You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Egmont buys picture book from YouTube's Sacconejoly family
Egmont has scooped the first picture book from vloggers the Sacconejolys, who boast the largest family YouTube channel in Europe.
Melissa Fairley, publishing director for picture book and gift, bought world rights from Abigail Bergstrom at Gleam Futures for canine caper The Great Cat-Nap.
The Sacconejoly family - who are Irish, but now based in London - began a daily show about modern-day parenting seven years ago and have uploaded a video every day since. The vloggers now have a global reach of eight million and their YouTube channel has nearly 500 million views with more than 1.8 million daily subscribers.
An Egmont spokesperson said: “Passionate advocates for children’s books, Jonathan and Anna have read a book to their children, Emilia, Eduardo and Alessia, every night since they were born.
“This exciting new picture book from the UK’s best-loved YouTube family, is inspired by the family’s six Maltese dogs and is perfect for families to read together. The action-packed story follows Emilia who wants something that only a girl with six dogs would want – a cat. So her six loyal dogs make it their mission to cat–nap a local moggy. But no matter how hard they try, they are foiled by cunning cats.”
Jonathan Sacconejoly said: “My two biggest achievements in life are my kids and my creative work, I wanted to do something which amalgamated the two together and that was the inspiration for. When I was a kid, I used to spend most of my days living out my life inside my head, my imagination was a never-ending playground. Eleven years ago, I went back to university to study interactive media, and somewhere between that time and now I discovered YouTube and ended up with six dogs and two kids and almost two million friends. Anna and I have always read to our kids in a bid to help them develop their own imaginations, and reading to them has made me fall in love with books all over again.’
Fairley said: “The humour and warmth of the Sacconejoly family spills out of the screen on their YouTube channel and those same qualities leap off the pages in this brilliant new picture book. Anna and Jonathan share Egmont’s vision to make all children proud readers and to show parents the gift of love that is reading with your children.”
The Great Cat-Nap will be published on 19th October 2017 in paperback retailing at £6.99.
