Illustration Masterclass: Ways into Publishing

This week author/illustrator Shana Nieberg-Suschitzky reports on our recent Illustration Masterclass event in London, covering the different opportunities for artists and writers in publishing today, hosted by Gillian McClure.  



On 28th June I attended yet another brilliant Illustrator Masterclass, called Ways into Publishing. This was given by the inspirational Gillian McClure and organised and run by our lovely Anne-Marie Perks.

Gillian McClure is a very experienced published writer and illustrator, who has experienced being in print in three very different ways since her initial success. First, Gillian was published through the traditional mainstream method, from 1974 until 2008. Then in 2010 Gillian, due to changes in the publishing world, she chose to start her own publishing company, Plaister Press. And most recently in 2012, Gillian’s company has become part of a group called Authorization, which gives extra help and support to self-publishers or small publishers.

Gillian devised the workshop to explore all of these publishing possibilities so that we might be better informed of our options. The event was divided into two sections.
In the first part she explained the advantages and the disadvantages of each publishing path. This was followed by Gillian showing us the sales and costing figures of producing a picture book, which drummed home the hard-core reality behind the business of making picture books.  

In the second part we were separated into small groups to explore and discuss each of our projects, work out how we could best sell our concept and where it would fit in the market. Finally three of us pitched to the whole group and Gillian gave us feedback that would help all of us think of how to present and analyse what’s the best way forward for each of our particular proposals.

To summarize the choices, looking at the traditional publishing route, the main benefit that stood out for me was the kudos of being on those Publishers' lists. And although there were plenty more benefits, the disadvantages can include: that even once you’re a published author/illustrator, you may still be waiting for a long time for responses; or that there can be a lack of commitment or support regarding marketing depending on your sales results.

With regards to the self-publishing route, the main advantages are that you are much more in control, being fully committed to your own project. You can make decisions on future print runs; choose directly which reviewers to send to, and form direct relationships with stockists and bookstores. The disadvantages include having to self-fund; having to do all of the marketing and business side on top of the creating; and having the stigma of self-publishing, which, though less prevalent today than it once was, still lingers.

And finally, there is the hybrid route, which is being part of an umbrella organisation (though this may only be able to happen if you are already published or have your own company). This seems to offer a great opportunity of having the freedoms gained by being self-published, whilst being part of an endorsed community, which offers business and marketing support. However, the disadvantages are that they will take 35% approx. of net profits and it’s still a very new business concept, so it’s not as tried and tested as the traditional route.

This was a fantastic workshop, which provided both published and unpublished writers the opportunity to gain vital knowledge from the wealth of Gillian’s experiences. It makes clear how hard it is to make money from this industry, however, I don’t think that any of us are, or should be, interested in this career solely for the money. Though we want and need to be paid fairly, the core desire of anyone creating tales and beautiful pictures is to give and take pleasure from telling our stories and to be appreciated. Gillian has shown us several possibilities of how to make this happen. 

It was generous and brave of Gillian to share this information with us and I would like to thank her on behalf of all of those present. I would thoroughly recommend attending if Gillian was to give this talk again.
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Shana Nieberg-Suschitzky aka Shanarama creates stories and illustrations for both picture books and older children’s fiction, though she has a few other tricks up her sleeve. In 2012 she won the Undiscovered Voices Competition for illustrating and is a proud SCBWI member.

THE UNIQUE SELLING POINT

Harry's Horse dummy

Generating a following and identifying a specific market for your book can be a challenging process. This week, author and illustrator Gillian McClure examines her experiences running a small press.



It was when my editor phoned to ask if I would help her come up with a unique selling point for the new picture book she was taking to an acquisitions meeting the next day, Harry’s Horse, that I realised a nice story and pictures were not enough to see a picture book into print; a business criterion needed to be met and I was going to have to review my way of thinking. In the end the book my editor wanted for her art series never got published as she was unable to convince the sales team. That was back in 2009. 

    A year later, I started Plaister Press in order to publish my own picture books. The decision was primarily a creative one - I wanted to proceed with a book rather than run a business. Luckily, the first Plaister Press book, Selkie, was a reprint. It had been on the National Curriculum and had a good sales track record. Just as well, for I still wasn’t thinking too much about the selling strengths of books.

 It was only after two years of Waterstones signing events that I really started to see things from a business perspective and realised that the second Plaister Press title, The Little White Sprite was quiet with no bright, in-your-face cover to act as its selling point. Memories of past letters of rejection ending with, ‘a little too quiet for us,’ rang in my ears. I needed to come up with a unique selling point for this book and learn how to get my message across if I was going to convince people to buy it:

 “Yes it is quiet,” I would say to customers (parents, grandparents and teachers.)  “Ideal for reading aloud at bed time with a gentle rhythm and rhyme and soft coloured pictures.” I would read them the opening pages plus the final one and then, to make doubly sure, point out that the theme of The Little White Sprite - a child going through a hole in a tree to a magical world inside - was one that would be encountered later in books like Alice in Wonderland where a child falls down a rabbit hole into another world. Teachers, looking to inspire the imaginations of their Year 1 pupils, liked this and parents and grandparents sometimes would say The Little White Sprite reminded them of a book they’d had as a child, Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree. It was evident customers like to see a new and unknown book in the context of books they already know about.

So there was a market for The Little White Sprite but it was not going to be a mass market and it was going to need some dedicated selling to shift copies.

    As the Plaister Press list gradually lengthened, increasingly, the business side of me would ask the creative side to identify the selling strengths of each new project right from the start. It was obvious now why my editor could not get Harry’s Horse through the acquisitions meeting.  It was a story based on a picture hanging in Parham House, but unfortunately Parham House is not part of the National Trust so the market for this title would have been limited to just one shop instead of the many National Trust shops. I too have rejected that title even though I’m fond of the story and pictures.

  Reviews can often help identify a selling point as they highlight what aspect of the book appeals. Here are two reviews of the fourth Plaister Press title We’re Going to Build a Dam:

Carousel review

Teach Nursery review

When I’m selling this book I now talk about beach holidays and hazy purple and yellow beach colours. This works even in the winter when we’re all yearning for summery outdoor activities.

 The fifth Plaister Press title, Flood was published after a winter of floods in 2014. I wondered whether that theme, along with the ink splattered, splashy pictures, would be its unique selling point.

Flood was taken in dummy form to the Bologna Book Fair and there received a conflicting response from Japan. One Japanese publisher liked the story but wouldn’t consider buying it because it was too soon after the 2011 tsunami while another thought it would be just the thing post tsunami. The unique selling point of this book obviously lies elsewhere – perhaps ‘teamwork and animal characters cooperating in the face of adversity.’

 Despite one’s best efforts, however, publishing a book, whether for children or adults is a lottery; nobody really knows which book is going to succeed and some of the classics have had their selling points completely misunderstood or ignored by publishers: the following rejections are taken from Rotten Rejections by Bill Henderson.

Animal Farm - 1945 by George Orwell
‘It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.’
The Time Machine – 1895 by HG Wells
‘It’s not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.’

The Good Earth- 1931 Pearl Buck
‘Regret the American public is not interested in anything on China.’

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On 28 June Gillian  will be leading an SCBWI workshop from a business perspective, Ways into Publishing, for writers and illustrators. Participants will be encouraged to look at their picture book projects, old and new, with a view to selling them to a publisher or directly to the customer if self publishing.

Her official website is here.

Picture Book Basics - Graphic Design

After the artwork is created the next stage to consider is the text and the design layout. For a commissioned title this might all be handled by your publisher. Nevertheless, it's important to know some of the processes involved. This essay in Book Basics has been entirely put together by book creator and independent publisher Gillian McClure in consultation with her graphic designer Lisa Kirkham, experts in the process of designing and laying out books for publication. 

GRIDS

When you start work on the images for a picture book you will need to have grids to work from in order to make sure your layouts fit precisely the dimension of the page. A book/typographic designer can create these using a page layout program such as Indesign. The type then needs to be added to the layouts on the grid and adjusted to fit the area allocated to it. For this you will benefit from having a good knowledge of typographic design and fonts, or working with a typographic designer. Here is a grid of the front and back cover for a picture book 220x 270 with flaps allowing for an extra 1mm width and 6mm height. 

TYPOGRAPHIC DEFINITIONS 

Font. Traditionally speaking, a font refers to a type of one particular face and size. More commonly now it is used to mean any type. 

Typeface refers to a family of fonts: the roman, italic and bold of a particular design. When choosing a typeface you must consider the bolds and italics as well as the roman. It may be that while the roman is perfect for you, the italic looks wrong, or the bold may be too heavy. 

Serif font. Put simply, a serif font is one that has a small line attached to the end of a stroke of a letterform. For example, Times.

Sans serif is a font that does not have such a line, for example, Helvetica.

FONTS 

Here are examples of fonts used in some of my books: 

Stone Informal in Prickly Pig 1976. This typeface has been very popular for use in children’s books because it had an ‘infant’ (or single-story) ‘a’ which is often believed to be easier for children to read.

Nara – Lisa Kirkham’s own typeface. It is delicate and fits the gentle style of illustration and story of The Little White Sprite

and also the text frames at 70% opacity in Zoe’s Boat

Compendio used in We’re Going to Build a Dam. This was chosen because of its irregular line, which blends with the strong black ink line of the illustrations and the messy work of damming a stream 

Sabon is more traditional – good for a fable like Flood but still with a modern feel. It has a relatively high ‘x’ and therefore looks open and easy to read. Some fonts have a small ‘x’ height in relation to the whole letter.

Bully Girl was used for the title of Flood

TYPOGRAPHIC DESIGN 

Sara Fanelli was one of the first illustrators to create her own lettering, making type an integral part of the illustration.

Mythological Monsters. © Copyright Walker Books

Illustrators like Emily Gravett have followed in that tradition and had a lot of fun making the lettering part of the narrative as in Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears.

© Copyright Macmillan.

If possible, work closely with a typographic designer at the earliest planning stages of a picture book. Then, if the word count of your story is not big, the typeface, text and illustrations can become integral to the narrative.

 Rabbityness by Jo Empson. © Copyright Child’s Play.

It might not always be possible to do this when working for a traditional publisher with in-house designers but it can be really helpful if you are going down the self publishing route. Look for a typographic designer who specialises in picture book design and has an awareness of the reading eye movement so you can place the text correctly in your layouts without any confusion over the flow of the words. If possible, choose a typographic designer whose work seems compatible with your own and who you find inspiring to work with. Ideally you will be passing roughs and layouts to and fro until the typography and images all harmonise and feed seamlessly into the narrative. What you are trying to avoid is a typeface that is just for effect, gimmicky, or in-your-face. Here is a good example of typographic design that fits in well with the narrative and page design. 

Harry and the Jaggedy Daggers by Jan Fearnley. Copyright Egmont Press

SCANNING ARTWORK 

Once the artwork is completed, it will need to be scanned. This will all be done by the publisher’s designer. If you are self publishing your picture book, you will have to get it scanned yourself at a resolution of no lower than 300 dpi CMYK. You will need an A3 scanner or pay to have it done professionally. If you do your own scanning, you will also have to know how to do colour correction in photoshop to match up the colours of the scanned image with the original artwork. This can be tricky as RGB colours on the screen do not necessarily look the same as CMYK printed colours. So if your book is going to be printed overseas (which is much cheaper than in the UK) it’s advisable to ask a local printer to do some colour proofs to match with the artwork before the press-ready file is sent off as couriering back proof copies will be an extra cost and any changes made at proof stage, expensive. A sample of three different coloured spreads is usually sufficient to see if the colours of the book are true. 

Once you are happy with the colour balance of the scanned spreads, the typographic designer will drop in the typeface (according to the original grid design). Because you can create separate files at this stage – with or without type – there is the opportunity to be creatively free with type colour and design without causing too much added cost or problems with translation into other languages. 

 

COPYRIGHT PAGE

Here you will need: Copyright details, date, where the book is printed, Publisher’s logo and details, ISBN – bought and registered with Nielsens via Pub Web.  Hopefully there will be reprints of your books. You can add a way of telling which print run a book belongs to by adding a sequence of numbers that can easily be altered before each reprint. For example, 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. For your second print run, you just remove the number 1, and so on. 

BACK COVER & FLAPS 

You will need to buy a barcode. You can add a ‘shout’ sentence on the back cover – a review if you can get one at this stage  


Also reference to other books on the front and back cover flaps if your book has flaps. 

PROOF READING 

 It is vital to get a proof reader to check all the text before your book goes to print. If there’s a missed typo, there’s nothing you can do until a new edition is printed! 

PRESS READY FILES 

Once you have the press-ready file completed, it will be sent electronically to the printer according to a previously arranged schedule. Here is an example of one from a Chinese printer: 
PO with us ----- Feb 27

Payment in full with us ----- Mar 13

All files with us ----- Mar 13

Plotter out ----- Mar 20

All okay to print ----- Mar 27

Complete shipping instruction with us ----- Apr 7 

Bulk ex-works ----- Apr 24

ETA UK around ----- June 5 

TYPOGRAPHIC RIGHTS 

Finally, it’s worth remembering that if you want to self publish an out-of-print picture book where the rights have reverted to you, this does not include the typographic design rights. Your original publisher still holds these. So you will have to get your story re-typeset. This happened with Selkie. We used the same typeface Garamond but made changes to the line length; shortening it on this page to make it easier for a child’s eye to read. We were also able to improve on the colour making it closer to the original. 

 Doubleday edition 

Plaister Press edition

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 Gillian McClure is the creator of dozens of picture books for children, and former member of the Society of Authors CWIG committee. See her website here, and blog here. 

State of the Nation Panel: It's a Mad World

 By Katrina Charman

Nicola Morgan

The State of the Nation panel was held on Saturday morning at the conference, and was chaired by award-winning author, Nicola Morgan, sporting a pair of fabulous spiky red boots! The panel consisted of Imogen Cooper from the Golden Egg Academy, Templar's designer and paper engineer Nghiem Ta, picture book writer and founder of Plaister Press Gillian McClure, multi award-winning Young Adult author Teri Terry, and winner of the 2010 Brit Writers Awards, Catherine Cooper. 

The panel discussed how to avoid the pitfalls and make the most of the opportunities in publishing today. They were asked first of all to answer the question of where we are now in publishing.

Gillian McClure

Gillian McClure noted that she had seen many changes in publishing since the 1970's, and that there had been a shift in power in the 1990's from the editors to those in sales, marketing and rights. With the emergence of the global mass market, Gillian decided in 2010 to start up her own publishing company - Plaister Press, as a platform for her books to be free of the constraints of the global mass market. She has now been nominated for the Greenaway award, maybe a sign that self-publishing is coming of age.

Catherine Cooper

Catherine Cooper, a successful self-published author, moved on to be traditionally published after she won the Brit Writers Awards with her book, The Golden Acorn. She noted that being traditionally published has taken her to places she could never have imagined or have been able to visit, such as the London Book Fair, Frankfurt and also being able to sell foreign rights to her book. When you self-publish, she said, you can do what you want, but you have to sell yourself, nobody else is going to do it for you. One of the biggest changes she has noticed in the industry in the last four years is the introduction of the Kindle. It has changed what she does and how she does it, being able to produce interactive teachers notes to accompany her book, for example.

Teri Terry

Teri Terry said that you need to do what works for you. Using social media such as Facebook and Twitter as a virtual watercooler, if you enjoy what works online. She also said that it is okay to say "no" every now and then to a marketing/promotion request if it is not for you. She initially began engaging with reviewers and bloggers online but now engages a lot more with the actual readers. When asked what an author can do on social media, she replied that it is more important to have a book that is good - the writing is more important than social media.

Nghiem Ta

Nghiem Ta said that good quality work is a combination of good teamwork. (Nicola Morgan noted that some publishers have forgotten about the importance of the author within that team.) For Nghiem, the role of the author is to perform various functions to various degrees. For the books that she  produces through Templar, especially with design-led books, her role is similar to that of a film director - she puts everything in the right place, and the writer writes to fit. Her job is to make sure that the story is told in the best possible way. But, she said, it is the authors name on the front of the book and they have to make sure that they get their name out there.

Imogen Cooper

Imogen Cooper from the Golden Egg Academy noted that there has been a change in the authors that publishers are interested in now. She said that showing the ability to get out there and that you understand the market, and what is happening in the market place, is desirable. With a fall in the sales of physical books and an e-books plateau, publishers are having to look into other streams of income, from world rights, TV and film companies, gaming and audio. Novels need to be able to be translated into exciting new ideas, and so the novel has to be focussed. The central concept is really important.



Nicola Morgan then opened up to questions from the audience. 
One question asked was 'Who are the new gatekeepers in publishing?

Nghiem - The public hold more sway than they used to.

Gillian - Self-publishing has opened the floodgates and it will be hard to sift between what's good and what's not.

Catherine - The book is key.



The panel were also asked 'What did they like best about the industry?'

Catherine - She is the master of her own books.

Gillian - There are more openings now for self-published authors.

Teri - The validation of traditional publishing.

Imogen - Being allowed inside writers' minds.

Nghiem - The privilege of working with creative people.



Nicola and the panel offered a fantastic insight into the ever-changing world of publishing, and the main thing that I came away with was that the industry is constantly changing, and with more options out there, it is an exciting time to be a writer.

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Katrina is a member of the Words and Pictures Editorial Team, and lives in a small village in the middle of nowhere with her husband, three daughters and a manic-depressive hamster. She writes mostly YA Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and tweets sporadically  @katrina_charman.

Plaister Press

Author-Illustrator Gillian McClure has enjoyed a long career working with publishers creating children's books - and then she began publishing herself. Here she offers the story behind Plaister Press.


Early in 2010 I formed Plaister Press in order to self publish new picture books – physical books - alongside my traditionally published books.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of running a small publishing company is acquiring a greater knowledge of the publishing industry; for all the paths I’ve been following are the same as those followed by big publishers. 

    Publishing is like doing the Lottery. It takes only one winning book to turn things around but that winning book is unpredictable; the most unexpected of books win. And all the other books - well they need a lot of dedicated marketing and selling to shift them out of the warehouse. It’s the winner, the best seller that subsidises the rest of the list. Until that happens, if it does ever happen, the advantages of running your own publishing company are not all financial. So what are the other advantages?

• You have the opportunity of creating a brand – your own list.

www.plaisterpress.com website

• You have books coming out and getting reviewed when perhaps there may not be much movement on the picture book front. 
• You have new books and new workshops based on them for school visits. 
• If you’re an illustrator, you have new artwork to sell one day.

All this keeps your name alive out there when it might otherwise be fading away as you wait for traditional publishers who take their time in deciding whether to take your next book. My agent Stephanie Thwaites at Curtis Brown agrees; she is happy with what I’m doing; sees it all helping raise my profile. 

My initial reason for starting Plaister Press back in 2010 was a creative one rather than a business one. I’d found myself becoming, over my thirty-year writing and illustrating career, a smaller and smaller cog in a bigger and bigger business and I was becoming frustrated. So when a friend gave me a sum of money to ‘proceed with a book’, I joined up with a typographical designer and started my own publishing company.

Working with typographic designer, Lisa Kirkham.

The creative rewards were great. I love the autonomy and control.
I love experimenting with new formats and working closely from the rough stage with a typographic designer – something I was never allowed to do before. However, ‘proceeding with a book’ means going far beyond an author/illustrator’s usual comfort zone if that book is going to end up on a child’s bookcase.

A business sense is needed. I saw ahead of me a huge learning curve - dealing with -
 

• Printers - Chinese printers – getting files to them, working within their schedules – avoiding the Chinese New Year

• Wholesalers & distributers – Gardners and Bertrams

• ISBNs and barcodes

• Invoicing and returns

• Marketing and promotions

• Trade fairs – the Bologna Book Fair and the Frankfurt Book Fair

• Selling

• Stock keeping – I needed an efficient excel sheet showing how much stock I owned rather than counting boxes under beds or in the attic

• Bookkeeping – double of everything because I’m still running my self employed business. Double accountancy bills

• And, on top of all this, leaving enough time and space to create new books  without losing the quality expected of me when published the traditional way

• I also needed an exit strategy: it helps on sleepless nights to know that, with one click of a button on the Companies House website, I can make my company go dormant. After that, all I have to do is clear my remaining stock in school and bookshop signings before a holiday on the profits! A simple exit strategy has been one of the reasons I’ve not wanted to complicate my business by publishing other people’s books alongside my own

Seeing how big the learning curve ahead of me was going to be, I decided, when I started out in 2010, to cut my teeth on reissuing a back list title with a good sales record where the rights had reverted.  After that, I’ve been publishing new picture books; one a year.

I discovered, early on, to my surprise, that I liked marketing and selling; enjoyed mailing out to all the UK Independent booksellers and spending time in bookshops, learning who my customers were.

So now to the drawbacks: small is beautiful but it’s also a problem. A small publisher, as I said earlier, is following the same route to market as a big publisher. Big publishers are my competitors and one of the real drawbacks of being so small, is that everything in the publishing industry is geared for BIG:

• Discounts are big
• Costs are big
• Print runs need to be big if you are going to make any profit at all   

• Turnover and numbers of titles need to be big to interest any sales agent 
• Even the lorry delivering the books from Felixstowe docks to my house was big – too big to get down my street. The driver phoned to say he would have to meet me in a lay by on the outskirts of Cambridge. I had a vision of 1,500 books left unguarded on a palette on a damp autumn day as I made several journeys by car getting them back to my house. I had to come up with some solution quickly or all those cartons of books would go back to the docks. With physical books you have physical problems. 

So three years after creating my publishing company, I found I was a bit stuck. My books were selling but the profit was only just covering the production costs of the next book. I could go no faster than one book a year if I was going to maintain quality.  Alone, I was never going to notch my business up to the next level.

So I signed up to Martin West’s organisation Authorization!   - a very newly formed umbrella organisation for small publishing companies or authors bringing back into print back-list titles. Authorization! has solutions to many of the ‘big’ problems and can help when you’re too small to proceed beyond a certain point on your own.

Gone now are the problems with large lorries delivering cartons to my house. Gone are all the books under the beds and all the trips to the post office. I now have warehousing, a sales agent, rights agent and four reps.

Martin West talking about Authorization! plus Susan Price and myself on a self-publishing panel at the 2012 CWIG conference. He will be speaking again on self publishing at the Society of Authors on Tuesday 16 July 2013 at 6pm: CWIG – Children’s Self-Publishing: Authors in Control?

I wonder whether, in the future, authors and illustrators who are already doing a lot of their own marketing through social media will be expected by their publishers to also foot the production costs of any risky or niche-market book – publishing it themselves. Then, only if a book is seen to be a winner, will the big publishers step in and take it over for the mass market. Perhaps, in this way, self publishing might be the way forward for publishers and authors and illustrators alike.
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 Gillian McClure is the creator of dozens of picture books for children, and former member of the Society of Authors CWIG committee. See her website here, and blog here. 

Not Seeing the Queen

Had such a busy week. I’ve been up to London three times and not once did I see the Queen but I did see lots of very nice people at The London Book Fair. We’ve had some postcards printed to promote SCBWI and Words & Pictures. I carried an arm-stretching number with me in my best shopping bag on Monday and persuaded every Scoobie I met, to take some. Thank you, lovely people.


After a brief interlude on Tuesday, doing the day job, I was back on Wednesday with a plan. The plan was stick to the red carpet - children’s book stands - and stick to the script -“Hello my name’s Jan. I’m with the SCBWI, The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. We have a new blog magazine; it’s called Words & Pictures...” PRESENT CARD “It tells you all about it on the back and there’s a handy QR code…”

As plans go, it was a good one, and a much lighter trip home.

There's loads of pictures
of  #lbf13 but only
this one of my lovely bag.

On Thursday, South West Trains brought me, and some more postcards, back again to see Undiscovered Voices 2014 launched at Foyles. This was after I’d late lunched in the cafe – a very reasonably priced and surprisingly delicious bacon, lentil and cabbage stew. Have you seen the report? If you’ve anything to add please do in the comments.

The closing date
is 29th April

Authors, if you’ve got an idea or WIP for #UV2014 why not test your pitch with agent, Anne Clark, in our Slushpile Challenge

On Friday, I loved how those that knew Jan Ormerod added their memories to Gillian Mclure’s beautiful tribute. It would be lovely to collect some more – did you know Jan or, like Candy’s children, did yours go to sleep with her books? Do they still?

A good conversation is up and running from Wednesday’s feature on what makes children laugh. We know that children laugh at all sorts of silly stuff but when asked, as our contributor, Celia Anderson, did, their first thought is everything toilet. What do you think?

There was news from the South East, an illustrator focus on Nick’s Blog Break, Part 2 of some really TOP tips for authors visiting libraries and the celebrations yesterday sparkled again. But, our most popular post, by page view, this week was Bryony Pearce’s brave and heartfelt account of her second book’s rocky road to publication. If you haven’t already, go read and learn.

So this week coming, with news, celebrations and the blog break, Sara O'Connor will be answering some of your questions in Ask a Publisher. We have the first in a series of features on marketing from Nicky Schmidt. Sheila’s got another social media video and we have a new featured Illustrator – look out for a shiny new banner and showcase from…

First though, here's the card. If you see me, grab some quick, they're going fast!

 I'm so pleased that Bridget's image is on the front, I hope she likes it.

And... oh yes, new featured illustrator -

you'll have to look in on Friday to find out!

Jan Carr

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Jan Carr is the editor of Words & Pictures. Her fiction is older middle grade, she blogs occasionally and loves to write in magenta.