Augsburg Fortress, the publishing arm of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, will launch a trade imprint for children, Sparkhouse Family, on August 4.
The inaugural list will include six picture books, three illustrated Bibles, and eight animated videos. Sparkhouse Family is an extension of the publishing house’s sparkhouse division, which provides faith formation resources for children, teens, and adults in faith community settings.
Sparkhouse Family products will start with established brands already in use in church classrooms, with plans to expand. “We’ll be branching out into new things in the future,” said Elizabeth Dingmann Schneider, senior project manager at sparkhouse. More titles will follow in October 2015 and February 2016.
Schneider said the experience of developing books for young readers in church settings would help the house to enter a competitive children’s trade market. “We have a number of years of great feedback from kids in congregational settings,” she said. “We really saw a lot of appeal for kids to encounter these types of story books in the home setting as well.”
Jill Braithwaite has been hired as director of product development for the Sparkhouse Family imprint. Braithwaite formerly led product development at both Capstone and Red Line Editorial. More information about the launch list is available here.
