Children's Features | ||||||||||
Letter from London Julia Eccleshare -- 10/30/00 A new company debuts, a bestselling author switches houses and Narnia turns 50
New Publisher Hatches This SeasonCelebrating the launch of its first list of titles this month, The Chicken House is a new company publishing for "free-range" children. Best known as the man who discovered J.K. Rowling in the early days of Bloomsbury Children's Books, Chicken House publisher Barry Cunningham is creating a list that is "imaginative, fun, sometimes surprising but always child-centred, in a mix of exciting and different formats." The Chicken House is the third children's list that Cunningham has started in the last five years (Bloomsbury and Element Books came first), but his enthusiasm for innovation remains bright. "Our trademark is that it's got to be new--new authors and new illustrators, or old authors and illustrators doing a new thing, and new formats of nonfiction." The first novel of the list is Spellfall by Katherine Roberts, whom Cunningham discovered at Element. Roberts's first novel, Song Quest, won the Branford Boase Award for best first novel of 2000. Other launch titles include a new nonfiction series, Fun Kits, which have already attracted worldwide sales. Backing for The Chicken House comes from Cunningham himself and from Egmont Holdings. Egmont will handle print buying, U.K. sales distribution, warehousing and European rights, while the small Chicken House team remains in charge of all creative publishing, overseas customers and U.S. rights. Brian Jacques Chooses New HouseBestselling author Brian Jacques has moved from Hutchinson, part of the Random House group, to Puffin in the U.K. in a major deal designed to make the most of a coordinated global marketing campaign led by Penguin Putnam in the States.
Puffin has contracted for a non-Redwall novel, The Castaways of the Flying Dutchman, due out next March in the U.S. and the U.K., and three future Redwall novels. Puffin managing director Philippa Milnes-Smith said, "Jacques hasn't been as big here as he deserves to be or as big, relatively, as he is in the U.S. This is our opportunity." The publisher plans to grow Jacques as an adult crossover author by adopting promotional idea that have proved successful in the U.S. Jacques's backlist will stay with Hutchinson, which will also publish the 14th Redwall title, Taggerung, in autumn 2001. Losing Jacques is a blow to Hutchinson and Random House, which had published him for the last 14 years. Publisher Gill Evans confirmed Random House's continued commitment to Jacques and the Redwall series. "We have ongoing publishing and tie-in publishing as well as a big backlist, and we will still work in close cooperation with Penguin Putnam. We have always been ambitious for Brian here and he has left us reluctantly in order to consolidate his position in the English-language market." Anniversary Plans for Narnia
HarperCollins U.S. and U.K. have also jointly created www.narnia.com, a new Web site devoted to the Chronicles and to C.S. Lewis. Pleasant Company U.K. Closes Up ShopPleasant Company, which announced the closing of its London publishing operation in August with the axing of 15 employees, has now shut down completely. The closure came only a month before a planned launch in the U.K., which had been set for September. Initially managing director Ingrid Selberg had been retained to control the foreign rights for all Pleasant Company titles and especially the European co-editions of the Angelina Ballerina titles. She has now parted company with Pleasant Company. "The closing of Pleasant Company in the U.K. was part of Mattel's cost-cutting exercise," Selberg said. "What's regrettable is that everyone was thrilled with both the book and the doll side of what we were producing and the market research throughout Europe had been very positive."
Smarties Shortlist AnnouncedThe 2000 Nestlé Smarties Book Prize is wide open again after having been won for three consecutive years by J.K. Rowling for her first three Harry Potter titles. (Last year, Rowling took her future titles out of the competition on the grounds that Harry had grown up too much to fit the Smarties profile.) The shortlisted titles are: for 5 and under: Husherbye by John Burningham (Cape); Max by Bob Graham (Walker); Me and My Cat? by Satoshi Kitamura (Andersen); for 6-8: Beware of the Storybook Wolves by Lauren Child (Hodder); The Red and White Spotted Handkerchief by Tony Mitton, illus. by Peter Bailey (Scholastic); Lizzie Zipmouth by Jacqueline Wilson, illus. by Nick Sharratt (Young Corgi); for 9-11: Arthur the Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland (Orion); The Other Side of Truth by Beverley Naidoo (Puffin); and The Wind Singer by William Nicholson (Mammoth). The three books in each category will now be judged by a panel of children. The gold medal winners will be announced on November 29. |
Letter from London
Oct 30, 2000
A version of this article appeared in the 10/30/2000 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: