Christmas Mash-Up! by Pippa Goodhart

Bookshops are currently bright with selections of wonderful children’s Christmas books. Many of those books are picture books, and nearly all are books with pictures. There’s a brief but intense selling window for such books, and competition for sales is stiff.

 

How best to compete amongst the glitter and beauty and fun of it all? The Nativity story is there in multiple forms, of course. So too are many stories about Santa and snowmen and elves and Christmas trees and nativity trees and presents. But there’s a new trend that I’ve noticed particularly because I’ve played a part in it. I’m calling it ‘the Christmas mash-up book.’ 

We all know some key trigger children’s book character and story types which have appeal – unicorns, diggers, monsters, fairies, dinosaurs, underpants, witches, fluffy bunnies and more – and now some of those characters have crossed what used to be an invisible boundary into Christmas. 

So, for instance, here we have dinosaurs mixing with Christmas fun in Timonthy Knapman and Sarah Warburton's Dinosaurs Go Christmas Shopping 

Fred Blunt pairs the Easter Bunny with Father Christmas, mixing originally religious festivals which have become more general to society. Easter Bunny is furious that Santa Claus has elves to do all the work of making the presents he gives whilst Bunny has to make the chocolate eggs himself. So Easter Bunny hatches a dastardly plan ….  But of course it all ends in a funnily big-hearted way.

 

I was asked to write a Christmas chapter book story about Winnie the Witch and her cat Wilbur. Mixing witches with Santa? Here’s James Brown’s new book, Jingle Spells –

  

There’s even been a Winnie the Witch picture book done before. In this one Winnie gets to fly with Santa –

 

So I had to think of a story that didn’t have Winnie flying with Santa on his sleigh. In my story (written under the fake name of Laura Owen), Winnie suddenly realises that if Santa delivers presents to everybody, there will still be one person still left out; Santa himself. That’s not fair! So in this Santa Surprise story Winnie and Wilbur try to deliver a Christmas surprise to Santa, with inevitable daft disasters that culminate in success of a kind they hadn’t thought of. Korky Paul has turned it all into a wonderfully wild and whacky visual story, showing that ‘picture books’ can overlap with chapter books.

So, what would you like to see mashed-up with Christmas on the bookshelves next year?

And if anybody would like to give a child in need a wonderful book gift this year, do visit the Book Trust's website where you can donate - https://www.booktrust.org.uk/support-us/donate-ten-pounds-and-make-a-child-feel-special-this-christmas/

Happy Christmas!   

Goodbye 2014, Hello 2015 - Group Post

Can you believe it, The Picture Book Den is now three years old?

In order to celebrate our birthday and to usher in the New Year the team decided it would be fitting to share what we've achieved during 2014, what we hope to achieve and have planned for 2015. So here it is. We hope you enjoy.

Oh and A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL.

Lynne Garner

Although 2014 was not my most constructive year for landing contracts I'm pleased with the fact they I had two books reach the shelves. The first was in February. It was the second picture book to feature Boris and Dog with their new friend Benji (Bad Manner Benjie!). My second book was completely different and was released in November. It is aimed at those who work with children in the early years sector and is called 'The Little Book of Print Making.' It was great fun to write, as I had to get my hands dirty to ensure the instructions were correct. So lots of messy 'play.' Sometimes this writing lark is a hard job.

Unfortunately I don't have any books due for release, however I intend to change that. I have a small library of manuscripts completed, which over the coming months I'll send out to publishers. I also have a few ideas for new stories and plan to start the process of plotting, writing, proofreading and editing in January. Once they've seen the red pen of the Picture Book Den critique team I'll send them on their way.

Jonathan Emmett

It’s slightly ironic that I joined Picture Book Den in 2014 as I’ve had no new picture books published this year, just new editions of previously published titles. However I have three (or possibly two and two-thirds) brand new picture books coming out in 2015.

The first of these is A Spot of Bother illustrated by my longtime collaborator Vanessa Cabban and published by Walker Books. This is a follow-up to The Pig’s Knickers and features the same cast of characters including the rather self-centred Pig. In this story Pig is horrified to discover that his spotless appearance has been spoiled by a cherry stain. His friends try to help, but the more they try to clean the spot, the bigger it gets.

This is the seventh book that Vanessa and I did together and I'm extremely sad to say that it will be our last as Vanessa passed away shortly before Christmas. She was a wonderful person, funny, mischievous and forthright, and a terrific illustrator to work with and I will miss her greatly.

Next up is The Clockwork Dragon. This book might only be described as two-thirds new because it’s a reworking of Tom’s Clockwork Dragon which was published in 2008. Unfortunately that book went out of print quite quickly but Oxford University Press decided that the story deserved a second chance and asked me to write a new draft which has been illustrated by Weasels and Nuts in Space creator Elys Dolan. Elys has a great flair for whimsical detail and, as well as completely reinventing the dragon, has populated the book’s illustrations with a supporting cast of wonderfully wacky characters. I've already written a second story featuring the book's young heroes Max and Lizzie so, if this book proves popular, they could be back with more clever clockwork contraptions.

And lastly, there’s Fast and Furry Racers: The Silver Serpent Cup, also published by Oxford University Press. This book is illustrated by Ed Eaves and the story was inspired by a set of souped-up vehicle models that Ed made several years ago for his college degree show. Ed sent me some photos of the models and suggested that they might plant the seed for a story – which they did. The Silver Serpent Cup is a rhyming story about a no-holds-barred race between a motley assortment of animals in an equally motley assortment of vehicles; cars, planes, boats, submarines – there’s even a tiger racing in a train. We’re hoping it will be the first of a series of Fast and Furry Racers books.

Abie Longstaff

2014 was really exciting for me. Two new Fairytale Hairdresser books came out:


The Fairytale Hairdresser and Snow White

and

The Fairytale Hairdresser and Father Christmas








as well as Just the Job for Dad.








 I did a loads of events, which was fun but exhausting!

and Lauren Beard and I won an award for The Mummy Shop :)

Here we are with the other winners

Next year there will be two more Fairytale Hairdresser books (The Little Mermaid, and The Sugar Plum Fairy) and a new picture book with Scholastic.


There will also be a brand new series, which I am really excited about. It's called The Magic Potions Shop and it's a chapter book about an apprentice who gets himself in all kinds of trouble learning to make potions (it was really fun to write!) There are 6 books in the series, so bring on 2015!

Jonathan Allen

Though not the most exciting year for me work wise, to say the least, my picture book 'Is That My Cat?' came out in Spring both here and in the US. My work seems to get simpler and bolder as I get older. Maybe I need better glasses ;-)

Next year sees the ten year birthday of Baby Owl! It was ten years ago that I took my idea (I'm Not Cute!) to see David Bennett at Boxer Books, (which also has its ten year birthday next year) and was told that he liked it, but I needed to make the drawings younger and softer. It was the start of a fruitful partnership, and a series of six "I'm Not" books over the years, (Cute, Scared, Sleepy, Santa, Ready and Reading) and several other titles. I now know what 'I'm Not Cute!' is in at least eight languages ;-) Well, I would if I could read Japanese or Chinese. .

Also, Boxer are publishing 'The Little Rabbit Who Liked to Say 'Moo!'' as a board book at some point in 2015, which is nice because it's a book that works very well with the very young.

So, I am looking forward positively to next year and whatever it brings. We are pretty certain to be moving house at some point, to get further out into the countryside. A big scary thing to do, but you have to keep having adventures in life otherwise a dull complacency can set in and before you know it you're old ;-)

Of course in 2015 I will no doubt think up a major best seller, become a millionaire and live happily ever after. . . Oh yes. . . Have a great new year won't you?

Pippa Goodhart

For me, 2014 saw new books in which text and pictures danced together, but which weren't strictly 'picture books'.  There were two new Winnie the Witch storybooks (published under the fake name of Laura Owen), illustrated in wonderfully wild fashion by Korky Paul ...

... and a Green Banana early reader book beautifully illustrated with clarity and humour by Amber Cassidy.

But there ARE new picture books by me on their way to publication, as well as more Winnie the Witch stories and early reader books.  I can tell you that there's one that is being illustrated at the moment by brilliant Sam Usher, and there are others that the publishers don't want talked about yet...  Watch and see.  

 Happy new year!

Jane Clarke

In 2014, I got lots of rejections as I do every year.  But I signed contracts for four new books, had fun doing author visits to lots of schools, became a grandma - yaaaay!  and turned 60 (not so yay!)

2015 looks very exciting - 10 books are due to be published, including two picture books and four toddler board books .  I'm hoping a new picture book series will get past the gatekeepers, and I've been invited on a school visit of a lifetime to China, and have another grandchild due in March. Life's not always a bed of roses, and I don't take any of this for granted.  I feel very privileged that I continue to earn a living from writing.  

Warmest Winter wishes and Happy New Year, Picturebookdenners!

May your year be full of good things (in between the rejections), too. 

Jane x

Malachy Doyle

2014 brought my first from Parragon Books (Peek-a -Book, with Rowan Martin); my first with my daughter Hannah and with Firefly Press (Pete and the Five-a-Side Vampires); and my 100th book (and first about death, sort of) Tad-cu's Bobble Hat, with Dorry Spikes.

 










2015 brings my second, third and possibly fourth from Parragon: The Nose that Knows, with Barroux; Sleepysaurus, with Hannah George; and Hide and Peek, with Rowan Martin again.
It also brings The Beast of Belfast, an illustrated storybook from Poolbeg Press, with Derry Dillon.
There are other pans in the fire, but we shall see.

2015 also promises my second grandchild, the wedding of my one-and-only son, and my very first venture east of Europe - a trek in the Himalayas.  Quite enough excitement for one year - and may you have an exciting one too!

Moira Butterfield

2014 - Where did it go? Was I in a timewarp, one of those films where someone returns home at the end, to find that only a minute has passed? I wrote what seemed like an unending line of books - about Anglo-Saxons and the Stone Age, about feelings, about the human body, about Halloween, about the weather....My first poetry for children will be published by Harper Collins in 2015, and hopefully my first picture book in a while - currently with the title 'I Saw A Shark'.  I've got board books coming out, too, with UK supermarket M & S.  It's all a bit of a mix and it's all very unpredictable. That's what it's like being a professional author for children.

Being a freelancer: I complain a lot when it's all a flurry, but when it's not, I start to worry.

Sorry I can't show you covers. I've left it too late to ask permission and the publishers have all gone away to their Christmas castles, where their butlers are now serving them their Xmas cocktails and lobster bites on golden sticks.

But I think it's OK to share one of the Harper Collins poems, which were written about weather.

Frost

Frost sneaks silently.

It weaves its white carpet

without even a whisper.

But if you touch it,

you can unlock its secret

CRUNCH!

Converting The Picture Book Attic, by Pippa Goodhart

In recent years there’s been a trend for converting house attics into proper rooms.  What had held dust and rats, water tanks and junk, have become studies, en-suite bedrooms, artist’s studios, and more.  Well, I think it is time to do the same thing for picture books.  There is a similarly lovely big expanse of room that is often under-used in picture books, and that’s the endpapers.  We’re missing an opportunity if we don’t use them. 

Endpapers are exactly that; the paper at the end of each book, joining cover to content.  That’s their job.  Most endpapers are left as bare white paper, and useful for old-fashioned library Return Due Date stickers to be stuck to, but that’s about all.  I’ve noticed how often it is the blank endpapers of library picture books which get scribbled on by small children.  Are they trying to tell us something?  “Use this space!”  And some picture books do.

 

Korky Paul cleverly hands-over the endpaper artwork to children.  These pictures of Winnie the Witch and cat Wilbur with dinosaurs are by Park Jung-Eum and Park Ji-Eun, aged seven.  They are wonderfully bold, dramatic and fun pictures which must give children a pleasing can-do feeling in knowing that people of their own age can have good work published. 

 

Jo Empson uses the endpapers in Rabbityness to give a kind of rabbit wallpaper of different rabbit poses; very attractive, and an appetiser for the story to come. 

 

Eileen Browne uses the endpapers for Handa’s Surprise to show and name fruits at one end of the book, and wild animals at the other end, adding interesting lessons to what is already one of the best picture book stories ever.

 

My You Choose and Just Imagine books have illustrations crammed with images but have little text.  I was a child who found reading hard, and was always relieved to find a book that didn’t demand much reading.  But there are children who relish new words to read.  So we’ve used the endpapers to list hundreds of words, offering a kind of treasure hunt game for those who like reading the words (they all name things to be found in the pictures), but placed in the book so that they are not a necessary part of the book experience if reading words isn’t something you enjoy. 

 

Helen Oxenbury’s  beautiful pictures on the endpapers of Farmer Duck are glorious.  Nothing ‘childish’ about them, and yet I’m sure that children sit and absorb and lot from them, both for their beauty and for what they reflect from the story.  At the start we see the farm landscape in winter; bleak and harsh.  By the end of the book that same scene has blossomed into warm colourful summer.

I’ve just asked my editor if a new book that is (hopefully!) on its way to publication might have a board game on its endpapers. 

There are so many way in which endpapers might add to picture books.  They might add information relevant to a story, for example with a map of where the story takes us, or non-fiction information relevant to the fictional tale.  They might add a game or an activity to complement a story.  How about a recipe or a quiz, instructions on how to make a paper aeroplane, or black and white pictures to be photocopied or traced for colouring in?  Or simply add decoration to make a book more beautiful. 

 
When books are fighting for sales against so many other attractions, an extra ‘room’ in a book might just make it a winner.  What other examples of extending stories into the endpapers have you found, or can you think of?

 

 

Twenty-five Years of Winnie Magic, by Pippa Goodhart

What is the magic that makes Winnie The Witch work so well?

The fist, eponymous, Winnie The Witch picture book came out twenty-five years ago this year, and on Friday the 13th of April and on Friday 13th of July Winnie will be celebrating her quarter century with birthday parties. (What? Didn’t you know that witches have birthdays every time there’s a Friday 13th?).

Over that quarter century, twelve picture books and eleven storybooks about Winnie and her cat Wilbur have been published, and more are in production. Winnie’s stories have be published in twenty-seven different languages, and sold over five million books.

For a picture book to grow into such a phenomenal, and on-going, success is the stuff of dreams. How did it happen?

Ron Heapy is the brilliant OUP editor who created the Winnie we know and love by bringing Valerie aThomas’s story and Korky Paul’s illustrative skills together.

Ron had already signed contracts to publish the Winnie The Witch story text, aiming it towards a series of early reader titles, but the illustration samples that followed had shown an uninspiring black shed in a garden. So Ron had sat on the story for a couple of years, unsure what to do with it next.

At that point, in walked Korky Paul, bringing some stories of his own to discuss with Ron. Ron described as ‘a bit like falling in love’, the moment when, at their end of their discussion, as Korky was heading for the door, Ron suddenly felt an impulse to do something to make sure that Korky would come back, and for there to be the chance for a working relationship to develop. So he handed Korky the story of Winnie The Witch, telling him that it was to be a book of desk diary size, and asking him to see what he could do with it.

Back came Korky with a wonderful picture of Winnie’s witchy mansion of a house, “full of stuff”. It was Winnie's house, even more than Winnie herself, which sold Korky to Ron as the right illustrator for her story. All of which process just goes to prove the point made in Malachy’s last post about how a story sometimes needs to wait very patiently until just the right illustrator is there to work with it. I asked Korky where his image of Winnie came from, and he says that he has no idea. ‘I sat and doodled a few witch type characters and she came almost immediately.’ He calls the process, ‘Purely instinctive. The bent hat was because I reached the edge of the paper while doodling, and just squashed the hat to fit it in’!

Was Winnie an instant success? Ron tells me that he had contracted to do a print run of 3,000 copies. Then he went to the Bologna Book Fair where Winnie artwork went up on a modest little stall. And straight away, Winnie’s magic began to work, halting delegates as they passed, so that publishers from Germany and America and more placed orders to bump that initial print run up to 16,000 by the end of the Fair.

Winnie The Witch was published in 1987. It won the Federation of Children’s Book Groups’ Award, chosen by children, the following year. Everybody wanted more stories about her. But that first book was a hard act to follow. Hence the long pause before a second story – Winnie In Winter - was finally published in 1996. Many more have followed since then. But I still think that very first story is the best of them. Why is it so good? I think that’s partly down to: 

• The story being brilliantly simple, following a strong logic that twists at the end to surprise and satisfy with a really strong pay-off that we don't see coming (one of the hardest things to achieve in any story).
• The characters, and their relationship together, being appealing and sympathetic.
• The slapstick and ‘yuck’ humour being such fun, and so clearly at a fictional remove that there’s no worry to any of it.
• There being so much more to find of subsequent viewings of those wonderful pictures.
• The story being about the look of things, and therefore perfectly suited to picture book treatment.
• The appeal of the idea of being able to do magic. I love those great swishes of magic that appear as splashes of colour. I wish I could splatter magic about like that! The inspiration for the magic to look that way apparently came from watching the Red Arrows!

I think that Winnie The Witch is one of the best picture books ever. Can you suggest other ‘perfect’ picture books? Or give other reasons for Winnie's success?

NB To read more about how Korky does his illustrations, do read the fascinating article that you can find on his website