It’s that time of year again and I am in the buzzing Big Apple for three weeks of meetings with all of our Manhattan based publishers! This year Book Expo America is at the end of my trip, where I’m meeting all of the publishers we work with from around the rest of the United States as well! This is my favourite city in the world and it’s thrilling to be back again!
The first week has flown by in a blur of busy client meetings and I am delighted with the fantastic reaction from both regular and new publishers to the wonderful work from all of our talented illustrators as well as the book proposals we have to pitch that we have worked on with our author/illustrators!
Just a few of the clients I have met this week include Bloomsbury US who are have just published their 4th book illustrated by our wonderful Alison Brown - I had the pleasure of seeing some of the new formats of board book they have produced from the picture books. It was wonderful to hear how well received Alison’s books have been, coming in the top of children’s book on the NY Times Children’s Books Bestseller list; Harpercollins where it was a joy to hear how thrilled the design team are working with our lovely Catalina Echeverri and how impressed they were with her work ethic, as well as to meet a lot of the editors and designers we work with but haven’t met with in person before; and Macmillan where the number of artist samples requested and the compliments I received on how talented our artists were vast!
Chloe flew out to join me for a few days on Friday and we visited Blueprint on Sunday afternoon where we met with some extraordinarily talented artists working in surface pattern design. It was a joy to see such talent and a real eye opener into the world of surface pattern design. Today Chlo has started her week at Surtex and I have started mine visiting Silvergate, an animation company we have been working with for a few years! I got to see the character designs and some of the panels from the 40 episode, animated, first series they are making based on the Fairytale Hairdresser books by Abie Longstaff and illustrated by our very talented Lauren Beard. I can’t share them with you yet as the series doesn’t air in the USA until later this summer! Its been a great start to the week!
The week ahead is jam packed with meetings, with 4 or 5 around Manhattan in a day and I am so excited about them all. This year, our ability to send clients all of the fantastic material they were interested in in the meetings extremely quickly has been fantastic, with the wonderful team back home in the office ensuring that all artwork samples and book proposals I have requested for clients are sent to them on the same day as my meeting, if not first thing the following morning. Take a very sneaky peak at some of the treats american editors and designers have seen this week.
More to come soon!
Han
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