Nosy Crow's Blog, page 43

@LittleNosyCrow – a new Instagram channel for baby and toddler books

It’s a big time for us at Nosy Crow because we’ve just launched @LittleNosyCrow – an exciting new Instagram channel especially for parents, grandparents and carers of babies and toddlers.

We’d been discussing for some while the idea of a separate channel both to connect with our readers and to promote our preschool and novelty books but, honestly, had been in two minds about it. We already have active Twitter and Instagram accounts for Nosy Crow, each with substantial followings, and we were aware that by adding another one we were at risk of diluting both our audience and the Nosy Crow brand. We also know what hard work it is keeping our accounts fed with interesting new material – it isn’t to be underestimated how much content they need.

But then lockdown happened and we were all thrown into a whole new world, on so many levels. The high street was suspended, for no one knew how long, bookshops and libraries closed, even supermarket shopping had changed beyond recognition. And we were all stuck at home, with our kids, ALL THE BLIMMIN’ TIME! We know now that people have carried on buying books and reading through lockdown – and in fact are reading more – but we immediately recognised that this new retail environment was going to be pretty challenging for Nosy Crow.

I’m really proud that Nosy Crow’s preschool and novelty list has built up a fantastic reputation since we launched the company ten years ago. Our books are regularly reviewed and recommended, we win prizes, we have a loyal following and sales are strong. But we’re also aware that our audience is forever growing out of our books, and we rely on being discovered by new readers all the time. And, of course, they do that much of the time in physical shops – where they can pick them up, turn the pages, press their buttons, slide the mechanisms and lift the flaps. Our books are hugely tactile and interactive – and it’s without question easier to appreciate their qualities when you have them in your hand.

But during lockdown, a much larger proportion of our sales were through online retailers and discoverability became even more important. We realised that we needed to work even harder for our books – and their authors and illustrators – to bring them to the forefront of our audience’s attention. So, in the weeks that followed, we examined all aspects of our digital sales and made some substantial changes. We rewrote sales copy, reviewed our metadata feeds and launched a new version of our website – complete with videos of every single novelty title in action! And we also started work on @LittleNosy Crow.

Of course, @LittleNosyCrow is a marketing tool ¬– we are in the business of selling books, after all. But this initiative is also about connecting with a community of parents and carers who we recognise are navigating some particularly long days with children at the moment. We hope the channel will provide inspiration and ideas for play, games and craft, as well as helping them find the books that will be just right for their child, at any given stage of their development. I’m hugely excited about seeing videos of babies reading the books (I NEVER tire of it!) and we are very much hoping that the channel will become a go-to resource for parents as we slowly return to “normal” life, and beyond. It’s very much work in progress – I’m sure it will evolve in response to our followers’ feedback. I hope you’ll take a look at it and tell us what you think!

You can find @LittleNosyCrow, our new baby and toddler Instagram account, here – we hope to see you there!

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Introducing Little Nosy Crow

We are thrilled to announce the launch of Little Nosy Crow – an exciting new Instagram page especially for parents of under 4s. We know it can be tricky picking out the best book for your little one, so we want to create a place where you can find lots of brilliant book recommendations, activities and reading tips!

Are you looking for a book for your dinosaur-mad two-year-old? Or does your little one love sound books and you’re looking for some new reads? Send us a message at Little Nosy Crow, we would love to hear from you.

Camilla Reid, Co-founder and Editorial Director at Nosy Crow, comments:

“We’d been looking at creating an account specifically for parents of babies and toddlers for a while, but when lockdown happened the need to connect with, and support, our fast-growing community was even more pressing. Instagram works brilliantly for parents of preschoolers – it’s a snappy, visual platform that suits their busy lives.

It is such a challenging time but we want to give parents loads of inspiration and ideas for playing, talking and reading with their little ones – and to cheer them on, too! We know how hard it can be to discover new books so I hope that we can help them find the perfect book for each stage of their child’s development and make at least that aspect of their lives much easier.”

To celebrate our launch we’re running a competition to win an amazing bundle of Nosy Crow’s award-winning baby and toddler books (worth £150) – perfect for kickstarting a lifelong love of reading!

Head to Little Nosy Crow for more information and to enter!

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Why I called the Felt Flaps books ‘Mr Lion’ and ‘Mrs Bear’

Our Editorial Director, Camilla Reid, explains the origins of the award-winning, internationally best-selling Felt Flaps series by Ingela P. Arrhenius.

The process of coming up with new series concepts for the preschool and novelty list is never especially linear. For me, ideas tend not to present themselves when I’m sitting at my desk, but when I least expect it. Sometimes a text takes shape when I’m walking the dog: the words start to hit the rhythm of my feet and spill out, step by step. Sometimes I’m inspired by a piece of art, or a vintage toy. And, often, ideas come when I’m having a conversation with a child. Because my own children are secondary school age, I’m not talking to toddlers as much as I once was, so a lot of my inspiration now is drawn from memories of reading to our girls – what they enjoyed, what left them cold, what aspects of novelty books worked for us, what didn’t.

A very clear recollection for me is sharing animal books with them, pointing out the different background creatures in a scene and discussing them. And I remember two things of significance: one, I wanted to make the animals seem friendlier, more characterful, so I always gave them a gender and, two, the gender that I found myself giving them was always MALE. So, for example, I would say, ‘What’s Mr Elephant doing – where do you think he’s going?’ And this annoyed me! I am a feminist, I am totally up for the whole push-for-equality thing and yet unless I checked myself, I called everything ‘he’. As if to be male is the norm, is the ideal.

I came up with the felt novelty concept after our Deputy Art Director, Zoe Bennett, suggested that we do something with Ingela P Arrhenius. I knew Ingela’s work well but Zoe’s prompt caused me to look at it again, and really think about what we could do with her. The felt flaps idea that I developed was based on Ingela’s gorgeous animals, but the novelty required that the animals were naturalistic and pictured in their natural environment. However, what I immediately realised is that if you stand animals on all fours and they don’t have fun names or trousers, it can all get a bit factual and dull, and that is definitely not what I want in a book! Because for me, books need to have warmth and wit, so children can identify with the characters. And my feeling is that you just don’t really identify with a character when it’s referred to as an ‘it’. For example, ‘Where’s Mr Lion?’ is SO much jollier than ‘Where’s the lion?’. It’s a tiny difference, but for me it’s huge.

You can see what happened: I decided to alternate male and female characters, and give them the titles Mr and Mrs. Now, obviously, it’s not completely perfect. I am married, but I didn’t take my husband’s surname, and I use the title Ms. I wrestled with the notion of a title which indicates marital status but using Ms in the book didn’t feel right – just too po-faced and politically correct. And giving names to wild animals was wrong, as well  – too anthropomorphising and even disrespectful. But I think if I met a (real) bear, and I knew she was female, I’d definitely address her as Mrs Bear, not Ms – and definitely not Miss! So that’s what, in the end, I did.

There are occasional grumbles about the use of the married title and I do get it. And the whole debate around gender and identity, and the use of pronouns, throws up yet another set of questions. Perhaps the Felt Flaps simply won’t be socially acceptable in 20 years’ time, as we move further away from binary genders. But at the time that I wrote them, I felt that we needed to score another (albeit small) point for feminism, so that was what I was attempting to address. Happily, the series has grown (we’ve just put the 21st title into production) and has sold almost 3 million copies worldwide, so at the moment it seems that consumers are relaxed about Owls and Tigers – and Cars and Fire Engines – having genders.

You may be interested to know that our Meekoo series has done away with gender and pronouns altogether – I’ll write about that another time.

Thank you, Camilla! You can find out more about all of the titles in Ingela’s Felt Flap series here. The latest book in the series, Where’s Mrs Queen, was published  yesterday – you can take a look inside the book below.

 

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Watch our Introduction to Children’s Publishing event

Earlier this week we held our second ever Introduction to Children’s Publishing event – it was a great, interactive evening, filled with insider tips from publishing professionals across various departments.

The event was a free, and designed to offer a comprehensive overview of working in children’s publishing – no prior knowledge or experience necessary. Unlike last year, holding the event at the office wasn’t an option this year, but we used this as an opportunity to open the event to even more attendees, holding it via a Zoom webinar.

We began with a fantastic introduction from Nosy Crow’s Managing Director, Kate Wilson, who spoke about her own experience in publishing, as well as her passion for children’s publishing, and how the industry has adapted to current times.

We then took a brief look at different departments, with representatives from Editorial, Design, Production, Rights, Publicity, Marketing, and Sales giving an overview of their departments and taking questions.

We asked each of our departmental representatives to highlight a key question from their section of the evening. Here are their questions (and the all-important answers)!

Fiona Scoble, Senior Editor

Question: How different is it to edit a younger book for e.g. readers aged 5-8 to editing an older book for readers aged 9+?

Answer: I love working on books for a variety of ages because the experience of editing them is so different. A very young text, for instance a two-colour book like the “Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam” series, is not many steps away from a picture book. You’re working very closely with a designer and really thinking about the interplay between text and image to tell the story, using the page turn to create suspense, and being creative with text layout to emphasise certain words and help children navigate beginning to read independently.

In books for older children, there’s obviously a much more mature story being told. The characters are more complex and the narrative arc has many more components to consider. You can have really interesting conversations with the author about their characters’ motivations and voices and become totally immersed in their world. Its a skill that I’ll never grow tired of practising and improving!

Manda Scott, Senior Designer

Question: How would you recommend an illustrator who wants to move into design get their foot in the door?

Answer: As I mentioned in my talk, I started out with an illustration degree and then got myself in front of art directors by applying to work experience in different areas of the business that offered placements.  I think it is probably a lot harder these days as work experience is a lot rarer. Whereas, when I was starting out, marketing departments especially did constant rotations to help with mail outs and events. ( I did a lot of envelope stuffing and washing up wine glasses)

It is a good thing that working for free is not happening anymore!  But to be honest,  it makes it harder to get in front of people to express your passion. This doesn’t mean it is impossible though!

Most recruitment for entry level jobs is done very anonymously in that names are redacted as well as other information that can potentially cause bias this means portfolio and CV count for everything in the first stage.

With that in mind, don’t ever send in a CV written up on Word. It should definitely be designed in InDesign and exported as a PDF along with a sample of your work. Be aware that you are being assessed on your typesetting skills and font choices from that initial stage.  If you are not confident using the software, I suggest you do some online tutorials. I was pretty much self-taught through YouTube.  If your portfolio feels illustration heavy or actually just a bit light then do some personal work to pad that out. Recreate ideas for covers of your favourite children’s book. Apply your illustrations to book jackets and add type.

And finally, showing enthusiasm is probably the most important part as skills can be learned but passion and drive not so much. Make sure your cover letter is researched and directed toward the company you are applying to. Mention books you like and why.

Sophie Banks, Senior Production Executive

Question: What would you look for on a person’s application, if they were applying for an entry level job in production?

Answer: One of the most important things for me, is seeing examples of key skills outlined in the job advert, regardless of whether these were obtained in publishing or not. There are many different routes into publishing, but ultimately what I really want to know is that you have the right skills to do the job.

I also look at whether you’ve tailored your CV and covering letter both to the company and the job. We completely understand that you might be applying to several jobs in different publishers and departments at once, but it’s very noticeable to us when you haven’t tailored your CV and covering letter. It’s sounds obvious, but if you’re applying for an entry level production job there should be a reference to production in your covering letter, other than just the job title. I’ve seen literally hundreds of covering letters for production roles, which don’t even mention production! Similarly, it’s useful for you to show some understanding of our company ethos and what types of books we publish. This kind of information is easily found just by looking at company websites, and it does make your application stand out.

Michela Pea, Senior Rights Manager

Question: How do you find travelling for your job? Are you on the road for most of it? Does that ever bother you?

Answer: Travelling is what I love most about this job. It allows you to connect with your customers, their culture and learn so much about their book market. I’m abroad for book fairs or rights trips most months, and while it can be exhausting at times I still find it exciting, challenging and worth the sleepless nights and the running around with 23kg of books.

Rebecca Mason, Publicity Manager

Question: ‘How has your job changed from being an PR assistant to being a Publicity Manager?’

Answer: As an assistant in most departments – and especially in publicity – a large part of your job is admin, from checking copy to filing awards submissions to tracking coverage and planning for events, not to mention the HUGE amounts of books we send out. One of the great things about Nosy Crow is that we’re still small enough that everyone’s ideas can be heard and valued when we’re planning or brainstorming, but as you progress from an assistant role, you get more and more tastes of this. You might get more independence – perhaps a smaller campaign to look after, for instance – until as a manager you have the freedom to make wider decisions about strategy and planning, and to look at not only the campaigns but the team itself as a whole.

Hester Seddon, Marketing Manager

Question: What skills are useful in a marketing role?

Answer: As a marketer it’s really helpful to be both a strategic and creative thinker, because you’ll be tasked with coming up with new and interesting ways to reach your audience. You’ll need to have a strong attention to detail, for example when proofreading copy and checking artwork. Being organised is useful in any job, and for a marketing role it’s vital as you’ll often be managing multiple campaigns at once and working towards very tight deadlines.

Frances Sleigh, Senior Sales Manager and Stock Control Co-ordinator

Question: What specific skills are you looking for and what skills could I be working on if I want to get into a publishing sales job?

Answer: Being able to flag any experience you have in sales is really helpful. It might be that you’ve worked in customer service shops but there are so many transferrable skills – you’re used to talking to people about product, you know the value of being knowledgeable about what you’re selling, you can upsell (a bit of a tricky term – I always go with ‘helped them find other related products that they’d also be interested in’…), plus you know that all sales is about customer service, and that’s making the other person’s life/job as easy as possible. For us that’s making sure our buyers have the most up to date information about our books at all times. In terms of hard skills I’d make sure to flag that you’re comfortable in excel and use this time to make sure that’s true!  Mentioning you can use pivot tables and VLOOKUP are simple skills to learn, but we all use them every day. There’s such an online element to UK sales at the moment that being able to say you know how to write good copy, and are comfortable with basic HTML for metadata is a plus too.

You can watch the full session below:

Thank you to all who attended!

 

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New books out in July!

We are absolutely delighted that – after making the tough decision to not publish new books in May and June, and move the books that had been planned for those months to other parts of the year – today, as bookshops around the country continue to re-open, we’re publishing our first new books since April: it’s our July publication day.

If you’re able to support your local bookshop, we’ve got some wonderful new books out this month – from brand new board books for babies and toddlers, to fantastic new picture books, sticker books, and crafty books for hands-on kids, there’s something for everyone.

Here’s a look at each of the Nosy Crow books that are out this month.

What Does An Anteater Eat?, by Ross Collins (now available in board book)

Buy the book.

Where’s Mrs Queen?, by Ingela P Arrhenius

Buy the book.

Sing Along With Me! A Sailor Went to Sea, illustrated by Yu-hsuan Huang

Buy the book.

Who’s Hiding in the Desert?, illustrated by Katharine McEwen

Buy the book.

Octopus Shocktopus!, written by Peter Bently and illustrated by Steven Lenton

Buy the book.

When a Dragon Goes to School, written by Caryl Hart and illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw

Buy the book.

Press Out and Decorate: Dinosaurs, illustrated by Kate McLelland

Buy the book.

British Museum 101 Stickers! Ancient Greece, illustrated by Sophie Beer

Buy the book.

Congratulations to all of our author and illustrators with books out today – and we hope you manage to make it to a bookshop this month!

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Take a look inside What Are Little Girls Made of? – our new nursery rhyme collection

This September we are incredibly proud to be publishing a new nursery rhyme collection with a feminist twist – What Are Little Girls Made of?, written by Jeanne Willis and illustrated by Isabelle Follath. And today, you can take a first look inside the book.

This wonderful and inspiring collection of reworked nursery rhymes is also a stunning physical object: we’re publishing the book in a gorgeous small hardback format, complete with jacket and luxurious paper.

With brilliantly funny rhymes by Jeanne Willis, and charming, witty illustrations by Isabelle Follath, these nursery rhymes prove that girls can be the heroes of any story. This book is the perfect gift – a wonderful book for children and adults alike to read aloud or enjoy alone.

Think you know your favourite classic nursery rhymes? Think again! In this witty reworking of popular nursery rhymes, Georgie Porgie doesn’t dare to make the girls cry, Little Bo-Peep’s sheep are all present and correct, thank you, and it’s the queen, OF COURSE, who fixes Humpty Dumpty.

Here’s a digital preview of the book:

What Are Little Girls Made of? will be in bookshops this September – you can find out more about the book here. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all of our books news, you can sign up to our books newsletter with the form at the bottom of this page.

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Nosy Crow has been named Independent Publisher of the Year at the 2020 British Book Awards

Last night, it was announced that Nosy Crow had won two British Book Awards. In the industry, they’re called the “Nibbies”.

We are so pleased and proud. It’s the most amazing fillip in tough times.

We won one award for achieving great sales in export in the category of publishers are under £10m per year. This is an award for selling our copies of our own edition of our books in English throughout the world (which is different from rights and co-edition selling, which is about selling books to other publishers to publish in their own languages). It is the most amazing tribute to Catherine Stokes, Maddie Price and export consultant Peter Newsom, who I met when I was, for a nanosecond, an adult publisher, and who is therefore one of those people who make you happy about your career mistakes, frankly. Nosy Crow has been selling to export markets ourselves (as opposed to selling through an agency) for just two years, and our growth has been phenomenal in that time. Catherine, in particular, has put in the most extraordinary amount of work, travelling extensively to make and build relationships around the world. As I said to Nigel Roby of The Bookseller, when I found out that we’d won the Export Award, “That woman hardly spent a night in her own bed all of last year – and not in a fun way.”

And we won Independent Publisher of the Year. This is open to all publishers that are “independent”. What makes a publisher “independent” is a bit blurry, but, for the Nibbies, it means publishers who have sales of less than £20,000,000.

We’ve been shortlisted for the Independent Publisher of the  award seven times in our nearly 10 years of publishing. Once we thought we’d won it, but we were only highly commended. In the meantime, we have won children’s publisher of the year in 2019 and in 2017, and we couldn’t be prouder of those wins.

But this year it felt particularly important to have won Independent Publisher of the Year. Every week, sometimes every day, in the current horrible pandemic, we are faced with making decisions about our own small business. Should we publish in May while the shops are shut, or should we rejig the publishing programme? Should we open the office for a couple of days a week for a limited number of people from July, or just stay closed? Should we buy buckets of the insanely expensive sanitising hand gel right now, or should we hope that the price will stabilise over the next few weeks – before we absolutely need it? Should we go to the Frankfurt Book Fair, or should we stay at home, Zooming internationally for all we’re worth. We don’t have an HR department. We don’t have a US parent company. We have to find out what we can, and simply make these decisions, and many more, on our own. Nor do we have a big stash of cash to fund us through this crisis. We’re a profitable company, but every year, we’ve ploughed our profit back into the company to fund our growth. We’re happy that, so far, our sales are pretty robust in the face of international lockdowns, but of course, though we look ahead with hope, we also look ahead with trepidation. To be independent is to be exposed. It’s tough. But to be independent also means that you can be fast and flexible and cohesive, and we are proud of what we have done so far in our years of publishing and during the Coronavirus crisis.

As an independent publisher, we feel, as I said in my acceptance speech, particular affinity with independent bookshops who are so important to the whole industry and to children’s books in particular. We are so grateful to them for the risks they’re taking and the roles they’re playing in their community. Tomorrow, Ruth Tinham starts work at Nosy Crow (well, in a bedroom at home) as Field Sales Manager. This marks the point at which Nosy Crow will be selling directly to independent bookshops ourselves (rather than selling through Bounce, who have been wonderful partners from the beginning) as we build our own little field sales force over the next months and years.

I’m so grateful to the authors and illustrators with whom we work, and to their agents, who believed in Nosy Crow at the beginning, and continue to believe in us. I am grateful to every independent bookshop, and every customer we have. I am grateful to all the wonderful publishers around the world who buy rights and co-editions from us, many of whom are independent publishers like ourselves. I am grateful to our brilliant, patient shareholders, to our strong and mutually supportive management team, and to every member of Nosy Crow’s staff. It was lovely to be able, for once, to celebrate all together as we did after the event on Zoom.

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Wendy Cooling

It was announced yesterday that Wendy Cooling,  the founder of the Bookstart programme, has passed away. Below, Nosy Crow’s editorial director, Camilla Reid, and head of sales and marketing, Catherine Stokes, pay tribute.

When I read this morning that Wendy Cooling had died I literally gasped – a proper, audible intake of breath. And I realise now that I did so for two reasons. Firstly, I was sad – I didn’t know Wendy well, but I liked her very much, and so I felt a sharp spike of personal loss. But the second reason was because I was shocked – because I think I almost felt that it was impossible for Wendy to actually die. This is bonkers, obviously, but anyone who ever met her cannot have failed to notice in Wendy a vitality, a force of positive energy that is rare to encounter and would fool you into thinking it would go on forever.

Wendy, as you may well already know, had taught English at secondary school before she left to go to Booktrust. I would bet good money that she was a wonderful teacher and I’m guessing that she transformed individual lives on a regular basis. But Wendy was a traveller, an explorer, both physically (she had endless tales of her adventures round the world taken in those long school holidays) and intellectually, so it isn’t a surprise that she had ambitions to affect change on a grander scale.

Driven by a fierce social conscience and backed by the scientific research which proved that babies who’d grown up with books went on to do better at both English AND Maths at all stages of school, Wendy made it her mission to get books into children’s hands. She admitted that she literally carried books in her handbag so if she met a bored child on a bus or a train, she would whip one out and read to them.

Of course, she went on to set up, and drive forward, Bookstart, a ground-breaking scheme that distributed books to every child in the country at their NHS health checks. Only someone with the unique combination of drive, expertise and charm could have managed to launch such a huge, ambitious project, and the project has benefited millions of children not only in the UK, but around the world, having been taken up by many other countries too.

I would meet Wendy regularly over the years to go through whichever list I was working on in order for her to select titles for the Bookstart packs. Presented with a huge stack of books to choose from she would, in her intense, bird-like way, scrutinise each title and ruthlessly (but kindly) discard those that were unsuitable until she had her perfect choices – usually just one or two books. The process was quick but thorough, complex – would it work for the baby was her priority, but also would it be fun for the parent or carer to read? Would all families enjoy it or would it exclude anyone? Would it work for the Bookstart budget? The child’s perspective, the critical eye, the rigorous ear for good text, have all stayed with me and continue to inform my choices every day as I write and produce my list at Nosy Crow.

I regret that I never found the chance to tell her how much she influenced me and to thank her for teaching me so much. We would probably all love to say that we had positively changed the world – I will settle for knowing that I worked with someone who genuinely, palpably did so.

– Camilla Reid, editorial director

I met Wendy through Booktrust, very early in my children’s books career, and I remember her skill and knowledge shining out to me from our very first meeting. So much so, that I can recall the exact location. But this is a personal tribute to one of incredible warmth and magnetic bonhomie.

Wendy watched my baby grow, peppering his shelves with, of course, the very best books, and marked with incredible detail his every milestone. She listened animatedly, as only a dear friend could, to hours of whatever was preoccupying me at the time. (‘He’s definitely a keeper’, she later pronounced after meeting my soon-to-be husband!). I’m only sorry we never got our long standing plan to go to India together off the ground, Wendy. I, like Camilla, just expected you to be there forever.

– Catherine Stokes, head of sales and marketing

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Nosy Crow is proud to announce a vibrant and vital upcoming picture book from Patrice Lawrence, Granny Came to England on the Empire Windrush

Nosy Crow is delighted to announce the acquisition of a timely and important picture book from author Patrice Lawrence called Granny Came to England on the Empire Windrush. The book will be published in hardback and paperback in May 2022, to tie in with events for National Windrush Day in June 2022.

Nosy Crow acquired world rights in all languages from Caroline Sheldon, children’s literary agent. Lawrence contributed to Make More Noise!, Nosy Crow’s short story collection celebrating 100 years of women’s suffrage in the UK, and Sheldon mentioned that the Empire Windrush and the Windrush generations were subjects that Lawrence was interested in exploring.

Louise Bolongaro, Head of Picture Books at Nosy Crow, comments: “I have long been a fan of Patrice’s powerful writing. Her words, and the feelings they evoke, stay with you, and I have always hoped that, maybe one day, she might write a picture book for Nosy Crow. Her vibrant and vital tale of Ava and her beloved Granny who arrived on Windrush, is more than I could have possibly hoped for.

Granny builds a life for herself in England, determined to stay despite overwhelming homesickness, and it’s this deeply personal story that vividly evokes a crucial moment in history. Granny tells Ava of the moment she arrived on the Windrush in 1948 and Patrice’s meticulous research shines through at every moment. The heat of Trinidad radiates off the page and we shiver in the bleakness of an English winter and the smog-laden skies of 1950s London. And, as with all the best historical narratives, this is a story that informs and educates in many, many ways. Patrice has expertly woven in non-fiction elements, with reference to Rosa Parks and Winifred Atwell, so that Ava can really understand the scope and scale of her heritage. The result is a story with great heart and soul and we couldn’t be more honoured or privileged to publish it on the Nosy Crow list.”

Patrice Lawrence comments: “I am proud to write the book that I wish I’d owned as a child, especially when I was made to feel I didn’t belong in England. The struggles and achievements of the Windrush generation must never be forgotten.”

Caroline Sheldon, children’s literary agent, comments: “This is a truly wonderful story of a journey that packs an enormous emotional punch and has a knock-out end that moved me to tears. I cannot wait to hold the physical book in my hands.”

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Our second ‘Introduction to Publishing’ event

Today we’re really pleased to announce that we will be holding our second ever ‘Introduction to Publishing’ event!

In July 2019 we held the first of these events at our London Bridge office, and we had 27 publishing hopefuls come for the evening to meet and chat to representatives from each department. It was a fun, interactive evening and we had some great feedback:

“Overall, I came away with a better understanding of publishing, more knowledge about the jobs available…what was most important was that I came away with knowledge that getting into publishing is not a direct line, and that although you may not be in the right department for you straight away, chances are you will find it.” –  ‘Introduction to Publishing’ attendee

We wrote a blog about it at the time: https://nosycrow.com/blog/key-questions-and-answers-from-our-introduction-to-childrens-publishing-evening/.

Holding the event at the office isn’t an option this year, but we’re using this as chance to make sure this event is open to all, so we’re going to be holding it as a Zoom webinar. The event will be taking place on the 30th June, starting at 6.00pm and finishing at 8.15pm. 

Anyone can sign up, below, and it’s completely free. When you sign up, you’ll get an email two days before the event with a link to the webinar, as well as an email reminder on the day.

Register for the event:

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On the evening there will be an introduction from Kate Wilson, MD of Nosy Crow, and then a series of short presentations from a member of our Sales, Publicity, Marketing, Rights, Editorial, Production and Design departments.  Each speaker will briefly cover how they got to where they are, what their job entails, and where their job fits into the publishing process. After each speaker there will be a chance to ask questions. After all the speakers have finished there will also be a chance for more general questions, or further questions for an individual speaker.

The aim of this event is to give people who are interested in working in publishing an introduction to the various jobs/departments available.  The focus will be on working within a publishing house, the day-to-day activities and the role each department plays in publishing a book. At Nosy Crow we’re really proud of being a recent start-up publisher, but this isn’t going to be a guide to setting up your own publishing house.

After the event we’re also aiming to put the session online, so if you can’t attend live then sign up anyway and we’ll send a link round after the session to watch later.

If you have any questions about the event please send them to frances@nosycrow.com with ‘Introduction to Publishing’ in the subject heading.

Q&A

Will everyone on the webinar be able to see/hear me?

No! When you join the session your camera will be turned off, and your microphone muted, you’ll only be able to see and hear the Nosy Crow speakers. You’ll not see any of the other attendees and they won’t see you, and neither will the Nosy Crow speakers. So, you can be in your pyjamas, in a noisy place, on your break at work and no one will know!

Can I ask questions?

Yes. There will be a chat box in the webinar where you’ll be able to post questions for each speaker. You’ll be able to direct your questions so all attendees can see them or just to the moderator. We will try and ensure we have time for everyone’s questions, although hope for understanding if this is not be possible.

I haven’t used Zoom before, do I need to download anything?

You should be able to use the web-based version of Zoom to join the webinar. We’ll have the webinar open for 15 mins before the start time so you’ll have time to join and check everything is working before it begins.

 

The post Our second ‘Introduction to Publishing’ event appeared first on Nosy Crow.