Nosy Crow's Blog, page 44

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Published on June 17, 2020 02:30

Two Nosy Crow books shortlisted for the 2020 English 4-11 Picture Book Awards

The shortlist for the 2020 English 4-11 Picture Book Awards were announced today – and we’re delighted that The Suitcase, by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros, and This is a Dog, by Ross Collins have both been shortlisted in the Fiction 4 – 7 years category!

Established in 1995, the awards are presented by the English Association to the best children’s picture books of the year. There are 17 books in the shortlist this year, out of 333 submitted – and in the Fiction 4-7 shortlist, two out of the four books are published by Nosy Crow.

Written in response to the refugee crisis, The Suitcase is a touching, timely tale about the importance of kindness, understanding and friendship. Take a look inside this heartfelt tale below:

A delightfully silly picture book from award-winning author Ross Collins, This is a Dog combines comic misunderstanding with wonderful illustrations. Here’s a look inside:

You can find out more about the English Picture Book Awards, and view the shortlist, here. The winners will be announced at the award ceremony in November.

Congratulations Chris and Ross!

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Published on June 16, 2020 04:00

Take a look inside Octopus Shocktopus

Next month we’re delighted to be publishing Octopus Shocktopus, written by Peter Bently and illustrated by Steven Lenton – a brilliantly bonkers picture book about an octopus who lives on the roof. And today we’re very pleased to share an early preview – you can take a look at the first few pages below!

When a giant octopus arrives, the children LOVE their new friend; he makes the perfect slide and is fantastic at football! But some of the grown-ups aren’t so pleased. Will they drive him away… or will they realise just how helpful an octopus can be?

A warm and witty rhyming story about welcoming newcomers, with striking, fluorescent illustrations throughout.

Here’s a first look inside this hilarious new picture book:

Octopus Shocktopus will be flying onto bookshops on July 2nd – complete with our free Stories Aloud audio recording available in all of our paperback picture books. You can pre-order a copy from Waterstones here, The Hive here, or from Amazon here.

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The Rabbit, the Dark and the Biscuit Tin, by Nicola O’Byrne

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Published on June 16, 2020 01:00

Empathy Day with Nosy Crow

Today is Empathy Day! We’re proud to have partnered with EmpathyLab to help develop empathy through books – encouraging everyone to read, share books, and put empathy into action. EmpathyLab has created a series of useful resources, guides, and activities for schools, libraries, and bookshops – and recommended No Ballet Shoes In Syria, by Catherine Bruton in the Read for Empathy collection. You can find out more on the EmpathyLab website, here.

And to celebrate Empathy Day, we’ve asked our staff to put on their Empathy Day Glasses and recommend some Nosy Crow books that encourage empathy.

Here are some Empathy Day recommendations from the Crow’s Nest:

The Suitcase, by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros

“This book is one of my favourites because it is so relevant to the world we live in right now. It tells a story about the importance of hope, kindness and friendship and shows us how a little bit of empathy can go a long way.” – Sophie Banks, Senior Production Executive

“The Rabbit, the Dark and the Biscuit Tin is a beautifully written and illustrated story which helps children understand the needs of others, and teaches them that the dark is actually very important… even to those who don’t like bedtime!” – Sophie Linneker, Design Assistant

Incredible Jobs You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of, illustrated by Natalie Labarre

“The last two months spent in the midst of a global pandemic has emphasised just how important every job and every individual’s role in society is. Through the introduction of weird and whacky professions, this books serves as a wonderfully funny and incredibly important reminder and celebration of that fact.” – Erin Murgatroyd, Rights Manager

Talking to the Moon, by S.E. Durrant

“S. E. Durrant is one of my favourite writers; she tackles topics that are real and difficult with a warmth and lightness which always leaves me feeling hopeful. If you love the seaside, this is the PERFECT read for you.” – Rebecca Mason, Publicity Manager

I, Cosmo, by Carlie Sorosiak

“Told from the point of view of Cosmo, a golden retriever that reminds me of my own labrador, this a moving family drama. I cried!” – Catherine Stokes, Head of Sales & Marketing

Baxter’s Book, by Hrefna Bragadottir

“Baxter’s Book is a lovely story about self-acceptance that I’ve read to my children many times. It helps children to understand the importance of being yourself and to like who you are.” – Stella Alekova, Financial Controller

When a Dragon Comes to Stay, written by Caryl Hart and illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw

“This is one of my favourite picture books! It teaches little ones about kindness, respect, and how to empathise with people who might look or act differently to you.” – Sam Payne, Digital Marketing Assistant

Earth Heroes, by Lily Dyu

“This book is not only very much needed In the current ‘climate’ but shows that empathy with action can literally change the world!” – Nur Ben-Hamida, Senior Contracts Executive

This Zoo is Not For You, by Ross Collins

“This is a fun book to read aloud, but also has an important moral undertone about understanding others who may be different to you – and that it is unkind to exclude them because they are.” – Imogen Blundell, Head of Operations

The Same But Different Too, written by Karl Newson and illustrated by Kate Hindley

“I’ve chosen The Same But Different Too by Karl Newson and Kate Hindley, which embraces, as the title suggests, what makes us similar and what makes us different with a delicious mix of warmth and wit.” – Kate Wilson, Managing Director

You can find out more about Empathy Day on the EmpathyLab website, here. What are your favourite books that encourage empathy?

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Published on June 09, 2020 02:00

Five of the best summer adventure books for 9 to 12 year-olds

When the sun is shining, it’s great to get lost in an epic story, so we’ve put together a list of five brilliant adventure books to enjoy this summer. From unmissable journeys through the jungle to getting lost in the woods, these books are perfect for children who love exploring the outdoors!

The Girl Who Stole an Elephant, by Nizrana Farook

Join Chaya and her friends on an unmissable journey through the jungle, where leeches lurk and revolution is stirring. Can Chaya leave her village a thief and return a hero? This fast-paced adventure about friendship, bravery and one very special elephant is the perfect book to get lost in!

We Won an Island, by Charlotte Lo

This fun-filled adventure story of goats, family and festivals is guaranteed to have you laughing! When Luna and her family win an island, she thinks it will solve everything, but island life comes with its own challenges – from bat poo to escaped cows and a quirky sheep pageant! Can Luna make the island a home AND get the donkey sanctuary she’s always dreamed of?

The Longest Night of Charlie Noon, by Christopher Edge

Journey deep into the woods in this breathtaking book from award-winning author Christopher Edge. When Charlie, Dizzy and Johnny get lost in the woods one night, time begins to play tricks on them. Can they solve the impossible puzzles and find a way out of the woods?

FloodWorld, by Tom Huddleston

Immerse yourself in a world of pirates, outlaws and epic adventures in this gripping series. Kara and Joe spend their days navigating the perilous waterways of a sunken city. When they find a mysterious map, they end up in a world of trouble. From floating towns to hi-tech submarines, Kara and Joe must fight for their lives and stop FloodWorld’s walls from tumbling down.

The Middler, by Kirsty Applebaum

This quirky adventure about forbidden friendship, loyalty and betrayal will have you gripped until the last page. Maggie is a middle child, invisible and left behind. Beyond her town’s boundary, the Quiet War rages and dangerous wanderers roam. One hot September day, Maggie meets Una, a wanderer, and everything she’s ever known gets turned on its head. . .

We hope this list has given you some summer adventures to enjoy! If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all our book news, you can sign up to our books newsletter with the form below.

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Published on June 04, 2020 01:00

An exclusive first look inside Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright! An Animal Poem For Every Day of the Year

This September – exactly three months from today, in fact – we are very proud to be publishing, in partnership with the National Trust, Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright! An Animal Poem for Every Day of the Year, illustrated by Britta Teckentrup and collected by Fiona Waters.

The follow-up to our highly-acclaimed, multi-award-winning collection, I Am the Seed That Grew the Tree: A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, Tiger, Tiger is a lavishly illustrated gift book treasury of 366 animal poems – one for every day of the year – ranging from unforgettable classics to contemporary works from around the world, including poetry in translation.

And today, we are delighted to share a very first look inside the book.

The spectacular range of poems for children in Tiger, Tiger includes work by Roger McGough, William Blake, Dick King-Smith, Ted Hughes, Grace Nichols, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson. Britta Teckentrup’s breathtaking illustrations bring together all the richness and wonder of the animal kingdom, making this poetry anthology a perfect gift that will be treasured by generations.

And here’s a look inside the book:

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright! will be published on September 3rd – you can pre-order the book from Waterstones here and from Amazon here – and if you’d like to be the first to hear more about the book, and be in with a chance of winning a copy, you can sign up to our Tiger, Tiger newsletter here.

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Published on June 03, 2020 01:00

Three Nosy Crow books to read for Empathy Day 2020

One week from today, June 9, is Empathy Day: founded in 2017, Empathy Day focuses on using books as a tool to build empathy, encouraging everyone to read, share books, and put empathy into action.

To support Empathy Day, EmpathyLab have put together two Read for Empathy Guides, featuring empathy-boosting books for children, aged 4-16 years old. We’re delighted that this year No Ballet Shoes In Syria, by Catherine Bruton has been featured in 2020 guide.

No Ballet Shoes In Syria is the moving story of an eleven-year-old Syrian refugee, seeking a new home in Britain. With an important message about kindness, and filled with warmth, hope, and humanity, this is a fantastic selection for the collection.

Last year, two of our books were featured in the 2019 guide – Ella on the Outside, by Cath Howe and Running on Empty, by S.E. Durrant.

You can find out more about Empathy Day and view the guides, here. Don’t forget to join us next week to celebrate and share the importance of empathy!

If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all our book news, you can sign up to our books newsletter with the form below.

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Published on June 02, 2020 01:00

Two Nosy Crow books included in the 2020 Bookbuzz list!

The 2020 Bookbuzz booklist has been announced today, and we’re absolutely thrilled that two Nosy Crow books have been included on the list – Icarus Was Ridiculous, written by Pamela Butchart and illustrated by Thomas Flintham, and Little Bird Flies by Karen McCombie.

Bookbuzz is a reading programme organised by BookTrust that supports schools to encourage reading for pleasure, independent choice and develop a whole school reading culture. Participating schools give their students the opportunity to choose their own book to keep from the list of 17 titles suitable for 11 to 13-year-olds and selected by a panel of experts. The programme is aimed primarily at Year 7 and Year 8 students but can be extended to children of other ages.

It’s an honour to be chosen for this reading programme – and a wonderful opportunity to reach new readers and encourage reading for pleasure.

Featuring laugh-out-loud retellings and unusual facts, Icarus Was Ridiculous is a fantastic way to introduce young readers to tales from Ancient Greece. This is the latest instalment in the hilarious, hugely popular, and award-winning Izzy series, which began with Baby Aliens Got My Teacher. Here’s a look inside the book:

The first book in a gripping series by much-loved author, Karen McCombie, Little Bird Flies is about the upheaval and opportunity of emigration, but also a beautifully told story about a young girl with big dreams. And you can look inside the book below:

You can find out more about the Bookbuzz, and view the full list, here. Congratulations, Pamela and Karen!

If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all our book news, you can sign up to our books newsletter with the form below.

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Published on June 01, 2020 03:00

“What we did in the war”

One evening a week or so ago, I was speaking to a friend in another publishing company, sitting at the kitchen table, glass of wine in hand, in today’s sad Zoom substitute for meeting up for a post-work drink. She referred obliquely to the famous WW1 recruitment poster, the one with the little girl on her shamed father’s knee, saying, “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?”. My friend said, “Afterwards, we’ll all talk about ‘what we did in the war’.”

Of course, to equate the current health, social and economic crisis to WW1 is banal and overused at best, and distasteful and trivialising of conflict at worst: we’re in a socially-distanced queue for Sainsbury’s, not at the Somme. But, still, this made me think about how publishers and, in particular, publishing leaders, will account for what we did “in the war”. Because I think it is the case that our staff, our authors, illustrators and their agents and our customers in the UK and elsewhere will – and should – judge us by what we did during the pandemic.

The conversation with my friend prompted me to reflect on what we’ve done so far at Nosy Crow.

To start with, we’ve worked out how to keep a business going. It’s a business that normally happens in a single big room and now happens in tens of different places – the homes of our staff. Most of us began working from home on 17 March, and no-one’s really been in the office, other than to pick stuff up to post or courier it, since Adrian, the CFO, cleaned out the big fridge on Friday 20 March. I am so proud of how everyone has adapted. Some of us went “home” to our parents, and are working from the bedrooms we last occupied as a child, our fluffy pink dressing gowns on the back of the door. We’re managing iffy wifi and working on equipment that is not necessarily as speedy or up-to-date as the equipment we have at work if we didn’t, as most did, tuck our Macs under our arm and take them home. Some of us are juggling our work with child-care or other caring responsibilities, while some of us are entirely alone through lockdown. Many of us are undertaking tasks that would have been outside our job role before this (though I still can’t work the franking machine on my odd forays into the office, so it seems that there are some new tricks that I am too old a dog to pick up). And, of course, like everyone else, many of us are working while we worry about people we love who are, for whatever reason, at risk.

But everyone who normally works in our London Bridge office is working. I know that other publishers have chosen to furlough staff. At Nosy Crow, we haven’t. This isn’t because we are hugely rich – we aren’t, and we have applied for one of the government-backed loan via the CBILS to help get us over the cash crunch that we can see ahead – but because that seems like the best thing to do to keep the show on the road both right now and for the future.

So what have we done?

Here are some of the new things we’ve done because of the coronavirus:

We’ve made elements of our books available online and free through our own website, but also by working with the BBC, Waterstones, schools and libraries, bloggers and vloggers, and theatre companies. We want to entertain and educate families in lock-down and, we hope, to build new audiences for our authors and illustrators. We’ve had to draft and negotiate new documentation to reflect this gratis use.

We published fast, and published free, Coronavirus: A Book for Children, our digital information book, illustrated by Axel Scheffler. It’s been downloaded more than a million times from our own website alone, and has been translated and made available free in over 60 other languages.

We’ve undertaken a comprehensive overhaul of our metadata, both in preparation for our new website, and in acknowledgement of the increased proportion of our sales that are coming from online retailers.

We’ve rescheduled our books intelligently and carefully (and, in some cases, more than once as situations change), pushing many of them into 2021 and beyond to give each book its best chance. We’ve done this rather than ramming them into the last few months of the year, which seems to be a more common approach, and which we fear may leave the end of this year overcrowded.

We’re creating, on hugely ambitious schedules, a handful of books specifically for important overseas customers who order large quantities.

We’re focusing on the markets and customers and consumers that are open and keen to engage with us, switching to digital forms of marketing and selling: we’re launching a second Instagram channel next month, for example, and we’ve run 70 virtual “Bologna” meetings with rights customers so far.

These are just some of the new things we are having to do BECAUSE of coronavirus. There’s been a whole bunch of other stuff that we have had to do IN SPITE OF coronavirus, including (successfully) dealing with a ransomware attack, paying a record amount in royalties in March, and, of course and crucially, working on existing titles and acquiring new titles for the future, and collaborating with our authors and illustrators.

Our business performance to the end of April – the beginning of lockdown – was our strongest ever. Our sales are currently 15% up year on year.

But, of course, we’re just two months into this. Notoriously, if apocryphally, Europe launched into WW1 in July 1914 saying that it would “all be over by Christmas”. The war lasted four years, three months and two weeks. So far, I am proud to tell anyone what Nosy Crow has done “in the war”: I think we have been generous and supportive and careful and savvy and kind. And I hope that, starting from a point of real strength, we can emerge on the other side, whenever that is, resilient and enthusiastic and having learned about ourselves and our business, to tell the full story.

This piece was originally published in The Bookseller.

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Published on May 27, 2020 08:46

Five of the best bedtime stories for toddlers

Sharing a story at bedtime is the perfect way to wind down! From reassuring reads to magical adventures, create a peaceful night-time routine with this dreamy selection of picture books…

Nothing Can Frighten A Bear, written by Elizabeth Dale and illustrated by Paula Metcalf:

A family of bears are cosy in bed, when suddenly Baby Bear hears a scary noise! Daddy Bear is determined to prove that there’s nothing to be scared about… Join the family on a humorous journey into the woods to face Little Bear’s fears. This rhyming, heartwarming tale is perfect if your little bear needs a bit of reassurance.

What Will You Dream of Tonight?, written by Frances Stickley and illustrated by Anuska Allepuz:

Drift off into the magical world of dreams with this lyrical picture book that journeys through deserts and waterfalls, shipwrecks and the starry sky. With a rhyming text and beautiful atmospheric illustrations, this charming, lulling picture book is pure escapism and a positive, uplifting way to end your day.

Here Comes The Sun, written by Karl Newson and illustrated by Migy Blanco

While all the other animals are asleep, Little Owl has a lot of work to do! Follow her on a magical journey around the world, blowing out all the stars along the way. With stunning scenes of slumbering animals, this calming, rhyming tale will leave little one’s ready for a peaceful sleep, just like Little Owl.

The Rabbit, the Dark and the Biscuit Tin, illustrated by Nicola O’Byrne:

Rabbit really does not want to go to bed. Then a bright idea pops into Rabbit’s head: he’s going to steal the dark, hide it in a biscuit tin and stop night-time happening! But as Rabbit will learn the dark is very important to a lot of animals… and maybe sleep isn’t so bad after all. With a magical fold-out surprise that little ones will adore, this gently funny tale celebrates how brilliant bedtime is!

Firefly Home, written by Jane Clarke and illustrated by Britta Teckentrup:

Immerse yourself in gorgeous night skies in this interactive picture book with dazzling splashes of neon ink throughout. Florence the firefly is lost and it’s up to the reader to help her get home! With a lovely message about kindness and helping, this simple story will captivate young readers, right until the end when they wish Florence goodnight.