Coming soon .........

Starting in January on our 'Alex and Friends' website there will be a FREE downloadable activity for children plus a special offer on our goodies each month for the whole of 2010.

Merry Christmas!

The Christmas picture is from one of our Christmas cards which you can buy from our website. Good quality, reasonably priced, A5 cards, with envelopes, and the Christmas greeting in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German and Russian. Plus a 'Spot the Difference' picture on the back.

The National Honey Show

Thanks partly to an upsurgence in interest in beekeeping, The National Honey Show was a great success, with good attendance both from experienced beekeepers, and newcomers.

The standard of entries of honey, wax, mead, cakes, art and crafts was sky high; the trade exhibition hall was buzzing; and the London & Surrey Beekeepers' display with its observation hive in the Green Room was constantly packed with interested visitors.

One of our exhibitors hosted a visit from the High Commissioner from Mauritius; we also had Sky Channel 813 filming and interviewing people (including my Dad) and The Food Programme came along to make a programme about honey, which will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Sunday 8 November at 12.30, repeated at 4pm Monday, or you can listen again on the BBC iplayer. Don't miss it, or you'll have to wait another whole year for the next National Honey Show.

Zazzle

Zazzle, Vistaprint and Lulu are such a major help to small outfits, enabling small quantities of promotional items to be ordered at a sensible cost.

Having just discovered Zazzle, we can now offer the Dragon/Wolf mug for sale without the outlay and storage for a minimum order of 1,000. To say nothing of the invoicing and postage. Check it out, and design your own coffee mugs, T shirts and mouse mats!

Dragon Mug at Zazzle

Frankfurt Book Fair

It seems almost unbelievable that we've been home a week. The bookfair was certainly an experience. Several football stadium sized halls filled with stands of publishers from all over the world.

The 'veterans', returning each year have back to back meetings each scheduled for half an hour throughout the day to discuss deals to sell their books in new territories, new languages and new formats throughout the world.

We had several meetings and look forward to following up .. and of course, being in the middle of the meeting season, there is the National Honey Show to look forward to this coming week......... From the Kids Section on the NHS website, you can download a free bee picture for children to colour, and spot the difference.

Inside a Beehive

The new book is well underway. You can look through the brood box of a real beehive from the comfort of your armchair, with no risk of being stung. Amazing.

New book: 'Alex and Friends' text in English and in French

We have now published the text of the 'Alex and Friends' story in both English and French. Yay! It is a little pocket book which will fit into the DVD case alongside the CDs. All made possible by Lulu.

Spiral Staircases

Holly and I have had such fun with the challenge of illustrating spiral staircases that it seemed a good idea to share this with you. Last weekend I had an opportunity to take some photos, though space was rather constrained, of medieval stone, spiral staircases. These are an excellent economical use of space, and a very interesting exercise for architects and illustrators in getting the perspective right.

Illustrations here are the stone spiral staircase, a sneak preview from our new book 'Secrets of Wolvern Castle' and in a post below, Alex's Tree Staircase.


In my spare time (!) I'll have a go at building blocks to make a spiral staircase in Google Sketchup (without help from which the Castle Dining Room would be totally squiffy). More spiral staircase pics can be seen in a special Photo Gallery.

Polish Polish Polish!

It seemed everyone, teachers and librarians, at the 'Library and Information Show' last week wanted material in Polish. Do e-mail us and let us know how many copies of the 'Alex and Friends' audiobook @ £15.99 you would order. When we get to a total of 300 orders we'll be able to do it for you! Look forward to hearing from you............

Activities added ...at last!

Holly and I, and the team of translators, have been working on these activities for the last couple of years and at last the first few have found their way to the website. They are black and white pictures to colour and discuss, with some text in several languages, available as downloadable .pdfs. Amazing how long it takes to put these together. The pic on the right is a coloured in version of one of these black and white pictures to colour, this one is also available as a poster.

I hope lots and lots of children will have fun with these!

Alex and Friends Calendar

Just published on Lulu. It seemed an obvious way to gaze at Holly's wonderful illustrations all year.
Enjoy!

London Book Fair

After almost catching up with myself, and working out how to grab the photos from my new phone, I can now relate what a brilliant time I had at the LBF. The seminars are always worth the effort of finding where they are hidden. Notable this year were several seminars on childrens books including 'What Teens Really Want ' - so ask them: a bright idea by Penguin which you can check out at Spinebreakers. A very popular seminar was Digital Publishing: "Where is the Money". Concerns being raised for the future of publishing where everyone expects information for free.... and the Society of Young Publishers Canon Tales, fascinating snapshots from a wide variety of publishing people. It's also interesting to talk to so many different people at prearranged meetings, at their exhibition stands, and while queueing for coffee.

The Grammar and Punctuation Headache

So the English version of the story is now finalised and ready to be pasted into the booklet. Just gave it a final whiz through 'Word's' spelling and grammar checker. 'Inanimate' objects should be animals, vegetables and minerals 'that' do things. Giving the wolf and the elves names and/or personalities mean transgressing this and so they have become creatures 'who' do things. Naughty. Door post, window sill, honeybees, backpacks, bed time, daytime and night time - 'Word' wants to contract everything. I've chosen the Oxford English Dictionary version over the Word version. Sorry - editorial decision.

I know my adverbs aren't all in the right places, but have chosen common use over correct English. I've done proof reading in my time: I still think perfection is always just out of reach, and it's all a total headache.

English Recording Session

Today we finally got the English version of the book recorded onto the computer. Tania Rodrigues has a wonderful voice, a pleasure to listen to. She gave an amazingly accurate reading with very few interruptions. Well done both to Peter Rinne and Tania. Can't wait to get the CD pressed now, though I still have the booklet to coax into shape. Have to use Coreldraw, which is clumsy at page make up. Can't get high enough resolution .pdf outputs using Pagemaker and my computer is too clogged to run InDesign.

It's only April, English and French were our New Year's resolutions. We're getting there, but I think this recording was worth waiting for. Many thanks Peter and Tania!

Another Website 'How to' success!

The shop programme used for the Alex website (Actinic Catalog)was a major culture shock, even though I had been writing and updating my own websites for years. It took me months to get my head around the concept, and more months to get anywhere near a presentable website for 'Alex and Friends'. That was last year.

Now I have discovered how to use the Actinic 'library' to insert layouts from Dreamweaver as in the photogallery, and paragraphs containing more than one hyperlink. Such a major step forward I had to shout from the rooftops... Yay!

GESS 2009 Report

More photos of the exhibition here.

A report on the background information, and the work by the GESS organisers, BESA, the PA and the UKTI that went in to making the exhibition a success is posted at:

http://www.alex-and-friends.co.uk/NotesfromGESS2009.doc

GESS (Gulf Educational Supplies Show) Dubai

Our contact at The Publishers Association (PA) suggested that this would be a good venue for us. It attracted a UKTI grant (to encourage export). We jumped.

The PA organised a joint stand under the auspices of BESA who incidentally had the coffee machine on the stand next door to us.

The organisers went to a lot of effort. The Sheik was scheduled to open the exhibition on the first morning. We were asked to arrive early (security). As is traditional, two children were there to present flowers to the Minister of Education at the opening of the exhibition, and Sarah (from GESS) came looking for a gift for a girl aged 10 and a boy aged 7 to be presented to them on a cushion. Our book and one from Mantra Lingua were rushed to do the honours.

GESS Exhibition, Dubai

What a difference it makes, being with other exhibitors on a collective stand. The long journey, the hotel, the unexpected setbacks all became a hugely entertaining shared joke instead of a disaster.

Pitfalls of 'Translations'

We had been advised to take a leaflet in Arabic to the GESS Exhibition in Dubai. It proved excellent advice. With zero knowledge of Arabic, we started with a translation agency, one which had been recommended to us.

They made several mistakes, firstly in layout, making it impossible for us to drop the outline .eps files into our leaflet, then we spotted no less than three mistakes in the English address, which shouldn't really have been re-keyed. This made our noses twitch. So Steve took the 'professional' translation to work and asked an Egyptian colleague to cast an eye over the Arabic translation and give an opinion.

The Egyptian colleague (Yasser) said it made no sense, it was translated so literally that it could have been done by translation software. We sent it back to the agency and they had two more goes at it with no better results. In the end Yasser translated it for us himself and we had all the problems coping with the RtoL script as described in the last post.

I took both versions to the exhibition and asked opinions. Yasser's version explained our book and audio CDs, rather than 'translated' our leaflet. The original leaflet had of course been aimed at the English speaking market. So Yasser's explanation made far more sense to the Arabic speaking world than did the literal translation.

This was corroborated by the rep from the British Embassy, Cairo, who said they always have to get translations from the UK re-worked; and ditto from the British Embassy Jordan, who talked me through the whole agency translation explaining word for word what was wrong with it.

So in the end, we were lucky. Just think. We are a multilingual enterprise, present under the auspices of the UKTI. A tacky translation would have completely undermined our street cred.

There are more lessons here - but we're not completely sure about recommending a solution. Trust is the key. If you possibly can, seek a first hand, trustworthy solution to any translation requirements.

Arabic

Well - as is always the way will all things 'computer' - it wasn't quite so simple.

Letters differ slightly when they are at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of words, so the variety of these versions was available in the 'Symbols' menu within 'Word'.

Our Egyptian colleague created the text using all these variations in Word 2003 under Vista. Fine. Great. Perfect. Looked fantastic.

The problems began when I took it home on the memory stick and stuck it into an old - let's be clear about this: antedeluvian - version of Word. The fonts didn't come across. Rubbish came across. Trying to intersperse the odd English formatting for ISBNs threw everything out of kilter................ it got worse.

Try Coreldraw. Rubbish font. Try Photoshop - brilliant. Minor problem, the letters were in the wrong order, in fact in reverse order, sdrawkcab. Clever. Don't know how it did it. Making a pdf from Word had the same effect. Using Parnian and pasting text in - still backwards.

Lots of wasted time, head scratching, brain storming. In the end we remembered that our son had a laptop lent from school which ran Word 2007 under Vista. This preserved the formatting and although we had missed the deadline for getting the leaflet printed, at least we could run copies off from the resident printer.

Moral: don't get involved with the left to right alphabets. by comparison Greek and Cyrillic are a doddle.

So why did we get involved and cause ourselves all this grief? The result of going against our golden rules of dealing direct, feeling out of our depth with Arabic, and using an agency. I'll bore you with that story in another post.

Tonight, we're celebrating success with the Arabic flyer!

Keyboard Layout for other languages

Did you know that it is easy to install and use keyboard layouts for other languages?

I'm still in Windows XP ................ you just need to enable another language from the
Settings > Control Panel > Regional Language and Settings.
You need a 'hard' restart to enable the languages. Then a toggle appears on your task bar so you can flip between English/French/Russian/Whatever.

You can even install the right to left languages like Arabic .......... and away you go.

More info from Microsoft.

Google images has pictures of keyboard layouts if you don't want to go across the keyboard and print it out for yourself. Overlays are also available to buy, or even other language keyboards.

Good luck!

Arabic

So now we have a sentence about ourselves in Arabic. I hope our visitors at the exhibition in Dubai won't assume either that I speak Arabic, or that we publish an Arabic version of our book..... Much as I'd love to. (Both).

Leaflet in Arabic, and PDF Security

I know it's the weekend.

Saturday last week Catherine and I took display tables at the ISMLA Conference in Cheltenham. Fun, but long drive. Back after 11pm.

Saturday this week (yesterday) was spent doing the VAT. Horrible job, but when it is done, there is such a saintly feeling of piety, followed by relief and relaxation........... and it makes the end of year accounts sooooo... much easier.

While all this is going on, there is the GESS exhibition in Dubai to plan for. We received the log in codes for the exhibition website at close of work on Friday, and the deadlines for the exhibtion catalogue and some of the other usual info were this weekend. Of course the 'weekend' in Dubai is different from here, and a a deadline of midnight is not our midnight - as Dubai is ahead of us. With the help of Kate at The Publishers Association we made it .......... just.

Now we just need to get some translation and printing organised for an Arabic version of our leaflet.

We (Holly and I) have put a lot of work into activities to accompany our book, and the thought of a printed version x 6 of activites for all the languages is daunting. So downloadable, photocopiable .pdfs for printing and even a .pdf of the whole book of illustrations for whiteboard/computer screen seems to be the way forward.

Then teachers can print out just what is needed for today.

Piracy is such a universal problem in publishing that we are experimenting with a protection system called PDFLocker which we hope will enable us to give you - as requested last weekend - the right to print various of our useful publications including the transcripts* of our audiobooks. The example was for a group of six young students of Russian. Or this would give you rights to photocopy an activity for your children or your class.

We want to make your lives easier, so if there is anything you need - ask. You may be surprised at how receptive and helpful we can be.

* Transcripts are not word for word into each language. Our translators were asked to make the story flow correctly in their own language.

Where does inspiration come from?

Our book illustrations are created at the storyboard, and our illustrator, Holly, brings them to life. We work by e-mail, bouncing ideas back and forth across cyberspace until they come to life - that is until we have a rough that we are both happy with and Holly paints them to life.

So we thought you would like to see some of the sources of our inspiration, and have started a photogallery. I wonder if you recognise where and how they appeared in our books? It isn't always obvious. Conversely, it has been difficult to find examples of some things we needed to illustrate, and we have resorted to Google Sketchup (wonderful, free tool) to rotate the angle, or work out what we would see.

All work should be this much fun!

As well as finishing off the new book, tasks for this month include the final two story CDs: French and English ~ we never thought it would all take this long.