Little Island looks to the future after quadruple CBI awards nod

For a smallish publisher, Little Island packs a wallop. The kids’ indie, founded by author and former Irish Children’s Laureate Siobhán Parkinson in 2010, releases around eight to 10 books a year, but in 2018 it had four titles on the Children’s Books Ireland (CBI) Book of the Year shortlist—all the more impressive given no other publisher had more than two entries on the 10-strong list.

The overall CBI gong ended up going to a Little Islander—not entirely unexpected as that book, Deirdre Sullivan and illustrator Karen Vaughan’s Tangleweed and Brine, also won Teen and Young Adult Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards last November. Two other Little Island titles also took home CBI silverware: Sheena Wilkinson’s Star by Star claimed the Honour Award for Fiction, while Meg Grehan’s The Space Between nabbed the Eilís Dillon Award for a début children’s book.

“To have four books on one shortlist was amazing,” says Little Island publishing manager and art director Gráinne Clear. “It was an enormous surprise, but at the same time we weren’t surprised, because the books themselves are so, so good, and we had a particularly amazing list last year. Then three of those books went on to win awards, so it was an incredible day for Little Island and the authors.”

Little Island began life as an imprint of New Island Books after Parkinson “went into a meeting to discuss translating some children’s books from German... and ended up heading a children’s list”. After a few months, New Island decided that a children’s list perhaps did not quite fit with the rest of the company, so Parkinson got some financing together to acquire rights to the titles she had already commissioned and went out on her own.

From the off, the mission statement was to “publish excellent books for children”, says Parkinson. “We tend to favour books by Irish authors. It’s not an absolute rule, but in general, that’s what we’re about: discovering and nurturing new Irish talent.”

Clear joined a couple of years later while finishing an MPhil in children’s literature at Trinity College Dublin and presenting an RTÉ Radio show on kids’ books. It remains a small team—in fact, Little Island only recently moved into an office, having previously operated out of Parkinson’s house. “I’m glad to get the space back,” she says.

Siobhán Parkinson and Gráinne Clear

Rocking on

Up until 2017, Little Island published mostly middle-grade and YA fiction. Yet last year it dipped its toe into non-fiction for the first time with Declaration of the Rights of Boys and Girls, a picture book by Élisabeth Brami and Estelle Billon-Spagnol that aims to debunk gender stereotypes. It followed that this year with the ...Rebel Girls-esque Rocking the System, written by Parkinson and illustrated by Bren Luke. The non-fiction list will grow next year with a philosophy book aimed at young teens, written by a Trinity professor.

Little Island avoids the often vexed question of Irish versus UK rights by selling directly into Britain. Clear explains: “We get world rights on pretty much all our titles, so we publish simultaneously in both regions. We had an arrangement with Walker Books for two years, where it was selling our books into bookshops, but it wasn’t particularly successful, perhaps because our books were too similar to Walker’s.”

Little Island switched over to Bounce for its sales and marketing and that has worked a treat. Clear says: “Sales were quite good in 2016, and 2017 was amazing—a lot of that was Tangleweed and Brine, but also our other titles as well. It’s really difficult for an Irish publisher to break into the UK, because the misconception is that we just publish books for the Irish market. But 60% of our turnover last year was generated in Britain.”

The UK success might become more difficult when the Brexit situation crystallises. Clear says: “All of our books are warehoused in the UK, so if we’re facing any kind of border taxation, it could be really problematic getting our books back from the UK into Ireland. It’s quite worrying. We might have to look at warehousing our books somewhere in Ireland rather than the UK.”

While keen to keep the quality of the list high, Parkinson is not necessarily thinking about expanding Little Island greatly in the years to come. “If we can do more titles we will, but we’re not planning to do anything outrageously different,” she says. “We would like to publish more picture books—that’s an ambition we’ve had since the beginning. We’ll continue to do a little bit more non-fiction, but we’re mostly here to give new novelists a voice and a platform.”