Nosy Crow - Blog

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Children's Publishing (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Tom — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:17:35 GMT

On 21 September 2013, we’re running an all-day conference: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Children’s Publishing (But Were Afraid to Ask). In the course of the day, we will cover many aspects of the publishing process, from manuscript to marketplace.

We’re doing it because we know of so many people with aspirations to write books for children and who want to be published. They use our blog and our Twitter feeds as a source of information and we think that many of them would like to know more about the industry.

We’re doing it because we know (from every time we advertise a job on our website) that there are lots of people out there who are keen to work in children’s publishing, or who think they might be, and we think that the things we’ll be discussing will be relevant to them too.

We’re doing it because we love what we do, and we want more people to understand it.

The event will take place at the St Bride Foundation on Fleet Street, and you can buy Early Bird tickets for £99 here. We have an INCREDIBLE line-up speakers planned for the day, including:

Lucy Mangan, author and columnist
You may know Lucy for her hilarious weekly columns in The Guardian and Stylist Magazine. She’s also a children’s literature devotee, and her talk, Bookworm: What children’s books mean to me, is bound to be an inspiring one for anyone who loves reading.
Follow Lucy on Twitter

Jon Reed, social media expert
Jon Reed is a social media consultant, lecturer, speaker and trainer. He worked in publishing for a decade before becoming a writer, and is the author of “Get up to Speed with Online Marketing”. Jon’s talk – Building Your Brand: Marketing Yourself Online – will be an essential one for anyone who’s new to the world of publishing and looking for the do’s and don’ts of social media.
Follow Jon on Twitter

Melissa Cox, Waterstones Children’s New Titles Buyer
Melissa is responsible for buying new children’s titles for Waterstones. She knows exactly what sells – and what doesn’t – and from her desk on the Sixth Floor of Waterstones Picadilly she has a unique view of the landscape. She’s been on the selection committee for the Children’s Laureateship and the judging panel for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and her talk, But will it sell? Children’s books from a bookseller’s perspective, will provide invaluable insight into some of the commercial realities of children’s bookselling.
Follow Melissa on Twitter

Hilary Delamere, agent
Hilary represents a star-studded roster of authors and illustrators including Raymond Briggs, Lydia Monks, Michael Bond, the newly-appointed Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman, and our very own Sarah Warburton, illustrator for The Princess and the Peas. Hilary’s talk will answer the question, What’s an agent for?
Follow Hilary on Twitter

Tracey Corderoy, author
Tracey is the author of dozens of children’s books, including the Hubble Bubble, Granny Trouble picture book series (and soon-to-be launched illustrated fiction series), Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam, and Just Right for Two. She’s well-known for her spectacular author events, and her talk, Playing to the crowd: an author’s view of the importance of live events, will draw on the lessons she’s learnt performing in front of thousands of young children.
Follow Tracey on Twitter

Helen Peters, Paula Harrison, and S.C. Ransom, authors
Helen, Paula and Sue are all authors whose debut novels Nosy Crow has had the privilege of publishing. Together they’ll be speaking on a panel, From Slushpile to Subsidiary Rights Sales: The Journey of a First-Time Author, sharing their experiences of being published for the first time.
Follow Helen, Paula, and Sue on Twitter

Kate Wilson, Nosy Crow Managing Director
Kate is the founder and Managing Director of Nosy Crow. She’ll talk about the future of reading and the international book market, and give an insight into some of the decisions that are behind the publishing deals Nosy Crow makes.
Follow Kate on Twitter

And that’s not all! There’ll also be talks from other members of Nosy Crow sharing their expertise in areas of the industry including editorial, marketing and digital.

The conference will take place at the St Bride Foundation (on Fleet Street, a walking distance from Blackfriars Station), and will include lunch, morning and afternoon coffee breaks, and a glass of wine (and the chance to chat with us all!) at the end of the day. It’s a jam-packed day so we’ll be starting at around 9.30am and will finish at 6.00pm.

If you’d like to come along, you can find all of the details and buy Early Bird tickets here – if you have any questions about the day, please email tom@nosycrow.com. We hope you can join us!

Here’s our event poster with lots of the details:

Which children's author would you most want to have lunch with?

Kate — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:59:05 GMT

I was interested to see, in Saturday’s The Guardian, that if you email family.competition@guardian.co.uk, by noon on 18 June 2013 (so you’ll have to be quick!), with Morpurgo in the subject line, and you include your name, address and telephone number in the body of the email, you could win four tickets (a minimum two of which would be for children under 16) to lunch at the Savoy hotel with Michael Morpurgo on 6 July at 12.30pm. Kids also get a signed book and chocolate. This is one of a series of literary lunches, The Guardian says: you could win lunch with Lauren Child and Judith Kerr at some point in the future.

This seems pretty great to me.

But it made me wonder which children’s author or illustrator, in an ideal dinner party sort of way, it would be great to have lunch with. In my donkey’s years in children’s publishing, I have already had the privilege of eating with lots of amazing, well-known authors and illustrators – Philip Ardagh, Philip Pullman, Philip Reeve (spot the pattern?), Sharon Creech, Axel Scheffler, Rumer Godden, Meg Cabot, Jenny Valentine, Charles Causley, Julia Donaldson, Michael Morpurgo, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Judy Blume… I could go on, but I sort of feel I’ve name-dropped enough. And of course I’ve also managed at least a cake or two with many of our Nosy Crow authors and illustrators.

If we’re talking living authors or illustrators, I would have to say J K Rowling and Quentin Blake would both be high on my lunch companion wishlist – the first, in particular, I know is pretty predictable. Susan Cooper and Patrick Ness would be up there too, though.

But you’re allowed to have people who are no longer alive at ideal dinner parties, and I think this is allowed here too (hey, I am making the rules). After serious consideration of Maurice Sendak, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen and A A Milne, I think I am going to go for Louisa M Alcott (pictured above – strong face, I think). But that might just be because Kirsty, Tom and I had a disagreement recently (while washing up after our first reading group meeting) about whether or not it was a terrible disappointment that Jo marries Professor Bhaer rather than Laurie.

My older child had to choose between the list she compiled of Susan Cooper, L M Montgomery, Rudyard Kipling (“for Kim”), Michael Ende or Dodie Smith. She went with L M Montgomery.

My younger child says she’d like to have lunch with Dodie Smith, Adeline Yen Mah, L M Montgomery or Esther Hauzig. But if she could choose to meet anyone who wrote a children’s book, it would be Anne Frank. She also points out that she’s said “Hello” to J K Rowling, that “Lewis Carroll’s a weirdo”, and that, of my choices, Hans Christian Andersen is the one to go for.

If you could choose a children’s author or illustrator to have lunch with, who would it be?

The Nosy Crow Guardian Reading Group verdict on Wonder by R. J. Palacio

Kate — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:51:01 GMT

We held our first Nosy Crow Guardian children’s book reading group for adults in our offices last night, and the first book up for discussion was Wonder, by R. J. Palacio, the winner of the Waterstones Childrens Book Prize for the 5-12 year-old category.

Chatting before the discussion started

Wonder has been regularly compared to Mark Haddon’s hugely successful The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (as Suzy Feay writes in The Independent, “I imagine that the pitch for Wonder went something along the lines of “does for facial disfigurement what The Curious Incident… did for Asperger’s”). It’s had excellent reviews. Cory Doctorow wrote, “Palacio is a wonderful storyteller and her characters are bright, well-rounded and intensely likeable. Wonder is a beautiful book that is full of sorrow and triumph, emotional without being manipulative,” and the book received starred reviews from School Library Journal, Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly.

There were twenty-odd of us, including Nosy Crow people and Michelle Pauli from The Guardian, so we split into two groups, as we thought that would give everyone a chance to speak. We discussed the book for an hour in our groups (and Michelle Pauli did a great job of transmitting the discussion in her group as it was happening onto The Guardian’s online page for the event), before reuniting with a glass of wine to talk through the main points our groups had raised (the picture at the top of this blog post).

I was focused on coordinating discussion in my group: I failed monumentally to do any Tweeting, and I didn’t make any entries on The Guardian’s page. But here’s a taste of what my group thought, and of part of the full-group discussion afterwards.

PLOT SPOILER ALERT

The first thing to say is that this blog post contains plot-spoilers, so look away now if that bothers you!

A GREAT BOOK

The second thing to say is that we all enjoyed the book, which many of us had read a second time for the group. Many said they “loved” the book, and spoke of their emotional response to it, saying that they’d cried at various points: the dog dying and the prize-giving were common triggers. Many of us felt that there was much to be said for aiming a book at children that celebrates kindness and the triumph of the better aspects of humanity. One reader, a teacher, liked the way that it showed that children can, and do, mess up, but that mistakes can be remedied. Readers thought Auggie was well-realised (I, for one, think that the first 80 pages is an example of terrific writing). As Kirsty said as the Nosy Crows were washing up afterwards, if it had come in as a manuscript to Nosy Crow, there’s no question that we would have swung into action immediately to try to buy it.

So, broadly, this was a book that we really liked and would encourage others, adults and children, to read.

Our discussion and our criticisms of the book focused, essentially, on two things.

TOO SENTIMENTAL?

First, many of us felt that the book was too sentimental. Several of us pin-pointed the prize-giving scene as particularly problematic, and was described as “too easy”, “too perfect”, “soppy” and “phoney”. This had already come up in Twitter discussions about the book before the meeting, where author Sally Nicholls (who, in Ways To Live For Ever, has herself tackled the challenge of describing a child dying of cancer) had voiced doubts about the prize-giving, saying it was patronising to anyone with any kind of disability or disfigurement, and comparing it to the attitudes parodied in this Laurence Clark video. In mitigation, Auggie himself says:

“I wasn’t even sure why I was getting this medal, really.

No, that’s not true. I knew why.

It’s like people you see sometimes, and you can’t imagine what it would be like to be that person, whether it’s somebody in a wheelchair or somebody who can’t talk. Only, I know that I’m that person to other people, maybe to every single person in that whole auditorium.

To me, though, I’m just me. An ordinary kid.

But hey, if they want to give me a medal for being me, that’s OK. I’ll take it. I didn’t destroy a Death Star or anything…”

Many of us said that we felt that the attitudes of the children to Auggie were simply unrealistic: they just weren’t mean enough. This was, we felt, particularly true of Summer. We all agreed that the most painful moment of the book was Jack’s betrayal of Auggie, and several of us commented that this felt very real. Others commented that the “Plague” was a great way to convey the other children’s initial refusal to accept Auggie.

In the context of the question of sentimentality, we spoke about changing attitudes to disability (or disfigurement). In many 19th Century children’s books disability was the “responsibility” of the person who was disabled (often caused by a moral misjudgment) who was also, often with the encouragement of another child, “redeemed” morally and physically. But in Wonder, the “responsibility” belongs to the other characters, and their morality is revealed by their attitude to the disabled (or disfigured) character. I wrote about sight- and hearing-impaired characters in children’s books in this blog post last summer, and one of us brought along this exploration of the subject.

We asked ourselves if we had different standards, where didacticism and sentimentality (and we saw these as linked in this book – the happy outcome was essential to the moral lesson) were concerned in adult books as opposed to children’s books. We felt we did. We broadly agreed that didacticism and sentimentality were more acceptable in children’s books than in adult books. This is interesting, given that this book is being spoken of as a “cross-over” book. I’ve written about the particular moral responsibilities of children’s book publishers in this blog post. Some of us – particularly those of us who work with children – said that the book was a useful “tool for discussion” with children, and one of us emphasised the degree to which Auggie’s disfigurement could be read as a metaphor for any kind of “outsiderness”.

We also asked ourselves how far our view of the book as “sentimental” was culturally determined: was there something British about our reaction: some of us said we’d cried at certain points in the story but felt embarrassed or rather ashamed of ourselves for this response, for example. Luckily, there was an American in our group, so we had another perspective to draw on. She, like us, did feel that the sentiment of the book was particularly American, that it was more acceptable to express emotion openly in American culture than it was to do so in the United Kingdom, and that this attitude shapes writing.

STRUCTURAL FLAWS?

The second aspect of the book that many of us criticised was the structure. Some of us liked the multiple narrative voices (though several of us admitted to being sorry to “lose” Auggie’s voice when the narrative first transitioned to Via). But we all felt that some voices were more successful than others. Many of us thought that the story would have been better told without Summer (who we felt was “too saintly” anyway), Justin and Miranda, and thought that the plot points that they delivered (it’s Summer who hints to Jack why Auggie is angry with him) could have been delivered differently. That leaves Auggie, Via and Jack. I do think that the structure of the novel (and I sketched the rough diagram below), in which the narrative is taken forward by one voice, before the next voice backtracks to a previous point in the story, is a challenging one, and it’s a real tribute to R J Palacio that she managed to maintain the pace of this story through this “two-steps-forward-one-step-back” storytelling.

The zig-zag narrative timeline of the story

Discussion of the split narrative led to discussions about individual characters’ narrative arcs or journeys. We agreed that Auggie’s emotional journey was simple: he overcame his anxieties and embraced the world. Some of us felt that he was rather passive: a character to whom things happened, rather than an agent himself (and perhaps this ties in to the question of attitudes to disability, above). I sketched a rough Auggie-ometer (below), using Auggie’s own numerical system to convey his level of happiness, and, for a lot of the book, it does seem to hover around 5. The character many of us were really interested in was Jack, and one of us, at least, felt that there was much more to get out of his story. Some of us questioned that central position of the play in Via’s story, and wanted to hear more about her conflicting emotions about being the sibling of someone who absorbed and drew so much attention.

The Auggie-ometer

Some of us felt that the book started better than it ended, and several of us commented on how precipitate and perfect the ending was as the denouement unfolded rapidly following the climactic attack that Auggie suffers when the school is away (and we spoke about whether it was a “cheat” to take the action out of the school to create this climax). Auggie is accepted, he wins his prize, his nemesis (Julian) leaves the school… and the family gets a replacement dog. All within the space of forty pages.

We were split on the success of the central section of the novel, where the voices fall away, and we have, in the Christmas/New Year school holiday, an exchange of emails and texts and Facebook messages. Some of us felt that it was a problem that these weren’t “owned” by a voice, and didn’t like the lack of clarity as to who knew the contents of the emails. Which of the narrators, if any, for example, have access to Julian’s mother’s email?

Finally, we were also split on whether the author takes too long – a good 80 pages – to tell us what Auggie looks like. Some of us felt that it was fine to go with Auggie’s “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse”, while some of us wanted the description that we finally get earlier.

What do you think of Wonder, and of the points we raised? You can tell us here or on Twitter (@nosycrow, with hashtag #NCGKids), but it would be even better if you would contribute to the comments here

Next month’s book is A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness. We’ll write more about it shortly.

This first reading group was, I am sorry to say, massively oversubscribed, but if you would like to join us, or, as it may turn out, join the waiting list for July 11 and beyond (we’re holding this on the second Thursday of every month), then please email tom@nosycrow.com.

Join in with our first Reading Group tonight

Tom — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:51:48 GMT

Tonight we’re hosting our first ever Reading Group here at the Crow’s Nest – and we’d love for you to take part. We’ll be discussing Wonder, by R.J. Palacio, the winner of this year’s Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in the 5 – 12 category, and as well as the physical event taking place here, there’ll be several online discussions taking place (we hope!) simultaneously.

We’ve partnered with The Guardian, who are hosting an online forum for discussion for everyone who’d like to talk about the book – leave your comments here (there are some great ones already) and check back tonight, where there’ll be contributions and updates from all of us here as well.

You can also join in on Twitter with the #NCGKids hashtag, where there’s already been a lively discussion about whether Wonder counts as a “crossover” book.

And you can leave comments here as well, if you have any thoughts about the book or the event!

We’re already planning our next reading group event, which will take place on July 11 – if you’d like to attend and haven’t already expressed interest, email tom@nosycrow.com.

A surprise for Little Red Riding Hood

Tom — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:35:41 GMT

Next month will be the App Store’s fifth birthday – and on Monday, our Little Red Riding Hood app played a very small part in the celebrations!

Our eagle-eyed publishing co-ordinator Mary has just spotted that the icon for Little Red Riding Hood was featured in a collage of apps which formed a giant number five in a slide during Apple CEO Tim Cook’s speech at the World Wide Developer Conference on Monday. You can see it above – Little Red Riding Hood is on the right hand side, just above the word “years”. Here it is closer-up (apologies for the low-resolution):

We’re absolutely thrilled by the recognition – out of over a million app developers now making content for the iPad and iPhone, it’s wonderful to see Little Red Riding Hood, and the work of small, independent publishers like us, acknowledged in this (very exciting!) way.

If you’re interested, you can watch Tim Cook’s entire speech online here. And here’s the trailer for Little Red Riding Hood:

Here’s Little Red Riding Hood on the App Store.

So thank you to Apple, and here’s to the next five years!