E-LENDING

There was an unexpected whisper of optimism at the All Party Parliamentary Writers Group party hosted by Lord Dubs at the House of Lords on 18 June.

Libraries Minister, Ed Vaizey, was not giving anything away but his look held the promise of something good. And that was, we all hoped, an increase in PLR (Public Lending Right) funding which would lead to legislation to extend PLR to e-loans under the 2010 Digital Economy Act . With proper legislation in place, authors and rights holders would be compensated for library loans of audio books and e-books. 

    None of this would come about without the tireless work of ALCS (Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society) and PLR and the lobbying of authors like Joanna Trollope who talked at the party about the need for all authors to be properly paid for their work, listing the industries that rely on us: publishers, printers, libraries, some of the film industry, wholesalers and distributers to name a few.

   
    I had gone to this party thinking it would be all doom and gloom, what with the recent demise of PLR, but even there, the news was not as bad as we had all feared. Although PLR will be run by the British Library, the Stockton-on- Tees office will remain and all its kind, author- friendly staff will keep their jobs, while the present Registrar, Jim Parker, will oversee a smooth transfer before retirement in a year. We have so much to thank him for. So let's raise a glass to a more hopeful future for the authors of e-books.

    

APPS AND EBOOKS

 Like many other author/illustrators of picture books, I’ve been approached by several different ebook/ app developers for stories. So, realising I needed to learn more about this whole business, I talked to Raphaella Serfaty who has been creating apps and ebooks with her sister Shulamit Serfaty-Engel for about 3 years and she has very kindly answered a few of my questions.

R: Yes, "Content" is the name of the game! There are many developers out there, who can create all these clever platforms to present and download ebooks. All they need now is content.
G: This is a dumb question but I’m not at all clear about the subtle differences between an app and an ebook. Perhaps you could give me a definition.
R: "App" is short for “application", as in software application — in other words, a software program.
An "app" typically refers to software used on a mobile device such as the Android, iPhone, iPad etc.
There are hundreds of thousands of apps available, ranging from maps and entertainment guides to business and games for children.
An ebook is an electronic book, which can be read on computers or on devices called ebook readers, such as Kindle.
So the difference between and app and an ebook would mainly be the level of interactivity - where an app is more like a game, while an ebook is more similar to a book.
G: But as the content of apps become more story led and an ebook more interactive won’t they end up roughly the same thing or do you think they are going in different directions? 
R: There are also "interactive books", which are a merging of the two: they're still based on stories, but more playful than "plain" ebooks. In the past 3 years, our publisher, Jolly Giraffe has published dozens of apps and ebooks for children.
Some of the projects involved converting our old books (which have been published as physical books) into ebooks. In other project we have created new texts and images according to well planned storyboards for new apps.

I'm In! - Traveling

 

G:  When I work on a physical picture book for a publisher I create a text, illustrations and cover image and then hand over to the publisher’s designer who deals with typography, all the scanning and preparation of files for production. What is the equivalent workload for you when working with an app or ebook producer?

R: New processes and way of thinking.
Creating an app was something new to us, both technically and conceptually. In addition to creating texts and images, as we used to do in our physical books, we now had to produce and manage many other aspects, such as sound recording, animation and the whole logic of the interactive elements seen and touched on the screen.

We had to plan and create a very detailed storyboard which would represent everything that could possible appear on each screen, in a way that would be clear to the developers.
So many devices! One of the problems of creating apps and ebooks is the wide range of devices available; each has their own screen format and resolution. Adjusting the images and design to all available formats added lots of time and effort to the project. And new devices and format keep coming out all the time!
G: And remuneration? I receive an advance and then royalties for a physical book. Afterwards there is PLR, copyright monies from ALCS and DACS and royalties from overseas editions. What happens with apps and ebooks?

Grandpa's Pockets

R:Working with Apple:
Before getting any payment, you need to have your app at the appstore so that people can see it and download it. Submitting an app to the appstore involves a long process of opening an account, filling in lots of information and eventually submitting your app for review by the Apple team. Once they approve your app, it is launched to the appstore and you can follow downloads and purchases. Apple takes 30% of the app price and you get paid monthly for downloads. Normally you would see a peak of sales in the first few weeks, when the app gets exposure, and then the selling curve goes down.
In our case, we still get downloads daily, and have covered our original investment, but I can’t say we are making a living out of this.

G: Would marketing help?
R: Marketing and promotion is a tricky issue when it comes to apps. It hasn’t been proven that investing money in marketing apps actually increases traffic and downloads. On the other hand, many apps, such as Angry Birds, that hadn’t put anything into marketing have made a fortune by being viral. In many cases it is a mouth to ear thing, where people see something they like on their friend’s device and download it.

Yet, what we did find effective is “Facebook App Parties”, which are virtual parties, usually hosted by facebook pages dedicated to educational apps for children (such as MomsWithApps, iPhoneMom, TechnologyInEducation and many more). These facebook page review and recommend apps daily and every few weeks announce an app party, where all app creators reduce prices on a certain date and parents can visit these pages and “grab the bargains”…
G: It sounds like the sales! Thank you so much, Raphaella for giving an insight into the world of apps and ebooks. Good luck with them. I hope you continue to get a great many downloads!

Here's the You Tube  clip to Grandpa's Pockets

INSPIRATION BEHIND THE NEXT PICTURE BOOK

Baby Liv, born on 17 March 2013 is the inspiration behind the next Plaister Press picture book.

Her mind is still a blank page but gradually it will be filled with images and words and among them the new story that I shall dedicate to her.

GUEST ILLUSTRATOR: CAROL THOMPSON

This conversation with Carol Thompson follows on from my 3 February 2013 post remembering Jan Ormerod (1946-2013) a much loved picture book author-illustrator whose first book, Sunshine won the Mother Goose Award.  Carol, also a successful picture book author - illustrator worked with Jan on two books Molly and her Dad and Looking for Rex. 

G: Molly and her Dad was the first book you illustrated for Jan, can you tell me how it came about?

C: Firstly, I would say that MOLLY came out of an acquaintance that grew into friendship. As we learned more about one another - our families, things that were important, I think Jan could see that I could be the illustrator for her Molly text, a tender story about an absent Dad and the small girl who get's to know him again. Based on Jan's own observation, the themes were of loss, a sense of where we belong, who we're like and where we fit in the world - handled with a light touch - and full of fun.

    Jan needed time out from illustrating her own texts - and with her usual insight, could see that another illustrator could bring a different experience and aesthetic.
I had been involved with adoption - so Molly's situation (who she was like, where she fitted in, who did she look like, wanting to have a Dad like the other kids), strongly resonated with me - but from a different viewpoint. I sketched and drew layouts, made up a dummy - and took Molly to Bologna. On first showing, Molly was bought by Neil Porter at Roaring Brook Press - YAY - we did it on our own! Then subsequently by Little Hare - Jan's Australian publisher. I'm still touched when I look at the pictures of Molly - trying to make sense of her new dad.

 

 

 Jan just hits the right note. She said very little on this one - liked the early sketches so much, she encouraged me to keep their looseness, be brave and not be tempted to 'tighten up'. 'Stick with it - and keep breathing'! - her favourite phrase.

G: Can you tell me what medium you used in Molly and her Dad?

 C: I made pencil sketches, and used charcoal for tone and texture - on layout paper. Then I pushed each of the drawings through my ancient photocopier - darkening the tones and either enlarging or reducing the image. This subtly changes the line and adds halftones and texture in a quite unpredictable way - to me, this is the exciting thing about the process. You never quite know what the result will be- it can be a lovely surprise, or, print it again! I then have a series of b/w prints on copy paper. These prints I cut and pasted into a Dummy - with the text in place, so I had something to show to publishers. I print my original drawings again for the final artwork,  but using a quality smooth surface Fabriano - not too heavy (the Machine doesn't like it!) but strong enough to take washes . I draw on these prints with a dip pen and ink or pencil. For colour, I use watercolour - inks - crayon, pastel, and occasionally collage.

The unusual thing about MOLLY is that most of the final art has been used straight from the original Dummy; I didn't re-draw - except where I was making changes. Jan encouraged me to keep the looseness and vitality of the original drawings - so we did. I'm always tempted to tidy up and end with a more finished image -but this time I didn't, they resonate with the emotional tone of the story - and my own first tentative drawings and response to Jan's text. The colour palette is quite spare - the tonal depth being in the underlying black/white prints.
The small child, Molly, is in the deepest red with the blackest hair - a smudge of colour on each cheek. She stands out - a strong graphic image on each page, the colour a metaphor for her feisty character and vulnerability.

G: Fascinating hearing about the process to get the images so loose and vital.

How soon after this did you start work on Looking for Rex?

C: REX was our second book together; very different to Molly. Jan handed over the text one day at her house, 'see what you think, no pressure. Take as long as you want to decide'. It took me no time at all to grab it and go! 'Yes please'!
    A family want their elderly Gramps to get a dog. They feel he needs company and is stuck in a rut - so they set out to find just the right dog for Gramps - resulting in hilarious doggy pics, as they encounter every type of canine.

Again, based on a family that Jan had observed in this dilema.
But there was an underlying thread of loss, loneliness and increasing frailty that I wanted to subtly bring out.  Jan agreed. In fact she made very few suggestions, other than getting rid of text when she saw my sketches at different stages. If you're showing it - you don't need to say it.
It was an exciting fruitful collaboration - and we were still friends!
REX had already been bought by Little Hare Aus - so this time there was no plan to find a publisher - we had one.

G: I love your jacket image for Looking for Rex.
It must be wonderful working with a friend in this way. You must miss Jan a lot and the collaboration you had.  

C: Although we'd completed Looking for Rex -Jan's sudden death has meant that we won't have the fun of taking Rex 'on the road' - to Bologna, into schools and libraries. We'd talked about it - Jan joked about her sequel Living with Rex - Life after Rex.
I can't tell her that Rex will be in China, Korea. One of her first wordless picture books Sunshine, has been selected for the Silent Library project in Lampedusa, Italy.
There's a Jan shaped hole in my life - which will probably never go away - nor would I want it to.

NURIT SERFATY: AN ISRAELI PERSPECTIVE ON PICTURE BOOKS

Nurit Serfaty is a renowned Israeli illustrator whose whole family are involved with children’s books. We became friends when she first came to visit her daughter and granddaughters who live opposite me in Cambridge. Since then, we meet every time she comes over to talk about children’s books. We discovered we had so much in common; besides both having overseas grandchildren we're both illustrators running small publishing companies and do a lot of school visits. In this interview with Nurit, I want to share some of her lovely images done in a great variety of media and find out more about the fascinating differences between the children’s book world of Israel and that of the UK.

 The Wedding written by Nurit Zarchi     Watercolours 

G: Of course the greatest difference between your books and ours is that yours read from right to left which feels very strange to us.

N: Yes, we read and write from right to left, and in a way, I guess we also “illustrate from right to left” - this is something that is done in an unconscious way, just as you probably “illustrate from left to right” - when a character leaves his home and go on a journey, he would walk from right to left, in a Hebrew book (and probably the other way, in an English book). So when translating a book into English, we would sometimes flip the illustrations as well.

 

G: And the other way round too, I suppose: an Israeli co edition of a UK picture book might need its illustrations flipped round so they read pictorially from right to left.

I have another question: Israel is a much smaller country than the UK, what impact does this have on your children’s publishing industry?
 

 

Guava Juice written by Tamar Addar          Ink on paper

N: Not only is Israel a small country, about 50% of the population does not buy books very often (mainly Arab societies and orthodox Jewish, who have their own markets). So we are actually talking about even a smaller number of people (There are 8 million Israeli citizens).

    Yet, Israel has a very live and active book industry. According to the data I found online, every year there are about 6000 new titles (according to the national library of Israel every 80 minutes a new title is published), out of which 600 children's books.  About 34 million books are sold every year, 17 million of which are fiction and non fiction.

    Israelis like buying their own books and "own" them, and until recently borrowing books in libraries was not very common. Also, in Israel most children’s books are printed as hard covers. It probably has to do with the way books are marketed or the way the Israeli reader is used to see his books- soft covers are mainly for notebooks and activity books. If a picture book is printed as soft cover it won’t be treated as “high quality” book.

 

Under Grandpa's Umbrella written by Raphaella Serfaty       Acrylic on paper

G: So there's a lot book purchasing going on. Does this mean, in Israel, it is easier for mid-list authors and illustrators to earn a living than in the UK where it is pretty difficult?

N: Although there's a need for new children's books all the time, authors and illustrators are not well compensated. The agreements signed with publishers are very strict - some times you get royalties only after the first edition (about 2000 copies) is sold (this is mostly relevant to authors, as illustrators are normally paid a one-time fee and not royalties). New authors and illustrators might be asked to pay some of the printing and marketing fees.

     This is why I, along with my husband, Lavish, and our two daughters - Shulamit and Raphaella decided to establish our own publish company. Jolly Giraffe.

 

Where Are the Clouds Going to? written by Lea Tzur     Papercuts

G: I’d love to hear more about your publishing company and the physical books you publish - I'll devote another post to your apps.
 

N: Our publishing company found the niche of preschool visits where I run my visits and also sells books. Preschools have budget for birthday gifts and end of the year events (like you have for Christmas here), and we sometimes manage to market our books as an idea for these occasions. In these cases a preschool might buy 30 copies of a book. 

 

Animal Tales  written by Ayala Yiftach     Digital illustration

 

We publish our own books, which we write, illustrate and design, as well as other authors’ books.

I would say half of the manuscripts we published are children’s books and half are more like Memoirs. Israel is a relatively young country and people feel they need to tell their personal stories - whether it’s to share childhood memories from their mother land, to recount how they survived the Holocaust, to tell how they immigrated to Israel or to commemorate a personal event.

G: You are illustrating a children's book about the Holocaust. Can you say a little about it? 

N:  It’s a story about a little girl who survived the war together with her mother. The author of the story gave me a photo album with pictures of her family. I thought it would be nice to integrate the photos in the illustrations, making a collage of my illustrations and the original photos. For the illustrations themselves I used watercolors and then added some airbrush effects on photoshop.

G: These pictures are still at the rough stage, but they are so full of feeling, I know this is going to be a moving and powerful book, Nurit. Thank you so much for allowing us an early glimpse of it and also for sharing this perspective on Israeli picture books.

 

 

 

AMANDA HALL

 

I've known Amanda Hall a long time and have always admired her work. So it's great to see her books doing well and her illustrations selling in the Chris Beetles Gallery. As my blog guest, I shall be asking Amanda about her books and illustrations and I'd like to start by asking about exhibiting and selling artwork; something illustrators can do but writers can't.

 

G:   What is it like exhibiting at the Chris Beetles Gallery, Amanda?

A: The Chris Beetles Gallery has been in Ryder Street, St James's, since 1975. Sited just off London's Piccadilly, it specialises in illustration as well as traditional British water colours, oils and sculptures, and there is now another gallery for photographs in Swallow Street. I've been on this wonderful gallery's mailing list for many years and originally met Chris Beetles in the mid 90s, after my book The Barefoot Book of Animal Tales  (Barefoot Books) .

 

  

 I popped into the gallery a few years ago (having just bought a hat from Lock and Co. nearby!) and was delighted to find that Chris remembered my work and was interested in seeing what I had been up to during the intervening years. Although I believe he had looked at images on my website, he always likes to see the original illustrations, so I made a couple of trips down from Cambridge to show him my current work. He very much liked my illustrations for The Lion Classic Aesop's Fables (Lion Children's Books) 

and decided to include most of the originals in his 2011 show THE ILLUSTRATORS: The British Art of Illustration, the winter exhibition he stages between November and January every year. My pictures have been met with enthusiasm by the public and have continued to sell from the gallery's website, Chris Beetles . This last year, many of the images from my most recent publication -The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers) were included in his 2012 winter show and have also been met with interest by the art-buying public.
 So, to answer your question, Gillian--it's great to have this very special outlet for my original artwork!

      

G: Your illustrations obviously bowled Chris Beetles over, Amanda. But perhaps the hat did too! I 'll have to invest in a hat like your fur one see if it does the trick for me. I’d love to know more about how you go about doing your illustrations.

 

 

A: Like a lot of illustrators I have evolved my own approach to create my illustrations. I began using pencil crayons at college, and there was a real vogue for using crayon at the time. I also worked in water colour, but only started putting the two together later. I also explored crosshatching, working in black ink for the very dark Gothic effect I was after at the time.

 

Now I usually work on stretched water colour paper with a smooth surface. I begin with pencil lines, based on the design in my rough (approved by the client), which I then paint into using water colour inks. I prefer these to solid water colour paints, as they are cleaner, purer colours. Once that stage is complete and dry, I rub out all the pencil lines and start working further into the image either with pencil crayon, gouache or acrylic inks and paints, depending on the effect I want for the particular commission. This final stage takes a long time, as I build up layers of colour slowly and carefully.

G: Thank you, Amanda, for sharing all this and good luck with your new project which I gather is top secret.
The roughs and corresponding artwork above belongs to:

The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau
Written by Michelle Markel
US Publisher: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
Year of publication: 2012
Hardcover picturebook
34 pages
Ages 5-9
ISBN: 978-0-8028-5364-6

Meanwhile, I'm off to buy a fur hat as winter doesn't seem to be ending this year.

 

TOP 10 THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU'RE 10

Top 10 things to do before you’re 10 according to The Primary Times are: 

1. Build sandcastles on the beach
2. Go to the zoo
3. Learn to ride a bike
4. Go to a theme park
5. Go sledging
6. Bake a cake
7. Swim in the sea
8. Camp under the stars
9. Be cheered on at school sports day
10. Eat round a camp fire

Interestingly the list is breaking away from today’s stringent health and safety rules.  I’d like to add number 11: Make a dam.  That’s what these little boys loved doing.

 One of them told me exactly how they built their dams and I put it all in the book We're Going to Build a Dam

 

 

Things I did as before I was 10:

make a den in the woods, play on a raft on a pond and make up a story and illustrate it!

Any other suggestions?