Reading together .. .
PAN/Macmillan's first 'baby' Read Together was born on August 1st 1988. It is growing fast – 12 titles are in the shops now and a further 24 titles will be published in 1989. It all began four years ago, when the reviews were slating reading schemes and promoting 'real' books for children, while parents were looking anxiously for books they could use at home to help their children to read. I knew that most children loved to hear 'real' stories read to them but that they struggled to read these books on their own. Could we publish a series which children could read for themselves without losing the ingredients which made a book a really good read? I needed an author, with lots of good ideas and a sense of fun, who was in touch with small children and who had the educational expertise to ensure that the children could read her stories with ease as well as pleasure. Helen Arnold was the obvious choice – with a track record of over 20 years in teaching and in teacher training, a solid reading research background and with a string of lively books to her credit. Would she want to do the work, did she have the time to write, would we like each other and be able to work together? Pan were enthusiastic about the project and keen to market the books, so we worked on the business plan together. It was a real publishing partnership — Macmillan were to produce the books, Pan would sell them and the two companies would share the costs and profits equally between them. At the same time, I started to research and trial material with parents and children. Helen and I worked together, using the results of the trials to devise the kinds of stories which the children particularly liked and which parents thought were suitable for them to read. Sometimes this caused problems when parents wanted fairy stories and children wanted fighting fantasy books! Read The Dragon and The Knight and you'll see how we solved that one! There was something everyone wanted — that the same key characters, drawn in a distinctive but not a Disney cartoon style, should appear in all 36 books. Helen and I sorted the story scenes out pretty quickly, but Tony Kenyon, our main illustrator, had to work flat out for over a year, drawing the West Street children who appear in every book. It was Donna Bailey, the Editor for the series, who made sure that all the children and animals who appeared in the first book hadn't changed shape, colour or size by the time Tony came to draw them in the last book — and that the text and artwork was checked, corrected and handed over on schedule. I don't think Dave Lawrence and the publishing services team will tell you how they did it (just in case someone asks them to do it again!), but they managed to provide literally thousands of full colour proofs and early copies for the Pan sales team, printing everything in Hong Kong, and to deliver the bound copies to the Pan warehouse on a schedule which would have been more suited to printing a one colour book in the UK. Fulfilling the requirements of a mass market paperback operation has given us all a tremendous amount of work . . . but the books are looking great! We've already started developing material for the next phase of the Read Together project ready for publication in 1900.
Cover Artist Tony Kenyon
Cover Artist Tony Kenyon
Cover Artist Tony Kenyon
Cover Artist Tony Kenyon
