What’s new at Brilliant Publications? (19 May 2022)

Welcoming Sidra Ansari to our family of authors!

I’m delighted to announce that Sidra Ansari has agreed to write 100+ Fun Ideas for Creative Writing in the Classroom‘. As you’d expect from someone who loves to inspire her pupils to do their best creative writing, Sidra has chosen some wonderfully creative headings for her activities. Some of my favourites are: They get caught in a thunderstorm, Character trait swap and Give your character a snake! I can’t wait to read the manuscript, Sidra.

This book will be coming out in 2023.

How do we choose illustrators?

Some of our new projects are going to need illustrations, so I’ve been looking back at some of the illustrators we’ve used in the past.  We are very lucky to have good relationships with many talented freelance illustrators. For example, Paul Hutchinson, who illustrated all the Luc et Sophie and Luis y Sofнa books, really made all the characters come to life (as shown in the sample below from Je vais aller en vacances) – I chose this spread as I’ve been starting to think about my own summer holidays!

For each project we must decide what style would suit the book best. An illustrator who specialises in water colour paintings might be great for illustrating an historical fiction story, whereas someone who likes to use clear outlines would be better for a photocopiable sheet. For some books a more cartoony style works best, but for others the illustrations need to be more serious, to match the tone of the book.

Once we’ve chosen an illustrator, we provide briefs of what we want in each illustration. No matter how full our briefs, the illustrators always surprise me by adding lovely extra details. For example, in the pictures below you can see that Paul has drawn a cute smiley face on the map of Spain on the front of the brochure the girls are looking at!

Do you have a favourite Brilliant illustrator?

What does Amazon recommend?

As you might expect, we frequently look to see how our books are doing on Amazon, to check that all the data is correct and read new reviews. Amazon uses very sophisticated algorithms when deciding what to promote to individual customers based not only on what you have bought, but also what you have looked at. An amusing side effect of this is that I frequently get recommendations from Amazon full of Brilliant Publications’ books. I can’t disagree with them – in my opinion they are all fabulous books!

You can, of course, also find out information about all our titles on the Brilliant Publications’ website.

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

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With best wishes for next week!

Priscilla

Publisher

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