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Hancock outlines vision for Bloomsbury Children's as picture book sales soar
After moving across from Puffin last autumn, Lara Hancock is setting her stall out with a range of illustrated titles at Bloomsbury Children’s Books—and is excited by the list’s potential.
Tom Tivnan is the managing editor of The Bookseller.
Tom Tivnan is the managing editor of The Bookseller.
Even those who work within picture books might concede that the sector has not been the trendiest part of the children’s market for some time—at least in the Anglophone world. Oh, it has been crucial, in a solid, dependable and ticking along quite nicely, thank you sort of way. But it is fair to say that the deals buzz of Bolognas in the Twilight Noughties was very Young Adult-centric, while the 2010s had a distinct middle-grade flavour.
But the 2020s might just be the decade of the picture book, as it has become arguably one of the busiest sectors for rights trading—and with a corresponding spike in sales to boot. UK picture books in 2021 hit an all-time high (£141.2m through Nielsen BookScan) and bettered children’s and YA fiction through the tills for the first time since accurate records began.
Digging deeper, we want to be rich, vibrant and diverse, a real destination for talent, whether that’s new or more established talent
This is undoubtedly part of the reason Bloomsbury Children’s Books decided to ramp up its picture books division last autumn by luring Lara Hancock over from Puffin to a newly created role of head of illustrated publishing, a move which saw the publisher combine its picture books and non-fiction teams.
Hancock says she was drawn to move to a company that “was already very successful, but at the same time shifting up a gear. It was hugely appealing to work with [publishing director] Rebecca [McNally] and also to bring picture books and illustrated non-fiction together to forge a complementary, dynamic list. And it is a hugely creative team with oodles of ambition. It was a dream offer, really.”
That she arrived at the new post when picture books have been surging has been a boost. She says: “I’ve been working in picture books for 20 years, so to see this growth is really exciting; it is an interesting time to think about forward planning. Obviously, we would love the hard work of all our authors, illustrators and teams to be rewarded by lots of bestsellers. Digging deeper, we want to be rich, vibrant and diverse, a real destination for talent, whether that’s new or more established talent. And ultimately we want to be a home for a really brilliant collection of joyful, inspiring books—the kind of books that get so loved that they fall apart.”
Why does she think picture books are spiking? “Well, all children’s categories have been growing as well. But for picture books there has been a huge variety of factors, not least that we have had two years of people inside the house with their young ones who needed to be entertained, educated and distracted.
“On a more direct level ,in the UK I think we should acknowledge the great work of [reading promotion organisations] Booktrust and the CLPE [Centre for Literacy in Primary Education], and the huge strides forward in encouraging new parents to build books into their daily routine with their babies, the raising of awareness nationally of how important it is for a child’s life chances that they are introduced to and learn to love books from a young age.”
At the moment Bloomsbury publishes around 20 new picture books per year, while the children’s non-fiction list adds around 10 to 12 titles. Probably the biggest picture book for 2022 is the “pacy, full of heart adventure story”, The Zebra’s Great Escape, which teams up star illustrator Sarah Oglivie with middle-grade bestseller Katherine Rundell, in the latter’s first original picture book. (She had previously adapted Rudyard Kipling characters for Macmillan Children’s Books’ Into the Jungle.) Of those new talents brought to the list, Hancock name-checks actor turned début author Robert Tregoning’s Out of the Blue, with art by up-and-coming illustrator Stef Murphy, a tale of a boy who lives in a world where it has been decreed everything must be blue, but the boy loves yellow. Hancock says: “It’s a story of having the confidence to follow who you are, of pride and of difference.”
On the non-fiction side, Hancock says she is excited by its “storytelling potential and showing new perspectives”. One of its hottest international rights properties going into Bologna has been Alexandra Stewart and illustrator Joe Todd-Stanton’s Kew: Darwin and Hooker, a story of the friendship and working relationship between Charles Darwin and botanist Joseph Hooker, who would go on to head up the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
I have a pet theory that non-fiction has exploded because we are in a time of an ocean of information and I think parents, and certainly I as a parent, would rather children had information that has been carefully curated and written with them in mind
Hancock says that the book enables kids to learn about the little-known story of Hooker’s influence on Darwin’s theories, and “allows you to really get into the time, look at the characters, as well as that sort of scientific information. So there’s a sort of a lovely, holistic approach about the story and the science that I think is so engaging”.
Of course, illustrated non-fiction is having something of a moment, too. The category, it might be fair to say, was long the poor relation of the children’s world but publishers really started tapping into it after the Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls feminism boom (a boom, Bloomsbury has long somewhat tetchily noted, could arguably be said to have been kickstarted by its own Fantastically Great Women series by Kate Pankhurst, first published prior to the Rebel Girls books). But illustrated non-fiction has gone up another couple of notches lately, with huge recent hits like England footballer Marcus Rashford and Carl Anka’s You Are a Champion (Macmillan Children’s).
Hancock says: “That we brought picture books and non-fiction together suggests the synergies the categories have, and that they both have a global lens. I have a pet theory that non-fiction has exploded because we are in a time of an ocean of information and I think parents, and certainly I as a parent, would rather children had information that has been carefully curated and written with them in mind. With all the distractions that children have now—from video games to TikTok—it’s incumbent on us to make these books as appealing and as attractive to them as possible.”
On the move
Hancock’s father was in the military, so as a child she moved around a lot: “My mother’s line is that we had 20 houses in 20 years.” The family lived throughout the UK and abroad, including one year in the great plains in Canada. “We called it our Little House on the Prairie because it was this remote place that had a back door that literally opened on a massive prairie,” she says. “It was a small tin-clad house with a basement which we had to go down to when the weather got scary—which it often did.”
She read art history at St Andrews and originally wanted to be an academic, but that did not pan out and she ended up working at a Dillons bookshop in Harrogate. She had something of an epiphany there, as she always loved looking after kids and enjoyed working with books, and realised she could fuse the two in a career. She started in publishing as a children’s rep for Oxford University Press, staying in sales for five years before moving across to editorial. That led to stints at Egmont and Simon & Schuster before she moved to Puffin.
Ultimately, she loves the picture books/illustrated space as “I really believe in what we do. I was at the Edinburgh Book Festival a few years ago and a dad in the queue came up to me with a book we published, On Sudden Hill by Linda Sarah, and he said: ‘This is an important book as I have an autistic son and since we have read this book together, he’s gone into school and made his first friend.’ I really hold onto that because it shows we can make a difference. In a really strange and troubled world, that is something to hang on to.”
