Isn’t it scary that next month we’re nearly halfway through 2013? Time flies when you’re having fun. The good news is that Miles Kelly has come up with a brand, spanking new blog schedule for the rest of the year to keep you well and truly entertained and up to date with everything that goes on at MK HQ.
We have made a resolution to blog at least twice a week, and we will be blogging about everything from how a book is made to Will and Kate’s baby to any exciting new titles we have appearing throughout the year – and obviously writing posts that are inspired by a random strike of inspiration! We will also be featuring guest blogs from each department, so you can find out what it’s like to be an editor, a designer and plenty more. Hopefully we can wangle some author blogs as well and as always, we will keep you up to date with our new publications so you won’t miss a thing.
What would you like to see on our blog? We welcome all feedback and opinions from our customers and supporters, because let’s face it, where would we be without you? If you let us know what you would love to hear about, you never know – it might just appear on the blog. We can’t wait to crack on and produce some super blog posts for all you wonderful Miles Kelly fans…stay tuned.
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Did you know 1 in 6 adults worldwide can’t read or write? Literacy rates are so low in many third-world countries because of large class sizes and limited reading resources. There are very few opportunities to develop literacy skills in developing countries, and yet the children are desperate to learn.
The Book Bus charity aims to remedy this problem of poor literacy by visiting schools in developing countries with a super colourful bus packed with books and enthusiastic volunteers. The volunteers read with the children, encouraging them to learn and to be inspired by what reading has to offer. The charity currently has four buses, stationed in Zambia, Malawi and Ecuador – and the newest arrival to the fleet will be introduced into India this year. Every bus is uniquely illustrated by Sir Quentin Blake.
Zambian school children turning out to greet The Book Bus.
Here at Miles Kelly we share the same vision as The Book Bus and are just as passionate about improving poor literacy rates, so naturally we wanted to team up to help in every way we can. Miles Kelly has donated many books to The Book Bus in the past, but this year we are doing something a little different.
We have created a project where our aim is raise over £22000 for The Book Bus through sales of printed and digital books that we have designed especially for the Book Bus cause. This sum of money will not only buy The Book Bus a brand new bus to join the African fleet, but will also pay for workshops that will train local adults to be better teachers, and to appreciate the value of reading. By doing this we are providing the charity with long and short-term help, hopefully creating a cycle – started by the new bus – and ending with ultimately better teachers and teaching practices, which will in turn increase literacy levels. Over the project’s anticipated lifetime of ten years, we will end up benefiting the lives of over 25000 African children.
Wondering what you can do to help? All you need to do is buy the books! Our interactive charity ebook is available now on the iBookstore for £1.99 and for every download Miles Kelly will donate an amount to The Book Bus.
Amazing Animals: Mammals is available from the iBookstore for £1.99.
We are also releasing ten individual First Question and Answer printed books next month for £2.99, again donating to The Book Bus for every copy sold, so keep your eyes peeled for the books in all good bookshops and of course from our website. By buying the Miles Kelly Book Bus books you can have fun, learn all about the animal world and do your bit for literacy levels in third-world countries! If you would like to find out more about the campaign you can head to our website, or if you would like to read more about The Book Bus charity, just click here.
So it is the start of a brand New Year at Miles Kelly – and we have plenty of treats in store for you in 2013! We still have our brilliant 100 Facts Series, and First Q&A’s, but on top of this we are also adding to our 512 collection and providing a couple more brand new series on top of that! Aren’t we good to you? Now repeat after me – “My New Years Resolution is to read more Miles Kelly books…”
One of the most exciting new series we have to offer you this year is our Make and Play Craft books that are an extension of our successful Animal Planet series. These books show children how to make all sorts of animals using a range of techniques and materials. Each craft project is illustrated by step-by-step artworks and photographs. They are also packed with fun animal facts and hints along the way of how to transform your masterpieces into charming gifts! And as the editorial team are so dedicated to all you lovely Miles Kelly customers, they have trialled our books and this is the finished product – which are being considered as a Miles Kelly mascot, naturally!
The Miles Kelly Lion and Lioness looking wonderful
So what else do we have on offer for you this year? We producing a Little Library series presenting favourite nursery rhymes as four themed books inside their own individual slipcase. Each rhyme has its own dedicated art style and they are made with thicker paper making it perfect for little hands. We have two new 512′s on the way; Toy Box Tales and Horse and Pony Stories, as well as deluxe editions of classic fiction in our Special Treasury series.
For those of you who are fans of our brilliantly successful convertible series, we are introducing the brand new Princess carriage! Perfect for all little girls wanting to be a Princess, this is the ultimate storybook, as it is also a playmat and of course, it converts into an actual carriage for you to climb in and be whisked off to a land Far Far Away! Once again, the Miles Kelly team, as dedicated as we are, have trialled this brand new product with undoubtedly successful results.
A member of our foreign rights team looking just lovely in our Princess carriage!
If this isn’t enough to tempt you, we are also working on a follow up to our hugely successful Discover the World series – this year featuring Discover the Savage World, full of mind-boggling photographs and facts, get ready to experience our Planet as you’ve never seen it before! On the way as well we have individual versions of our Utterly Silly Stories and Aesop’s Fables, First Fun Flashcards, Sticker Playbooks…the list goes on. So keep your eyes peeled and watch out for all the incredibly exciting books we are throwing your way! And of course Happy New Year from us all at MKP.
Did you know that the Kindle celebrated its fifth birthday last week? Over the past five years we can clearly see a brand new digital presence in the world of books and reading. Whilst printed books are still very much alive, readers are now presented with a choice to read digitally on a lightweight, e-reader screen or to read a traditional book made from trees and ink.
The digital sphere of books has brought so many positive elements to reading. Instead of your suitcase being over the weight limit by about 20kg, and having to choose which three books make the hand luggage, or finishing your book on the train without a new book to follow, you can have it all on one lightweight machine; your own personal, portable library. Is there anything better? If you finish your book on the train and realise with dread that you have another 3 hours to go and no book to entertain – NEVER FEAR, the Kindle will provide you with a never-ending selection of titles that you so cleverly downloaded in an eBook shopping spree. Whilst digital books can provide positives that the print book cannot even compete with, due to the fact that it’s weight is proportionate to it’s length, and realistically the size of your handbag is limited; as much as we would all love to have Mary Poppins’ magical bag. But what about the smell of a brand new book? Or a really old book for that matter. Does the Kindle have a button that exudes the smell of crisp, brand new pages? Or an old, musty well-loved and travelled library book? I think not. There is something about a print book that is difficult to put your finger on; to define what it is about a book that makes people react so strongly to the prospect of making it digital. Society gets protective of the printed book – not wanting it to slip into a technological black hole.
What goes around comes around.
In our current societal culture, print and digital seem to be in a stand-off. Unlike other creative arts such as music, which since the introduction of digital downloads and technology seems to have fallen hook, line and sinker into the digital world, leaving CD’s behind as an ancient artefact, the world of books and reading has not had the same social reaction. Whilst the digital sphere has taken off, print is still very much alive, and more importantly still very much protected. As the cartoon above demonstrates, we should embrace the digital sphere in the current time because in the future we will come full circle and return right back to print, and realistically this cycle will continue for the forseeable future, because what goes around comes around!
Being nearly a week into November now, and today being the first day that the car needed de-icing, we can safely say we are at that time of year where before you know it, it will be Christmas Day! Rather than brace the horrendous prospect of Christmas shopping on a weekend, where you spend the whole day elbowing people in the ribs and feeling like your nose will fall off because of the cold, why not do it all from the comfort of your own sofa? Complete with slippers and steaming mug of tea? No contest really.
Here at Miles Kelly we have a range of books and products that are perfect for Christmas gifts. If you haven’t experienced our convertibles then you are missing out – is it a book? Is it a playmat? Is it a climb-in vehicle? It’s all three!
If you like the look of our convertibles, you can buy them here for the bargain price of £!0.00 on our website: http://www.mileskelly.net/products-page/convertibles/.
If you’re looking for something to fill those stockings that appear every year round the fireplace, then why not take a look at our Magical Stories? In this 10 pack series you can find individual books that include four stories, beautiful illustrations and are perfect for younger children to read along or for older children to read independently. http://www.mileskelly.net/products-page/magical-stories/
If you are lucky enough to get an iPad or an e-reader for Christmas, Miles Kelly has many of our books available on a variety of different digital platforms. Whether it is an apple product, a Kindle, a Nook or a Kobo e-reader just search for Miles Kelly and our books will appear; then click the download button and you can be reading in minutes. Our newest iBook is Discover the Awesome World; Earth and Nature, which is running alongside our print version of Discover the Awesome World! This iBook is multi-touch and interactive, jam-packed with videos, photos and facts! If you like the sound of this just click here to download it.
So what are you waiting for? Get christmas shopping! And as a final treat for you all, here is a picture of all the Miles Kelly staff looking extra spooky for Halloween!
So it’s Frankfurt Book Fair this week and what better way is there to let you all know what is going on than a blog full of picture updates? Well here you go…
Our stand looking as colourful as ever!
So this year once again Miles Kelly Publishing has created a wonderfully colourful and appealing stand, complete with chairs in a rainbow of colours.
We are currently working on Make and Play books as part of our Animal Planet series to be published next year, that show children how to make all sorts of exciting African animals, including a giraffe, hippo and lion. Each book even comes with a pull-out scene for the finished product to play in! Our Make and Play safari dummies – two little lions – managed to travel all the way to Frankfurt! Maybe they are on the way to becoming a Miles Kelly mascot? Who knows…
Make and Play Lions having a ball in Frankfurt!
Frankfurt has also seen the appearance of our wonderful 512 pagers – both fact and fiction! Whether you want 512 pages of fantastic facts about history or science, or 512 pages of fantastically silly stories then Miles Kelly is the place to find them!
Our 1000 Fantastic Facts series showcase over 1000 facts across 512 pages with brilliant photographs, funny facts and quizzes too!
Our fictional 512 pagers are also there in Frankfurt!
In other news at Miles Kelly, we have just started a brand new Halloween giveaway where you can have the chance to win one of three spooky story collections! Just head to @MilesKellyPub on Twitter to be one of three lucky winners that could walk away with either 50 Scary Fairy Tales, 50 Tales of Vampires and Shapeshifters or 50 Monster stories – the choice is yours!
Three lucky winners will get one of these three books (their choice) for Halloween!
I think that’s about all the updates for today at Miles Kelly – let’s hope that the rain stops soon and the sun comes out just in time for us to hit 1100 followers on Twitter 
Hello! We are back in the blogging sphere after a staff change and there is a LOT going on here at Miles Kelly. Next week is Frankfurt Book Fair – one of the biggest events of the year, so the staff have gone into overdrive, trying not to scare the chickens that are still determinedly sticking around outside the barn.
Next week we are launching our second book following on from Discover the EXTREME World as we prepare to launch; Discover the AWESOME World. We have teamed up with Discovery ChannelTM once again to produce a hardback book on holographic foil, with a bold, dynamic design approach that creates a visual WOW factor! This sensational new book gives core reference subjects an awe-inspiring twist that can bring fun to all the family.
Our other recent addition to the ever-growing Miles Kelly digital title span, is our multi-touch iBooks, also published withDiscovery ChannelTM! These books designed for an iPad show 60 pages full of interactive features for you to understand the basic principles behind the fastest machines in the world. Just head to the iBookstore to download one of our multi-touch iBooks that are perfect for interactive learning!
This week is Space Week and if you’re not already following us on Twitter, just search for @MilesKellyPub and hit the follow button to enter various prize draws and have the opportunity to win wonderful Miles Kelly prizes! The prize for this week, as it is Space Week is a selection of age appropriate space books, and possibly a free digital download of “I Love Space” for one lucky new follower. Also as it is October keep your eyes peeled for spooky, Halloween themed giveaways in the near future!
And just to finish off…the wonderful bosses of Miles Kelly are doing a 75kilometre sponsored bike ride through the mountains of Tuscany before heading to Frankfurt next week; let’s hope they survive it!
