When Rachel Williams and Jenny Broom decided to team up and launch their own company publishing children’s books, one of the first hurdles was a name.
“We love cats,” Williams says. “So, we toyed with all sorts of names and landed on ‘Magic Cat’ because we feel that magic happens when you sit down with a young reader and pore over something that’s physical, on paper. We thought it was playful, and we think cats bring good luck.”
“We have three crazy cats between us as well,” Broom adds. “And that fed into the name.”
The early conversations heading into 2019 and entrepreneurial dreams of two long-time co-workers – who worked as part of teams at several publishing companies – have grown into an all-female-led venture with 29 employees, the release of about 50 books a year, and a recent Independent Publisher of the Year award from the British Book Awards. “After a slow start working in the pandemic, we’ve really come a long way,” says Broom, who lives and works out of the Magic Cat offices in London. “It’s been a ride.”
“I think our success has been because we have stayed true to our commitment to making the best books with authors and illustrators,” says Williams, originally from Australia and who now lives in Norfolk in the UK. “That’s really at the heart of everything we do.”
Magic Cat’s titles encompass a wide spectrum of topics – things kids naturally gravitate toward like the environment, fantasy worlds with wizards and goblins, mysteries and adventures – but Williams and Broom have also made nonfiction a focus of their publishing.
The two have an uncanny knack for finding authors and illustrators who tell nonfiction stories in an interactive way, knowing that kids love to point and search and dive deep into puzzles, mazes, and games with their parents while learning something too. The illustrations are stunning and visually invigorating, such as the Brown Bear Wood: It’s Busy Down in the Woods Today (by Rachel Piercey and Freya Hartas) that harkens back to the Richard Scarry books of the 1970s with countless characters going about their daily activities in a woodland setting that functions like a city.
We wanted something focused on the creative joy of books that didn’t just demand shareholder money each year. — Rachel Williams
The company also branches out into more fiction-oriented stories like its Bearlock Holmes mysteries by Kristyna Litten, but always with a backdrop of learning. And, of course, Williams and Broom are always looking for a perfect fit for bedtime reading, like 5 Minute Space Stories (by Gabby Dawnay and Mona K.), short stories that “set out on a mission to explore different aspects of the universe; from how the Moon came to be, to the birth of a star and the immense, light-sucking darkness of a black hole.”
Williams authored one series herself, of which one book – Slow Down…on Your Doorstep: Calming Nature Stories for Little Ones – was featured in Literati’s “Subscription Box.” Literati is continuing to work with Magic Cat on bringing more of the UK company’s titles to its U.S. offerings.
“Their books are very well packaged, very attractive and make you want to pick them up and dive in,” says Aubrey Poole, Literati’s editorial manager. Poole first encountered Magic Cat at the publisher’s booth at the annual Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy. “There was a book called 5-minute Nature Stories that I picked up and started reading. It was nonfiction and intended for short stories at bedtime, but the whole thing was written like poetry but was still very accurate and scientific. I saw that theme resonate in their selections, and I started to go through their catalog and just got more and more impressed with the quality of their books.”
“One would think nonfiction books would be seen by kids as dry, less interesting than an exciting adventure theme,” Poole says. “But I love looking for authors and illustrators that find ways to get kids drawn into nonfiction and interact with the content, get engaged with it to make it more fun and exciting.”
Williams and Broom call each other “work wives” based on their years together serving different roles at publishing houses in England. The constant collaboration is a foundation for not burning out on their business, since support from a friend is continual, Broom says. They also credit their current success to children’s book author and publisher Amanda Wood, a founding editor and publisher of Templar Books, itself an award-winning children’s book publisher.
“When Jen and I first started talking about the business, we pulled her in and said, ‘Let’s start a female owned and operated company,” Williams recalls. “We wanted something focused on the creative joy of books that didn’t just demand shareholder money each year. We felt this independent spirit and love of the bookmaking process that would be more than simply moneymaking.
“We started out with a really strong kind of reputation for making nonfiction,” Broom says. The duo commissioned the Little People Big Dreams, a biography series that delves into the lives of key figures from history from the world of science, the arts, sports and culture, with an emphasis on showing children how their understanding of the world changes through time with these real-life portraits.
“We had this very solid understanding of how we could translate traditional nonfiction into something children can enjoy… content that gets their brains going,” Broom says. “But as a parent, we realized that sometimes it can be helpful to have a narrative bolted onto the content so that you’ve got a beginning, middle, and end.”
Williams and Broom, both mothers of children at the perfect age to engage with their books, say they have a “captive audience” to “road test” their work, but their parent friends are also a constant source of feedback. “It’s a really privileged position to be in, and we’re having a blast doing it,” Broom says.
Regardless of how much creative thinking the two put into selecting books to publish, Williams says that, in the end, it’s about channeling the creative work of writers and illustrators to reach young minds.
Broom agrees. “I think we’re particularly interested in working with people with a message,” she says. “We want to take somebody’s passion and channel that into a young reader and create the next generation of interested people engaging with the world.”
