What’s been happening at Brilliant Publications? (29 September 2022)

I’ve been feeling quite reflective this week!

Do we live up to our mission statement?

Yesterday I was lucky enough to get a day out of the office to attend the Independent Publishers Guild’s Autumn Conference. There was an excellent programme of speakers – on everything from the state of the economy and how to make the supply chain more sustainable to using Tiktok to promote books and how educational technology is being used in the classroom. (Not to mention great opportunities for networking and some delicious cakes!)

One message that kept being repeated throughout the day was the importance of having a clear vision and making sure that it is an integral part of all aspects of your business. This, of course, got me thinking about our vision statement:

“Brilliant Publications creates easy to use resources, featuring engaging approaches to learning, which will inspire, motivate and challenge pupils across the wide range of curriculum areas.”

So, here are just a few of the questions that I will be thinking about in the coming weeks:

• How can we make our resources even easier to use?
• How easy is it for teachers to adapt our resources to suit their teaching style and pupils?
• Could we make the process of buying our books easier?
• How can we be sure that activities will engage pupils?
• What inspires and motivates children? Has this changed?
• How do we build challenge into our resources?
• What areas of the curriculum should we focus on next?

If you have views on any of these questions, I’d love to hear from you!

Should learning be fun?

Earlier this week I proofread our ‘International Best Sellers’ catalogue in preparation for the Frankfurt Book Fair. I love reading this catalogue from cover to cover as it gives a whistle-stop tour of so many of the projects we’ve worked on over the years and makes me really proud that we’ve been able to publish so many high quality books.

We feel passionately that children should enjoy learning and coming to school and, as a result, the word ‘fun’ appears in the descriptions of several of our books. Sometimes I worry, however, that ‘fun’ has connotations of being frivolous and not serious, which is not at all what we mean when we say an activity is fun. Instead we mean that it attracts the children’s attention and makes them want to engage more, know more and work harder.

What do you think?

(Incidentally, it was due to many discussions on this topic that we decided to omit the word ‘fun’ from our vision statement!) 

Our birthday sale ends tomorrow!

It’s been 29 years since we published our first book, How to be Brilliant at Writing Stories.

To celebrate, we are offering a 29% discount on all books purchased from our website between now and the end of September. This is a great bargain, so make sure to share the discount code (we-are-29) with all your friends.

We love to hear from our customers. If you have any comments or queries about any of our products, please get in touch. Our contact form is here.

If you would like to receive more information from us, please tell us what interests you by clicking this link so that we can tailor the emails you receive – http://eepurl.com/gKMnqf.