated or contrived. That, as always, was difficult – working a lot on something but having the results look like they were effortless and just flew out of the end of your pencil without a care.

In fact, a lot of the hard work in my illustration comes from trying to recreate the feel of what I did right at the start. It’s bit like musicians’ ‘red light fever’. You set up in a recording studio and run through a thing five times perfectly, then the tape rolls and you either mess up in the first bar or get to the end without disaster but it’s over-cautious and lacking energy, just because you know this is ‘a take’ and you’re supposed to get it right.

Rough sketches of the frog (left and centre) and the final version (right)

But with Lou and Nia’s ever-patient direction, encouragement and expertise (this is no exaggeration, they really are amazing), the characters and environment, the textures and props were all worked on, so that they had distinct enough styles without shouting for attention. The features and stances of the animals were honed until they seemed to communicate just the right emotion.

Development of the environment and mushrooms

I’m really proud of Out of Nowhere – it looks just how I would have wanted it to when I first scribbled it out. But even though there might only be one name on the front, any book is a massively collaborative process and it’s always a pleasure to work with people you trust and that have the same feelings and enthusiasm for a good story, and one that hopefully rings true for children and grown-ups.

—

Thank you, Chris! Out of Nowhere is available now – you can order a copy from Waterstones here, Bookshop.org here, or Amazon here.

Take a look inside the book below:

Buy the book.

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Looking back on 2020

How do you begin to write about 2020?

I used to do an annual “looking back…” blog post every year, but rather got out of the habit. The last one was in January 2018. To resume now, given the challenges of summarising a year dominated by COVID, but with powerful and important issues like the Black Lives Matters movement and the challenges of climate change and, through the last months of the year and at the beginning of the year, the impact of Brexit and challenges to Western democracy, feels like folly, and to concentrate on what’s happened commercially and in other ways to one small children’s book business seems oddly blinkered, but here goes…

Nosy Crow ended the year with higher sales than we achieved in 2019. We sold over £22 million pounds worth of books, up 24% on our previous year. We published 77 new, original titles in the year – down from the previous year’s 119 and down compared to this year’s projected 119, too. We didn’t publish any books at all in May and June (UK bookshops reopened on June 15 2020) and we moved most of those titles into 2021 rather than pushing them later in the year: a book about a pirate feels quite… summery, and not right for, say, November publication. We were grateful to all of our authors and illustrators and their agents who were so understanding in the face of uncertainty and change around our publishing programme. Inevitably, in common, we know, with many of other children’s publishers, we were more reliant than ever on our backlist – 70% of our sales last year were backlist sales.

A bigger proportion of our sales than ever came from outside the UK, with significant growth in co-editions, export and rights sales. The groundwork for many of those sales was actually done in 2019, a year in which the sales and rights teams travelled extensively… while the situation as we look ahead to 2021 is different, as we haven’t had the book fairs and trips to build our relationships and show new books. However, we have found new ways of presenting our books using video call platforms and digital marketing material that we have been told by our customers abroad is cutting edge. We are very proud of it, certainly. But nothing is as informative – or enjoyable – as sitting opposite a buyer and watching their face as they respond to a physical book, or a proof or a dummy in front of them, and as soon as it’s safe to return to bookfairs and visit our customers, we will be first in the queue.

So our international sales growth was particularly outstanding, but we are so pleased and proud that our 2020 UK sales ended up ahead of 2019. We are now the 11th biggest children’s publisher in the UK based on sales to UK consumers. In the middle of last year, we set up our small but excellent field sales force, so now all of Nosy Crow’s sales are managed in house. Ruth Tinham, based on the south coast, joined us as field sales manager, and she’s supported by Alice Corrigan, based in Preston. Ruth focuses on the south of the UK, and Alice on the north. They are selling to independent bookshops and the wholesalers who supply them and supply schools and libraries. We’ve always been in touch with independent bookshops, but our increased direct exposure to them in the course of this difficult year has only increased our admiration for their hard work and resilience and our determination to support them however we can. We’ve watched bookshops, from big chains to tiny single-room traders, develop new online and other strategies for connecting with their customers and communities. Meanwhile, our sales through supermarkets and existing online-only retailers were strong, and we’re supportive of all the ways that carers and teachers have been able to get books into the hands of children.

And, of course, getting books into the hands of children has never been so important. When children can’t go to school, accessing books is key. While we need to sell books to keep in business, we have also been as generous as possible in allowing public bodies – schools, libraries, hospitals – to have access to our books and to use them widely and freely. Nur Ben Hamida (nur@nosycrow.com), our contracts manager, has been inundated with requests, and we are so grateful to the generosity of our authors and agents in enabling us to ensure that children can read and listen to books even when libraries and school libraries haven’t been able to give them the access they normally can. We are continuing our support of public bodies by giving them free access to our material through the early part of this year, at least until schools reopen, but it’s important to protect our rights and the rights of our authors and illustrators that we do grant permission for use properly, so Nur is the person to go to if there’s anything you’d like to share.

We are proud that we made one book in direct response to the pandemic. Coronavirus: A Book about Covid-19 for Children is an ebook and a print book that won the FutureBook Best of Lockdown Book of the year. It also won a Digital Book World Award Outstanding Achievement Award For COVID-19 Response. We published this free digital book for children on April 6 2020 under a creative commons licence – a first, we think, for trade publishing. It’s been viewed/downloaded 1.5m times via the Nosy Crow website alone, but the English-language version is hosted on many other sites. It’s been translated into 63 languages, including 3 different sign languages: our one stipulation when we provided the files was that the ebook be distributed free. It was updated – with new information and illustrations to reflect changes in understanding and regulations – on 23 July, when Nosy Crow also published a not-for-profit £1.99 print version, which has raised £30,000 for NHS Charities Together. Actor Hugh Bonneville narrated the audiobook of the first edition of the book. The book was universally acclaimed and our scientific consultant, Professor Graham Medley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, tweeted: “TFW you spend a few hours discussing draft manuscripts and it turns out to be, perhaps, the most significant thing you ever did. Thank you @NosyCrow for giving me the opportunity to contribute.”

We won prizes in 2020, and I can’t tell you how much of a boost to our morale that was. We were Independent Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards, where we also won an Export award. At the Independent Publisher’s Guild Awards, we the Children’s Publisher of the Year award for the fifth time since 2012, and won the International Achievement award for the fourth time. Keeping up our collective spirits in pandemic times has been a challenge, it must be acknowledged. We are, I think, a particularly collaborative business, and this, combined with our manageable scale (54 people now) and the lay-out of our single-floor open plan office means that it’s very easy to stay informed about what’s happening even in areas of the business that don’t involve you. Moving our whole business to remote working has been hard. We started by having all-company meetings every evening in the first lockdown, but have now moved to twice-weekly short meetings where we share things that (we hope!) are of interest to all of us. We even managed a Zoom Christmas party. We didn’t furlough anyone, and we didn’t make anyone redundant. I am more proud than I can say of the adaptability, goodwill, good sense and sheer mental sturdiness of the Nosy Crow team as we work scattered across the country and sometimes beyond. But I have to say that we have found that making books means touching books, and working closely with colleagues, and as soon as it’s safe, we’ll be back in the office, which at the moment is open only for people who really can’t work from home.

Despite our commercial success in 2020, it’s not a year we would ever want to repeat. We begin 2021 in lockdown, but with a sense of resignation rather than the shock that accompanied the first lock-down. We begin the year out of the European Union, about which we feel abiding sadness, but without, so far, any real disruption to the way we do business. And there is the prospect of vaccination for many of us over the next few months and for our colleagues abroad. Books, we know now if we ever doubted it, matter more than ever, particularly to children, and we are proud to make and sell good ones. So we look ahead with hope, and with gratitude that we survived and even found some ways to thrive with a little help from our friends – our colleagues, our authors, our illustrators, their agents, librarians, retailers at home and elsewhere, and our sister publishers in the international community. Thank you.

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Early praise for The Boy Who Met a Whale

We’re delighted that The Boy Who Met a Whale, which we published last week, has been named the Independent Booksellers’ Children’s Book of the Month for January. From Carnegie-nominated Nizrana Farook, with cover art by David Dean, this is a brilliant adventure set in a fictional Sri Lanka, featuring a courageous hero and a huge blue whale!

Razi, a local fisherboy, is watching turtle eggs hatch when he sees a boat bobbing into view. With a chill, he notices a small, still hand hanging over the side… Inside is Zheng, who’s escaped a shipwreck and is full of tales of sea monsters and missing treasure. But the villains who are after Zheng are soon after Razi and his sister, Shifa, too. And so begins an exhilarating adventure in the shadow of the biggest sea monster of them all…

And today we’re sharing some glittery reviews of the book…
“A fabulous fun-filled adventure, crammed with high seas, dastardly villains and loveable heroes!” – Jasbinder Bilan, author of Asha and the Spirit Bird

“The Boy Who Met a Whale is another cracking adventure from Nizrana Farook… Serendib’s shores glow in my imagination.” – Julie Pike, author of The Last Spell Breather

“What a joy it was to return to the beautiful island of Serendib with its endearing child-heroes, extraordinary animal bonds, calamitous peril, and wild adventures unlike anything you’ll have read before – all dished up with Nizrana’s brilliantly deadpan wit. The Boy Who Met A Whale has it all: menace, mayhem, majestic sea-creatures and even a melancholic ox whose dreams of finding adventure are hilariously fulfilled. I absolutely loved it!” – Hana Tooke, author of The Unadoptables

“Such a fantastic book. Filled with the most gorgeous description, heart racing adventure & peril, & such a great gang of characters. Absolutely LOVED their bants & humour. Edge of seat reading” – Yasmin Rahman, author of All The Things We Never Said

“A fast paced, page turning adventure” – A. M. Dassu, author of Boy, Everywhere

Read the first few chapters of this wonderful adventure below:

The Boy Who Met a Whale is available now – you can support independent bookshops by ordering a copy through Bookshop.org, here.

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New books out in January!

We’re beginning the new year with a bunch of brilliant new children’s books! From new board books to magical picture books, fantastic non-fiction, and four new fiction titles – including a new book in the Baby Aliens series by Pamela Butchart, a thrilling new adventure from Nizrana Farook, and the third magical instalment in The Dragon In the Library series.

Here’s a closer look the new Nosy Crow books available this month.

Love, by Emma Dodd (now available in whiteboard):

Buy the book.

Sing Along With Me! Five Little Ducks, by Yu-hsuan Huang:

Buy the book.

Sing Along With Me! Hickory Dickory Dock, by Yu-hsuan Huang:

Buy the book.

Where’s Mrs Tiger?, by Ingela P Arrhenius:

Buy the book.

Peekaboo Love, by Camilla Reid and Ingela P Arrhenius:

Buy the book.

Make Tracks: Farm, by Johnny Dyrander:

Buy the book.

Out of Nowhere, by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros:

Buy the book.

Making A Baby: An Inclusive Guide to How Every Family Begins, written by Rachel Greener and illustrated by Clare Owen:

Buy the book.

National Trust: The Castle the King Built, written by Rebecca Colby and illustrated by Tom Froese:

Buy the book.

British Museum: Find Tom in Time, Ancient Egypt, by Fatti Burke (now available in paperback):

Buy the book.

Welcome to Our World, written by Moira Butterfield and illustrated by Harriet Lynas (now available in paperback):

Buy the book.

The Boy Who Met a Whale, by Nizrana Farook:

Buy the book.

The Broken Leg of Doom, written by Pamela Butchart and illustrated by Thomas Flintham:

Buy the book.

The Wizard in the Wood, written by Louie Stowell and illustrated by Davide Ortu:

Buy the book.

Zoe’s Rescue Zoo: The Rowdy Red Panda, written by Amelia Cobb and illustrated by Sophy Williams:

Buy the book.

Congratulations to all our authors and illustrators with new books out today! If you’d like to keep up-to-date with all of our book news and future releases, you can sign up to our newsletter at the bottom of this page.

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