Two weeks after a Bologna Children’s Book Fair at which it looked as if picture books had at last turned a corner, Simon & Schuster UK has confirmed its biggest single co-edition deal ever. Lectorum, part of Scholastic US, has taken 280,000 copies of a bilingual edition of If I Had a Dragon, by newcomers Tom and Amanda Ellery. The deal, negotiated by S&S Children’s Rights Director Alex Maramenides, is one of the largest quantities ever bought by Scholastic as a co-edition. The book will be published in the UK in January 2007.
Can this signal better things for poor benighted picture book writers? Should we all start dusting off all those tear-stained PB manuscripts stuffed into desk drawers and start stending PB texts out again? What do you think?
You can read my report Picture Book Market Warms Up ...
