Nosy Crow

About Nosy Crow

Nosy Crow is a multi-award-winning, independent children’s publishing company. We began publishing child-focused, parent-friendly children’s books in January 2011 with the aim of creating books that encourage children to read for pleasure. We’re one of the country’s fastest growing publishing companies: we’re currently the 12th biggest publisher of children’s books in the UK.

We publish high-quality, commercial fiction and non-fiction books for children aged from 0 to 12 by well-known authors and illustrators and by new talent. Making well-designed physical books is important to us, and we think carefully about covers, paper type and paper weight so that our books are attractive to look at and pleasing to hold. All of our fiction appears simultaneously in print and ebook form, and many of our fiction titles are also available as audiobooks. All of our paperback picture books and many of our baby and board books come with a free digital audio reading using an innovation we’ve called Stories Aloud. We’re building a library of audio-enhanced iBooks with text highlighting which are digital versions of our picture books.

What’s important to us?

Good books

We know it’s subjective, but Nosy Crow wants to be proud of everything that we publish and make. We want to be sure that it meets the need of a reader (or emerging reader), and meets that need as well as it possibly can. That means great illustration, great design, and really great writing. We go out of our way to find these things from new and established talents.

Authors, illustrators and creative talent

We recognise that it’s a privilege to be entrusted with other people’s creative work. We aim to be nurturing, responsive, speedy and fair in our relationships with authors, illustrators and other creative people. We want them to enjoy working with us and being part of Nosy Crow.

Our culture

We are very happy to be independent. We are very happy to be small (for now: we hope to grow, of course). We are very happy that we can be fast and responsive. All in all, we are very happy. We think that being happy and having fun is important and will make what we do better and more successful. We don’t have big meetings. We don’t have a corporate machine we need to feed. We make all our own decisions.

Thinking internationally

We have, between us, decades of relationships and friendships in the international world of reading. In our careers, we have made books that have been successful throughout the world and we have a strong understanding of global markets. We are looking for books and apps that will translate well, and we look forward to selling our books and apps throughout the world.

Being part of something bigger

We like being small, but we are proud to be part of a bigger industry. Nosy Crow is a member of the Publishers Association (www.publishers.org.uk), and of the Independent Publishers Guild (www.ipg.uk.com).

Doing the right thing

Here at Nosy Crow we believe it is very important that we source the suppliers and materials used for our books responsibly.

We are committed to working only with factories that operate ethically and responsibly and so we only source directly from a small number of suppliers globally who all have environmental and CSR accreditation. We require all of our suppliers to be audited using the SMETA methodology, we also expect that as a minimum all of our novelty book suppliers hold ICTI care accreditation but most have accreditation from many other bodies too.

We are members of the Book Chain Project and use their tools to ensure that all of the wood fibres used in our paper and boards comes from sustainable sources. Where possible we use FSC or PEFC papers, but when this isn’t possible we commit to only using papers scoring a 3* minimum on the PREPS paper grading system.

We regularly test the materials used in our books to ensure that they aren’t harmful to the children who enjoy them and require all of our suppliers to itemise every material that goes into our books.

Back in the UK, we believe that ensuring our own staff have a proper work/life balance is important, and many of our staff, particularly those with childcare responsibilities, work part-time and/or from home some of the time. We pay our staff fair wages, that are competitive with the rest of the industry. When we have interns who are no longer in full-time education, as we do occasionally, we pay the living wage.

Meet the crows