Archive for February, 2016

Tell A Fairy Tale Day is a glorious made-up US celebration of unknown origin and, thanks to the power of social media, it has crossed the pond to the UK. (Follow #tellafairytaleday on Twitter when it comes round again next February.)

Telling, or rather, sharing fairy tales is something we do in every issue of Storytime. We do it because we love them. We do it because our readers love them. To be honest, right at the beginning we didn’t really question that. We were launching a magazine with stories for kids, consequently fairy tales had to be in it. That was that.

It’s only as we’ve researched and rewritten these tales, which have endured for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of years, that we’ve had a chance to reflect on the role they play in reading for pleasure, the influence they have on young minds – and the reasons we need to keep telling them.

So, here are our 5 reasons why you should all join the fun and tell a fairy tale!

1. They Inspire the Imagination

Of course, all stories feed the imagination, but fairy tales really are the original and the best. Want to climb a beanstalk to a magical place in the clouds? Attend a ball you really shouldn’t be at? Visit an ice palace and save your best friend from the Snow Queen? Whoever you are, wherever you are from, fairy tales take you by the hand and lead you on adventures far and wide and, in the process, encourage magical, creative thinking.

2. They Help Kids to Face Fears

Fairy tales also allow kids to confront real-life anxieties in fantastical settings. Those monsters under the bed seem that little bit less scary when kids know they have what it takes to outwit the witch who wants to eat their brother, the wolf who wants to blow down their house, or the three disgruntled bears who want to know why their home is trashed. Fairy tales can help your children deal with difficult emotions and find a hero or heroine they can relate to.

3. They Encourage Critical Thinking

Next time, bring a ladder, huh?

One of the things I enjoy most about telling fairy tales are the questions kids ask. Probably my favourite ever was, “Why didn’t Rapunzel just ask him to bring a ladder?” Fairy tales are filled with flawed characters and bad decisions, all ripe for being pulled apart by curious young readers.

4. Kids Learn That Bad Things Do Happen…

It’s not all sugar-coated. Much like real life, fairy tales feature great adversity, and this brings an opportunity to discuss what constitutes good and bad. Little Red Riding Hood is saved, but only after being devoured by the wolf. The Gingerbread Man is ultimately eaten by the fox. Rapunzel is taken away from her parents. Snow White and Cinderella are both bullied by wicked stepmothers. There are many moral lessons to be learnt in fairy tales.

5. …But Dreams Can Come True

Fairy tales are the place where dreams come true – where monsters are easily vanquished, where bad people get their just desserts, where the impossible happens for those who are down-trodden. It’s more than just escapism, it’s about spreading optimism and hope in the world. And perhaps this is the most crucial reason of all.

For all these reasons and more, fairy tales play an important role in developing literacy in early childhood and helping kids to read for pleasure in school and at home, and I hope this post inspires you to snuggle up and read your latest copy of Storytime!

(And, ahem, if you don’t have the fairy tales mentioned above, you can pick them all up from our Back Issue Shop!)

Here’s to happily ever afters, folks!

Storytime Issue 43 recently launched, bringing home the fact that we’re over three years and an astounding 300 stories and poems into this adventure. It made us feel reflective and we couldn’t resist looking back at our previous magazine covers.

Never before seen: the Storytime cover that never was. Note that the title font changed too.

We couldn’t possibly choose a favourite, but Issue 1 will always have a special place in our hearts – even though it was the most agonised-over cover we’ve worked on. (Launch issue… the pressure!) Anyway, there’s a story behind that cover, plus a secret we’ve never told anyone…

The Hare and the Tortoise was never meant to be our Issue 1 cover

For months and right up until the last moment, Goldilocks and the Three Bears was our cover. We’d commissioned the cover art from the briilliant Brooke Boynton Hughes and it was adorable – just what we’d hoped for. However, Storytime magazine was about to go on sale in newsagents nationwide, sitting alongside the plastic cover-mount brigade, and we just had a nagging feeling that our bears would get eaten alive. Our cover felt too sweet to compete.

Launching by a hare’s whisker

At the same time, artwork had come in for The Hare and the Tortoise by Corey R Tabor (see above) and we all loved it. It was characterful, bright, colourful, full of wit – just what we hoped Storytime magazine would be. With very little time left before going to print, we decided to take a gamble on a lesser-known story and commission Corey to illustrate our first cover. We loved the result and made our deadline by a hare’s whisker.

Our final cover for Storytime Magazine Issue 1

Slow and steady wins the race

We’ll never know whether a Goldilocks cover would have sold better, but in hindsight, we’re all sure that The Hare and the Tortoise was the right choice. Not just for design reasons, but because the image and story sum up so much who we are. We might not have the manpower, budget or speed-to-market of bigger publishers – we might well be the tortoise to their hare – but we have an army of loyal subscribers who are reading for pleasure, so here’s hoping that slow and steady really does win the race. 43 issues in, we’re still not out of the running!

To date, The Hare and the Tortoise has been the only fable to make a Storytime magazine cover and Issue 1 was the only cover story we’ve ever changed (thankfully).

So what do you think? Did we make the right choice? We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on Twitter or Facebook. Incidentally, you can still get hold of Issue 1 and other Storytime issues in our Back Issue Shop.

Talking fairy tales next time, so hopefully see you soon!

We often get asked why we launched Storytime. There’s more to it than loving stories (which we do) and rebelling against the practice of plonking plastic toys on kids’ magazine covers. So here are five reasons why we launched a monthly magazine with stories for kids.

1. Consumer Choice

As the parent representative in our small team, I was hugely frustrated by not being able to find a magazine that my daughter enjoyed. She discarded the heavily branded, pink, mainstream kids’ magazines within minutes, along with their poor-quality plastic gifts. Yet the artsy, high cover price magazines didn’t engage her either. While I salivated over their cool illustrations, she was off playing with Lego. This lack of choice got us thinking: could there be a middle ground – a kid’s magazine that was neither high end nor super-mainstream? Something different?

2. Bringing Back Stories to Magazines

Do you remember the mags of yesteryear, which had real actual short stories in them? Where did they go? Over the years, we’ve developed several magazines for kids and found that stories were often sidelined for ‘more educational content’. But aren’t stories educational? Don’t they teach us lessons about morality and emotion, and give us the gift of words and wonder? We think so and somewhere along the way we became wholly possessed by the need to bring back good old-fashioned stories for kids to the magazine world.

3. Reviving Lost Tales

We love fairy tales at Storytime HQ, but why are the same ones churned out again and again? Even the best publishers fall back on releasing new versions of old classics like Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk. They’re wonderful stories, and we would never omit them, but what about the hundreds of fairy tales and folk tales that aren’t commercial enough to make it into modern books? That’s what Storytime is for – to tell the lost and forgotten stories that never get told.

4. Making Memories

It’s important to us that we create things with good values, which make happy memories. We want to make the kind of product that somebody will look back on in years to come and fondly recall. “Do you remember that lovely magazine, Storytime?” Or “Oh, I used to love snuggling up with (insert name here) when they read Storytime to me.” That’s the kind of magazine we wanted to make.

5. Improving Literacy

Childhood literacy stats can be disheartening, so we’ve always hoped we can play a small part in assisting all those heroic educators in our schools. We’d also like to bridge the great book/magazine divide, because as far as reluctant readers are concerned – no need for snobbery – any reading is a good thing. The idea that a child might read our stories and be inspired to pick up a book is one of our primary motives. If we can help kids fall in love with reading, then our job is done.

So these are the five things that got us started and keep us going. I’ve kept it brief for our first blog, but I’m sure I’ll write about all of the above in more detail in future – so please check back for more insights into the world of stories for kids, children’s illustration, kids’ magazines and more.

Wishing you many happy Storytimes,