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Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2019 – The Shortlists

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The shortlists for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2019 (announced today) are as follows:

Illustrated Books:

  • The Girls by Lauren Ace and Jenny Løvlie (Little Tiger Press)
  • Mini Rabbit Not Lost by John Bond (HarperCollins)
  • Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History by Vashti Harrison (Penguin)
  • The King Who Banned the Dark by Emily Haworth-Booth (Pavilion)
  • Julian Is A Mermaid by Jessica Love (Walker Books)
  • 100 Dogs by Michael Whaite (Penguin)

 

Younger Fiction:

  • The House With Chicken Legs by Sophie Anderson (Usborne)
  • The Train To Impossible Places by P.G. Bell (Usborne)
  • Brightstorm by Vashti Hardy (Scholastic)
  • The Mystery Of The Colour Thief by Ewa Jozefkowicz (Head of Zeus)
  • The Boy at the Back of the Class by Onjali Q. Raúf (Hachette Children’s)
  • The Boy Who Grew Dragons by Andy Shepherd (Templar)

 

Older Fiction:

  • The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo (Egmont)
  • Children Of Blood And Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (Pan MacMillan)
  • A Winter’s Promise by Christelle Dabos (Europa Editions)
  • The Truth About Lies by Tracy Darnton (Little Tiger Press)
  • Me Mam. Me Dad. Me. by Malcolm Duffy (Head of Zeus)
  • Boy 87 by Ele Fountain (Pushkin)

Congratulations to all involved with the shortlisted titles.

The winners will be announced at an evening reception at Waterstones Piccadilly (London), Europe’s largest bookshop, on Thursday 21st March, 2019. The winner of each category will receive £2000, with the overall winner receiving an extra £3000. In the event that the prize is awarded to a partnership, then the prize money will be split equally between the joint winners.

First awarded in 2005, the Prize has evolved into one of the most prestigious accolades for children’s books in the UK.  Now in its fifteenth year and with its shortlists exploring some highly topical subjects, the Prize shows its enduring relevance as a formidable platform for emerging talent. 

Last year’s winner, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, shot to the top of the bestseller charts after the announcement and saw an increase in sales of over 900% across the Waterstones estate.

Florentyna Martin, Waterstones Children’s Buyer says: “This year’s list showcases an exploration of wide topics including world-folklore, black history, mental health, refugees and the world around us, through dynamic forms of poetry, fables and sweeping fantasies. It is a truly enthralling time for children’s writing, and our booksellers have keenly chosen shortlists that they are inspired to share with readers and, in doing so, recognise the creators who will shape the future of children’s stories.”

James Daunt, Waterstones Managing Director says: “We are immensely proud of our Children’s Book Prize. It has chosen unfailingly wonderful books and in so doing propelled the careers of a succession of exceptional authors. Who knows how many might otherwise not have achieved such success? The Prize is the work of our booksellers and represents Waterstones at its very best.”

All the shortlisted titles will have “Shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2019” added to their listings entry over the next few days and we will be highlighting several of the titles during the six weeks leading up to the category and overall winners announcement on 21st March.

Previous Winners of the Prize are:

  • 2005 The Cry of the Icemark by Stuart Hill
  • 2006 The Diamond of Drury Lane by Julia Golding
  • 2007 Darkside by Tom Becker
  • 2008 Ways to Live Forever by Sally Nicholls
  • 2009 The Thirteen Treasures by Michelle Harrison
  • 2010 The Great Hamster Massacre by Katie Davies
  • 2011 Artichoke Hearts by Sita Brahmachari
  • 2012 The Pirates Next Door by Jonny Duddle
  • 2013 Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher
  • 2014 Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell
  • 2015 Blown Away by Rob Biddulph
  • 2016 My Brother is a Superhero by David Solomons
  • 2017 The Girl of Ink & Stars by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
  • 2018 The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

 

A Picture Book Wins the 2015 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize

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It was fantastic to see the hashtag for this prize (#WCBP) trending on Twitter yesterday – testimony both to the level of interest the general public now gives to children’s books and the push and publicity that Waterstones has brought to this signficant award.

Rob Biddulph was announced as the overall winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize at the booksellers’ Piccadilly HQ with his picture book, Blown Away!

blownaway

The Waterstones Children’s Book Prize is now one of the biggest children’s book awards in the country. There are three shortlists for the Best Illustrated Books, Best Fiction for Teenagers and Best Younger Fiction, with category winners as well as an overall winner.

Melissa Cox (Head of Children’s Buying) had this to say of the winner: “The test of a good picture book is not how good it is on first reading, but how enjoyable it is on its fiftieth. Blown Away more than delivers – its whimsical, madcap plot engages immediately and its rhythmic text drives the story along while the illustrations charm and thrill on every page. It is truly wonderful, and a very worthy winner.”

James Daunt, Waterstones MD, said: “This year we have another wonderfully inspiring Prize that is testament to the extraordinary vibrancy and creativity in children’s publishing.”

Every one of the winning books’ Amazon reviews is a 5-star recommendation. Rob Biddulph is art director for the Observer Magazine and a winner of the PPA Designer of the Year Award. Blown Away is published by HarperCollins.  The Waterstones Children’s Book Prize Prize champions new and emerging talent in children’s books. It has been running for 11 years and this is only the second time a picture book has been selected as the winner.

The winner of best young fiction category was Robin Stevens with Murder Most Unladylike, the first in the author’s series of boarding school mysteries, featuring schoolgirls Daisy Wells and Holly Wong of Deepdean School for Girls. The second Wells & Wong Mystery, Aresenic For Tea, was published in January and the third, First Class Murder, is due in July. The books are published by Corgi.

murdermostunladylike

Stevens has a very serviceable responsive website, with some interesting author facts on the About Me page.

The winner of the teenage category was Half Bad by Sally Green, the first title in a series that Penguin have high hopes of becoming a franchise in the style of The Hunger Games. The momentum is building well and the second title in the sequence, Half Wild, has just been published.

halfwild

The other titles on the shortlists, which included recent YA Book Prize winner Only Ever Yours by Louise O’Neill, were well-chosen and superbly presented and publicised by Waterstones. The one book that I feel has been strangely overlooked by this award, and by the other prize that focuses on emerging talent, the Branford Boase Award, is Close To The Wind by Jon Walter (published in hardback by David Fickling Books last summer and now available in paperback), a novel that I continue to enthusiastically recommend whenever the opportunity arises.

closetothewind

 

 

via Rob Biddulph’s ‘Blown Away’ wins the 2015 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize | Waterstones.com Blog.

Waterstones Piccadilly expands children’s section | The Bookseller

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The Bookseller reports:

Waterstones’ flagship Piccadilly store is expanding its children’s section after a sales increase of 20%.

London regional manager Luke Taylor said the company decided to re-think the space after “the recent explosion in children’s sales”, driven by reference, games and educational related products.

The children’s area will take up two-thirds of the second floor and will include a bigger picture book and board book range, a new YA space with crossover titles like Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, and an area for related products such as party packs and toys.

via Waterstones Piccadilly expands children’s section | The Bookseller.

Thumbs Up, Hi-5 Etc For The Revamped Waterstones Website

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At long last Waterstones has a website worthy of a big bookselling retailer.

The new look/design is a huge improvement on the ‘pathetic’ [Daunt’s own description] previous offering.

The site is beautifully ‘responsive’, making it user-friendly on whatever device you’re using.

The landing page is crisp and clear.

waterstones01

 

And the navigation tab opens up to show a full listing of the online shop’s different ‘departments’.

 

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I would like to see more detail on the individual title listings. The Publisher and ISBN should be included in the box that shows the price, rather than underneath the synopsis.

 

Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 09.50.01

 

Amazon is more successful in summarising basic descriptive information. For the same title:

Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 10.06.48

And also in linking to other editions.

Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 10.09.15

But all good websites are works in progress and I’m sure Waterstones will want to make improvements in its listings design in the weeks and months ahead.

What the site does really well is promoting its John Lewis style Click-and-Collect service. A good deal of thought has clearly been given to making the website a user-friendly experience for this type of buying. In most cases, the online price will be lower than the store price.

How well this works out in practice will be a determining factor on customer satisfaction. It does mean that individual stores will need to be very on top of their stock audits and that this information will need to be updated to a central database. I assume that this will be done through the till, at point of sale. It is not altogether clear whether the click-and-collect service will apply to same day purchases.

waterstonesclick

A shame that the site’s copy-editors have let that ‘recieve’ slip through 🙁

It’s been a time a-coming, but on the whole then, an extremely promising relaunch.

 

https://www.waterstones.com/

Both Waterstones & Foyles See Print Sales Rise and eReader Sales Drop

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ft

The UK’s leading high street bookseller said that sales of the Kindle ebook reader had plummeted this Christmas as a physical books market battered by ecommerce showed signs of improvement.
Waterstones said that sales of Amazon’s ebook reader had “disappeared to all intents and purposes”. The lossmaking chain of 290 bookshops had previously touted Kindle as the way to “solve the digital question” in 2012 when it launched a partnership with Amazon to sell the devices.

However, physical book sales at Waterstones rose 5 per cent in December as the company reaped the benefits of its store refurbishment programme and a relinquishing of control to local store managers who could respond to the tastes of local communities, said James Daunt, chief executive.

…

Foyles, the London chain of bookstores, said like-for-like sales of physical books had risen 11 per cent this Christmas. Sam Husain, chief executive, said sales of Barnes & Noble’s ebook reader the Nook were “not as impressive as one would expect them to be” and that physical book sales had outperformed ebooks.

via Waterstones plans more stores as book sales rise – FT.com.

James Daunt: the man who saved Waterstones – ES Magazine

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Excellent Evening Standard magazine profile of Waterstones’ James Daunt:

We have a lot of different markets.’ In what way? ‘Much as Asda sells different things to Waitrose. If you pile up the latest celebrity thing in Hampstead for 1p, it ain’t going to sell. And if you pile up an esoteric history in Gateshead, it isn’t going to shift. We have different books on display in Harrogate than we do in Kensington, for blindingly obvious reasons. There’s a different economy outside London. In Middlesbrough half the high street is vacant and there isn’t a lot of money. It’s a town that’s in big trouble, but our shop has reinvented itself there; it’s got rocking horses and pretty much all day long pre-school kids are sploshing about with paint. It’s not the most profitable shop, but it’s got spirit.’

In the Kensington branch they sell a lot of Scrabble and Monopoly. In St Pancras it’s novellas that you might finish on your journey: ‘Those sell in huge quantities.’ In Trafalgar Square it’s Union Jacks; in Walthamstow, they shift ‘a ton’ of camera-lens mugs (left). Huh? ‘It’s a mug with a lens on it. We sell billions.’

So bookshops are surviving on mugs, wrapping paper, cards… ‘There isn’t a bookseller in the world that doesn’t sell stuff that isn’t books.’ He leans in. ‘Booksellers have it really tough in this country. I think we’re in the worst position in the world. We have Amazon, Kindle and fierce price competition with supermarkets and we don’t have any of the protection that booksellers have in the US and Europe. And we pay huge taxes through business rates. I’m in the tax brigade. We have responsibilities to the society in which we live and one is paying tax.’ Unlike Amazon… ‘And many other multinationals who do everything they can to avoid it.’ Amazon’s controversial Luxembourg registration, which entails five per cent tax or less, is coming to an end next year. ‘It’s already achieved its purpose, which was for them to achieve market dominance,’ Daunt shrugs. He’s too busy to lobby. He’s hoping to get Waterstones back into airports when BAA’s contract is up for tender.

via James Daunt: the man who saved Waterstones – ES Magazine – Life & Style – London Evening Standard.

What the industry learned in 2014, including praise for Waterstones

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bookseller

The discovery of talent via YouTube, a resurgence at Waterstones, the long-running Amazon/Hachette terms dispute and the thinning out of independent publisher numbers were among the significant developments in 2014, according to prominent figures in the industry.
…
Many praised the performance of Waterstones, with Forbes Watson saying it had “rediscovered its purpose” during the year. The chain’s m.d. James Daunt himself reflected that “at Waterstones, book sales grew for the first time in many years, and so in effect answered positively the question whether there is a sustainable, long-term future for the current number of range-holding, dedicated bookshops in the UK.”

via What the industry learned in 2014 | The Bookseller.

Waterstones Book of the Year shortlist 2014 announced

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This year’s Waterstones Book of the Year shortlist – nominated by Waterstones Booksellers – “proves that the quality and range of publishing in 2014 is as thrilling as ever. In fact, there were so many brilliant books published this year that we had to expand our shortlist to eight titles from our usual six.”

Waterstones Managing Director James Daunt summed the list up by saying “Any one may be crowned our Book of the Year with pride but – my goodness – it will be for a variety of reasons: all is well in the world of bookselling!”

The winner will be announced on Tuesday 2nd December – but in the meantime here’s a look at each of the shortlisted books.

 

Everyday Sexism,
by Laura Bates

every_day_sexism

This book is a manifesto for change; a ground breaking, anecdotal examination of sexism in modern day society. Everyone has a tipping point – and at her’s, Laura Bates decided to launch the fourth wave of feminism. 

“This book creates the passion, anger and energy in people to talk about these issues and engage in feminism in a way that other books have tried and failed to do.” Jeni, Waterstones Manchester Deansgate

 

The Miniaturist,
by Jessie Burton

the_miniaturist

An atmospheric literary thriller set in seventeenth century Amsterdam. Written by actress-turned novelist Jessie Burton, it was our Fiction Book of the Month back in July and is the best-selling debut novel of the year.

“A dark tale of heady spices, sugar, and religious fervour. An insightful depiction of an intriguing period.” Inge, Waterstones Aberystwyth

 

The Narrow Road to the Deep North,
by Richard Flanagan

the_narrow_road

Man Booker Prize winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North is not just a war story (dedicated to his father who was a prisoner of war) but a love story. Hailed as a masterpiece, Richard Flanagan‘s epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one man’s reckoning with the truth.

“The most powerful, moving and poetic novel I have read since Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road. This story’s basis in fact however makes it all the more chilling. There is not a person I have met since reading it that I’ve not recommended it to.” Dan, Waterstones.com

 

Persiana: Recipes from the Middle East & Beyond,
by Sabrina Ghayour

persiana

A celebration of the food and flavours from the regions near the Southern and Eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. A beautiful book that has already been named Observer Food Monthly’s Book of the Year.Try Sabrina Ghayour‘s take on Eaton Mess to see for yourself.

“Not since our first book of the year Polpo has form met function to such lip-smacking, salivation-inducing, tummy-rumbling effect as in Persiana.” Kerry, Waterstones.com

 

Once Upon An Alphabet,
by Oliver Jeffers

once_upon_an_alphabet

The letters of our alphabet work tirelessly to make words that in turn make stories, but what if there was a story FOR each of the letters instead? A work of exhilarating originality from artist Oliver Jeffers that is packed with funny, thrilling, perilous and above all entertaining tales inspired by every letter in the alphabet.

“I fell in love with this playful take on the alphabet; it’s one of the most unusual and best picture books of the year.”  Floretyna, Assistant Children’s Buyer

 

The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories,
by Marina Keegan

the_opposite_of_loneliness

A hope-filled collection of essays and stories from Marina Keegan, who died in a car crash five days after her graduation from college in America, that articulates the universal struggle of working out what we aspire to be.

“A superb book that is truly inspiring and gives you a new perspective on things in life.” Laura, Waterstones Bournemouth Castle Point

 

H is for Hawk,
by Helen Macdonald

h_is_for_hawk

This year’s Samuel Johnson Prize winner, H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey. An unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald’s struggle with the grief of losing her father, and her attempts at catharsis through the difficult process of training a goshawk. Woven throughout the story is Macdonald’s retelling of author T.H. White‘s own attempts to train a hawk. It’s a book that is as hard to explain fully as it is to forget.

“Genuinely captured the imagination of readers of all kinds, and continued the rebirth of beautiful nature writing & publishing.” Joanna, Stratford Upon Avon

 

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Pikkety

capital

A thought-provoking, brilliant and much-talked about economics book – and that’s not a common combination.Capital in the Twenty-First Century – nominated for this year’s FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year – reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

“I’ve never seen such demand for a business or economics title.” Ian, Waterstones

http://www.waterstones.com/blog/2014/11/waterstones-book-of-the-year-shortlist-2014-announced/