You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Creative agency The Curved House this week launched division The Curved House Kids, which will create books that children can either illustrate or write themselves.
Publisher Kristen Harrison said the Make-Your-Own series will encourage kids to read at a time when the visual world is taking up more and more of our attention.
"In October the BBC reported that England has some of the lowest literacy rates in the developed world among 16-24 year olds,” she told The Bookseller. “There are a number of factors at play but one very significant one is that children are being born into a world that demands a high level of visual engagement with much less emphasis on text-based reading. So we use visual techniques to get children to engage with the text and therefore align our books with the way kids are instinctively navigating the world."
The series comprises Illustrate-Your-Own books, which allow children to draw their own pictures, and Write-Your-Own books, which have blank spaces for kids to add text.
Budding artists can illustrate My Summer Snowman, written by Chester Travis (£4.99), or Monster Small, Monster Big, written by Keith Tilbury (£4.99). For writers, the range so far includes Grandma’s Jungle Party, illustrated by Ben Hawkes (£5.99), and Up, Up Into Space!, illustrated by Megan Archer (£5.99).
After finishing the books, children can upload their work to an online gallery on the Curved House Kids website.
Harrison is arranging a range of promotional activities next year and the books will be part of the Exhibition of Children’s Illustrations at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin on 11th January.
Next year the company will also launch an app, which will allow users to write or illustrate their own books from a smartphone or tablet. The provisional launch date for the beta version of the app is late summer/early autumn.