Crowvus is a small company, and there is no legal requirement for us to produce an annual report. That aside, it's both beneficial and gratifying to recap the year and revisit our aims and goals. It's gratifying because you can celebrate the parts that you got right through the year. And it is so important to take a step back and look at your achievements. In 2025, we sold a record number of books, built the newsletter to a surprising number of subscribers (if you'd like to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, then head over here !) and we had a phenomenal number of entries for the Crowvus Ghost Story Competition. Wow! What a year 2025 turned out to be! It's beneficial because it helps you gain an understanding of the business. Because of the records I insisted on keeping through the year, I now know the percentage of our readers who shop at Amazon, and percentage who prefer paperbacks to ebooks, and the country where we sell the most books. All of this information we...
Friday 22nd November – Illustrations
I respond best to visual learning styles. I’m always looking
for pictures. Whether it’s a pre-existing landscape just begging to be
photographed, or the words of a writer on the page calling out to be
transformed into art.
I’m not the best artist in the world, but I can make a
decent attempt at drawing. But the hardest thing about illustrating a book is
pleasing the author, while the hardest thing about having your own work
illustrated is relinquishing your hold on it.
So, what I tend to do now is wait to be asked to illustrate
things, or else I illustrate my own stories. Over the last few years, I’ve
offered to illustrate people’s favourite poems for National Poetry Day, and this
year I had my first published illustrations in “Rosie Jane and the Swadgrump”. When
we launched the book in the school, the thing which most impressed the children
was how I’d managed to do the characters' hair(!) and how I’d reproduced the same
character, from scratch, in every picture. Their awe really gave a newbie like
me a massive confidence boost! This was the first time I’d shared any of my digital
graphics with the world, creating most of the pictures in strong, bold colours
using the computer’s shades rather than my own.
One thing I’ve learnt (although, not always done!), is not
to fill a picture. Look at the needs of your audience, and the needs of the
illustration itself. Sometimes, empty spaces aren’t blanks, they’re
vacuums which draw the reader in.
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