Great website for swapping books – http://www.bookcrossing.com/ – you ‘tag’ your book with a code, leave it in a public place (e.g. Youth Hostel, cafe) and then the person who picks it up and reads it can log their comments against the code, the book might travel the world and you can meet it’s readers!
Core values August 19, 2007
Many moons ago when I worked in a proper office, for someone else, who sent me on fancy training courses and everything, I did a few management courses. One of them was about how everything you do should emanate from your core goals and that way you would be perfectly content. I don’t remember what it had to do with managing but it did result in a few people jacking it in and taking off with surf boards around the world! One thing I did think early on in parenting was that never was this truer than with parenting…
So here are some of my core goals (note my next post will be about challenges so please don’t assume I’m some smug saint and all these work all the time!):
relevance / meaning – I have always felt, and this is just a personal thing, that the kids should understand what we do and why we do it – so what we choose to eat, where we live, what work we do (resulting in me leaving my job and starting child-related businesses that my kids not only understand but gain a lot from – see entries on Tatty Bumpkin and Barefoot Books) etc. We try to do this in an undogmatic, way, I don’t want them to think that’s the only way to do things…
anything’s possible – I’ve long been a believer of if there’s something you want to do / is needed and no one is doing it then just do it! It does mean I never get to veg and watch TV but is incredibly empowering. I was very lucky that my parents gave me a sense of anything being possible and that there were no limitations on what I could do, that I was utterly capable of anything (I did entertain a brief spell of fancying myself as a super-hero and jumping off the top of a tall fridge freezer dressed in my dad’s parachute boots and hat but otherwise entirely naked – but generally I think it was a good thing). All around us there is evidence of people getting him off their backsides and doing great stuff and there are loads of groups coming up with amazingly creative answers to (often multiple) problems.
sustainability – having long been a pursuer of all things environmental, it feels a bit like a (sometimes slightly annoying!) coming of age now that sustainability, carbon footprints etc are the words du jour. The kids are master composters and love being outside. They haven’t yet (thank goodness) started lecturing me about my car use (as my neighbour’s daughter does!) but they are pretty aware of the environment. The thing I think anyone new to all things green needs to realise is that it is a journey with no specific destination, that is to say that it’ll never be finished: I thought I was doing pretty well (we eat almost all organic, mostly wholegrain food from a food co-op, use cloth nappies, no chemicals in the home etc) but I keep finding new things (like the Mooncup, if you don’t use one, try one, they’re suprisingly good) and am still dealing with old demons like my tendency to use the car when I could probably avoid it.
Storytelling clothes July 29, 2007
I wanted to share with you my find! I’m doing some storytelling at Babington House, a swanky hotel in Somerset which is very family friendly and wanted a cool outfit. I was going to sew something but since the days, as a child, when I tacked my clothes together and they fell off rather promptly, my sewing has won no prizes. So I found this top, a story of its own!
Ten Tips on Reading with your Child June 13, 2007
Learning to read is the cornerstone of every child’s education. By reading aloud and teaching your child in a way that is a pleasure for both of you, you will be sharing one of life’s most valuable gifts and open all kinds of doors for the future. Here are some tips on making the most of reading with your child:
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Choose a time and a place where you can be quiet and give your child lots of attention. Make the occasion a special one.
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Turn off any distractions such as televisions, music CDs (unless they go with the story!), radios etc.
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When you are reading aloud, show that you are enjoying yourself.
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Involve your child. Let yourself be interrupted with questions; talk about what you think of the story and the pictures.
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When your child has started learning to read, follow the text and help your child point to the words as you go along.
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Establish a routine. Try to devote some time every day to reading.
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Take your child to your local library and involve him or her in choosing books.
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Notice what kinds of stories your child enjoys and look out for ones with similar themes.
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When you are reading aloud, praise your child for listening well and sitting still.
- When your child is learning to read for you, give praise and encouragement too, but be sure gently to correct your child when he or she makes mistakes.
- Help build your child’s vocabulary and memory skills by supplementing reading sessions with audio books on car journeys and after meals or at bedtime. Audio books are especially helpful in building memory skills and supporting the learning of dyslexic and autistic children.
Sharing your child’s journey into reading can be one of the most rewarding experiences of parenthood. You owe it to your child, and to yourself, to make it a priority in your daily life.
father and son reading group May 29, 2007
I’m thinking of starting a group for ‘dads and lads’ at my son’s school-to-be as I have read a lot about how this can help boys with literacy. If anyone has any experience of this or ideas please let me know!
Barefoot jolly in France May 27, 2007
I’ve just come back from a brilliant long weekend in Gascony in France, having won a trip there with my Barefoot Books work. It was 5 days of grown up talk, no nappies, lots of ideas thrown about about books, life, parenting and a lot of wine and dancing!
We looked at some of the new titles for the autumn – Portside Pirates with a brilliant song for seal-lovers, an amazingly moving book called Mother Bridge of Love which is a beautifully illustrated book on (Chinese) adoption and One City, Two Brothers which is a folk tale set in Jerasulem which comes from both the Jewish and Muslim tradtions and is all about sharing… (among other new titles). It just got me going all over again and amazed at the sturdiness of the titles, can’t wait to get my hands on them!
Running my Barefoot business
I started ‘stallholding’ with Barefoot Books in September 2005, around the time I started running Tatty Bumpkin sessions. I came to it to try to escape Thomas the Tank Engine which I have succeeded in doing! At first I was dabbling, then gave it all I had over Christmas and since then have worked at it steadily, giving myself time off when other pressures got too much!
Barefoot Books is all about beautiful timeless stories which help parents and children to enjoy ‘proper’ stories with important values, a chance to use their imaginations but that are also bright and fun! They are full of stories from other cultures and are such a brilliant alternative to some of the other rubbish you find for kids in the ‘information age’! The company is very grassroots-y and has pulled out of some of the US chains and gone for a more community-based approach because retail at that level is so soul-destroying.
I now have a team of over 40 people who sell the books, run storytelling sessions and all sorts of other ventures around the country. I love it and feel so proud when I’m by my stand at a fair in a multi-cultural area and have brilliant books with stories from many countries for people to look at and buy. Their philosophy of ‘not dumbing down’ to children by using bright and thoughtful artwork and strong age-old (and modern!) stories really appeals to me and my customers here in Bristol!
There’s more on this at www.mybarefootbooks.com/PaulaBrown
Local mum provides job opportunities to Bristol parents and wins holiday to the South of France May 25, 2007
Paula Brown is a local mum of 2 boys, Gabriel (4,see About) and Jude (22 months) who runs the Tatty Bumpkin sessions and also sells the brilliant Barefoot Books www.mybarefootbooks.com/PaulaBrown, children’s books with amazing artwork and stories from different cultures, to schools and families throughout Bristol.
Paula has recently won a trip to the South of France with Barefoot Books – a combined relaxation trip and conference – for her team development. Since having children she has been interested in the dilemma mums face regarding going back to work and wanted to find a better work/life balance. Starting the business only a year or so ago she has recruited over 30 people to her team, many of these mums in the Bristol area who want to combine motherhood with flexible work where they can still see their children and bring another skill to parenthood in the form of brilliant stories!
She also runs Tatty Bumpkin classes and helps to recruit mums to do this too www.paulabrown.tattybumpkin.com (featured in the Evening Post last year).
Footnotes
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Barefoot Books run a direct selling scheme. For information about joining visit www.mybarefootbooks.com/PaulaBrown or email barefoot-paula@blueyonder.co.uk.
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For more information call 0117 952 0070, email PaulaBrown@mybarefootbooks.com
fun children’s session and books donated to preschool working with disadvantaged kids
Paula Brown, local mum, 2 boys, Gabriel (4, above right) and Jude (2 years) will run a children’s movement, music and yoga class to the Bristol Playhouse Playgroup & Family Centre in Eastville, a preschool supporting children from disadvantaged backgrounds and What’s On For Little Ones (whaston4littleones.co.uk) will donate some brilliant children’s books from round the world. Having a child at an excellent local preschool Paula realises how important good resources are at this age and being a volunteer at a preschool herself, Sam from WO4LO how hard preschool leaders work!
Tatty Bumpkin www.paulabrown.tattybumpkin.com is a children’s adventure session inspired by yoga which gets children and their carers moving, laughing, learning and having fun. The sessions fulfill all the criteria of the Foundation Stage, are multi-sensory, great for carers and children to have fun together and have recently won an award for best national children’s activity.
Bristol Playhouse Playgroup and Family Centre in Eastville was established in 1979 Bristol Children’s Playhouse is a daily “drop-in” Family Centre and pre-school nursery supporting children under 5 and their parent/carers living in isolation, poverty and disadvantage. Based in a culturally diverse community our work has a significant and well recognised impact on the integration of marginalised groups. Formerly funded by Surestart, funding is always an issue.
“Getting children interested in reading, storytelling, learning and movement at an early age is vital” says the pre-school. “We also love that the books are so reflective of the many cultures in our community and pre-school and that the Tatty Bumpkin sessions is so inclusive of all the children including those with special needs.”
We will be doing a Tatty Bumpkin session about life on the farm (a brilliant opportunity for photos) and presenting over £100 worth of Barefoot Books and activity resources.
Footnotes
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Paula has recently won a trip to the South of France to the Barefoot Books annual International summit for helping local mums start similar businesses
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What’s on For Little Ones runs a website on which children’s service providers can advertise cheaply and parents can easily find information about what activities are on offer for their children. They ran the awards that Tatty Bumpkin won and will also be providing the free books to the preschool
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Tatty Bumpkin sells an educational resource kit for teachers to use in their classrooms – visit www.tattybumpkinineducation.com/.
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For more information call 0117 952 0070, email paulabrown.tattybumpkin.com
Inc. (US business magazine) Interview: Nancy Traversy, co-founder of Barefoot Books
Kids are really smart, says the owner of Barefoot Books. And big bookstore chains are stupid. After 13 years in independent publishing, Nancy Traversy definitely has some stories.
Barefoot Books is what entrepreneurial moms want their businesses to be when they grow up. The $6.5 million company, founded by Nancy Traversy and Tessa Strickland in 1993, commissions and publishes children’s books that are profound and imaginative enough to make librarians’ hearts go pitter-pat, and visually stunning enough to win over design-centric retailers like museum shops. With seven children between them, the two women built the company from their respective homes in England, pulling off a work-life balancing act of Ringling Brothers proficiency. To date, Barefoot has released more than 400 books–almost all of them still in print–and ancillary products that include puppets, puzzles, and CDs. Traversy, who runs the business side of Barefoot while Strickland handles the editorial, operates out of a Crayola-colored office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I was born in Canada to a family of artists. I studied business, which made me the black sheep. After college I worked for the banking division of Pricewaterhouse in London. One day I was wearing a suit. One of the partners said to me, “Women don’t wear trousers” and sent me home to change. It was a formative experience.
I spent the next few years as managing director for a small London design company called FM Design. Those were the heady days when British Telecom was spending a million pounds on its logo. We designed luggage for Samsonite and did electronics for Sanyo.
I had my first child in 1992 and decided I no longer wanted to work for other people. So when my baby was two weeks old I started a management consultancy for small creative businesses. I helped one entrepreneur launch a board game meant to help train executives. I helped an opera singer start her own recording studio.
In 1992 I met Tessa Strickland. Tessa had worked at Penguin and run the mind-body-spirit list for Random House. She was very interested in Jungian analysis, fairy tales, and Eastern religion. She had an idea for a company that would bring multicultural stories with art-quality illustrations to children. The name Barefoot Books came to her in a dream.
At that time, the big thing in children’s publishing was licensed characters. Maisy. Where’s Waldo. There were also a lot of gimmicky pop-ups: pink fairy books where the child was supposed to tear out all the little parts and the whole thing was in pieces on the back seat before you got it home. The books that were educational had great content but looked boring.
“People undersell kids all the time. Children can appreciate a very high level of sophistication in art.”
We launched our first list in 1993. It was three books: The Myth of Isis and Osiris, The Outlandish Adventures of Orpheus in the Underworld, and The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time, which is a Sufi myth about a bird that saves the world from the seven human frailties. We were perhaps a little too esoteric for our own good. Realistically, you’re not going to sell that many copies of Orpheus.
Typically, we bring groups of people together for a book. For the anthologies, Tessa and I decide on a theme and then find an author to compile it and retell it in the right voice. Then we find an artist who fits the subject matter. The art has to match the sophistication of the text. People undersell kids all the time by giving them cartoony rubbish. Children can appreciate a very high level of sophistication in art at a very young age.
For the first seven years we both worked from our homes. Tessa had three children and lived in an old farmhouse in the countryside outside Bath. My husband and I lived in London. I had my second child in ’93, my third in ’95, and my fourth in ’97. I never stopped working full-time. I was also traveling to book fairs in places like Frankfurt and Bologna, and to New York twice a year because we were selling American rights to all the major U.S. houses. I was breastfeeding, so I normally had a baby with me. There’s no maternity leave when it’s your own business.
By 1996 we were doing about $2 million in sales with practically no overhead–just one or two employees. We went on the Web–we were probably the first British publisher with a website.
In 1998 we decided that if we were really going to grow the business we had to be in America, so we opened an office in Manhattan. I was commuting from London every three weeks with four kids under the age of 6. I realized it was no good trying to run the company from England, so in 2000 we sold the house, closed down the London office, closed the New York office–which was too expensive–and relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tessa stayed in Bath.
Around that time my husband surprised us by arranging to bring the whole family to Kenya to celebrate my 40th birthday and our 10th wedding anniversary. We were on a British Airways (NYSE:BAB) flight and suddenly this six-foot-four Kenyan guy comes up from the back of the plane and breaks into the cockpit. The plane went into free fall: It fell between 12,000 and 15,000 feet. All four engines were stalled. An American basketball player climbed into the cockpit and pulled the guy out. Afterward the pilot came on and said four more seconds and it would have been irretrievable.
I got back from that trip and found two letters waiting for me. One was from British Airways saying, “It’s not our fault.” The other was from my U.K. warehouse. It said, “We’ve gone bankrupt and we’ve got all your books and all your money and you’re not getting any of it back.” I lost hundreds of thousands of pounds–all my Christmas sales from the U.K. I did get the books back.
At the same time my right-hand person in New York said she wasn’t coming to Boston, so I had no one selling in the U.S. Then we sent out our first direct-mail campaign–100,000 catalogs–the week of the anthrax scare. No one opened anything. I remember sitting with my husband and saying, “What is this telling me? Am I supposed to stop?” Obviously I chose not to.
We opened a store near Harvard Square in November 2001. It’s a place to get feedback and test products. We let customers read manuscripts before they’re published; we ask people which jacket cover they like better, which illustrator.
Our books don’t sell in the chains. If you go into a Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) or a Borders (NYSE:BGP), no one tells you what’s a great book. You buy what your kid pulls off the shelf–usually whatever is face out or on the table. That means someone’s paid a lot of money to get that real estate; it doesn’t mean it’s the best book. The whole chain model is a nightmare: 60 percent or 70 percent returns and you don’t get paid. So at the beginning of the year I said to the Barnes & Noble and the Borders buyers, “I really can’t sell to you anymore.” They said, “Fine, we’ll put our money behind other publishers.” And they cleared their shelves. One buyer took it particularly badly. She told me she’d read every single Barefoot cover to cover. I said, “That’s wonderful, but it’s not the point.”
We’ve had to sell through an awful lot of channels just to keep going. The business through our catalog and over the Web is about 18 percent of sales. We sell to schools and libraries, also to independent bookstores, children’s boutiques, gift stores, museum shops. Our export market is really taking off. China has a burgeoning middle class that wants its kids to speak English. Foreign language rights are 10 or 12 percent of our business.
One of our best moves was to launch home-selling in 2003. It’s like Tupperware (NYSE:TUP). We have about 650 people–women mainly, some men–in what we call the Stallholder program, named for those Parisian bookstalls you see along the River Seine. They have Barefoot parties in their homes or sell the books at schools or offices as fundraisers. Last year it grew 90 percent in the U.S.
My kids grew up with Barefoot. They’ve always read manuscripts and looked at samples from different illustrators. They help out with data entry, stuffing catalogs, work in the store. They came up with the idea for Animal Boogie, which is our best-selling book. I know it’s hard when mummy has her own business. But now they feel anchored by it. They understand hard work.
Happy Tracks in the Snow 
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