Books on the shelves

“The Mouse Who Ate the Moon” is now officially out! Last Thursday was the publication day. Publishing a book is long process and it’s a  whole team effort. My editors and I work hard on the story and on the pictures. I’m very lucky to be published by Walker Books, who are well known for producing good quality books. I’m not talking only about content of the books which is obviously the most important, but also the technical quality.

“The Mouse Who Ate the Moon” is beautifully printed, the paper is thick and the colours are right. The book smells delicious too!

Now is the time to introduce the book to the public. You may think that a good book would find its way into shops by itself, but it’s not so easy. Publicists work hard, the publisher works hard and so do I. I’m happy to travel a few hours on the train just to do a reading and drawings for a small audience. I don’t mind doing it, because the audience is always nice. People who come to such events want to hear the story and see nice pictures. This is the nice part of my job.

I had a very good review in The Times and Little Mouse appeared on the website of The Guardian this week. Have look here. I also had lots of nice reviews on different Blogs and lots of tweeting about my new book, but getting a book in to the shops is still the hardest part of it all.

Luckily  there are still some bookshops who care about the quality of books they are selling. Of course, everybody wants to make a living and nobody has it as hard as bookshops these days. It’s nice to know that there are shops who make space on shelves for picture books and who don’t just care about the profit they can make on variety of well known titles and true stories of endless celebrities.

What I wanted to say is “Thank you to all the shops who care for picture books”!

This week I was working on a new idea and also painting the cover of my next book.

Here are some of the sketches.

I was also in Clapham in London (part of Omnibus) introducing the new book to the young audience.

It was a fun and friendly event in a beautiful building.

I’m now off to visit two primary schools in Barking. I’ll be drawing more mice no doubt about it!

By the way this picture is a detail of a big painting I did with children in Hay on Wye this year.