StoryWeaver celebrated 2 special milestones on May 29:

1. We crossed 5 MILLION reads on StoryWeaver! ✨
2. We now offer storybooks in 250 languages! 📚

A big thank you to our wonderful community for being such an integral part of what we do. Authors, illustrators and publishers who have open-licensed their content at scale. Linguists and translators who have introduced us to new languages. Educators, parents and storytellers around the world who have welcomed us into their reading routine, and into the hearts of their children.

Here’s to the next 5 million reads, and nurturing the next generation of readers. 💛

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Sudeshna Shome Ghosh has worked in the Indian publishing industry since 1997. She has worked at Penguin Books and Rupa Publications where she has managed the children’s imprints Puffin and Red Turtle respectively. Currently she is the Publisher of Talking Cub, Speaking Tiger Books’s children’s imprint. She also freelances as an independent publishing consultant. She has Guest Edited and written picture books for Pratham Books. You can read her book 'A Friend for Little Goat' on StoryWeaver.

The very first time I was entrusted with a book, I was only allowed to tally corrections. For those who don’t know the long, laborious stages through which a book is made ready, this is the (mindnumbing) bit where a poor editor sits with a pile of final proof pages and matches the corrections marked on the previous set with the new one. All she/he is allowed to do is mark the ones that may have got missed out, and any glaring typos that the proofreader may not have seen. The book, I clearly remember, was Percival Spear’s A History of India, Volume 2.

Life in a publishing house, however, improved rapidly. I quickly understood the peculiar joy that comes from working on a book at every stage of its development—from the moment the manuscript lands on your desk(top) to that final moment of relief tinged with trepidation (is it full of typos? It is full of typos! I will be fired!) on sending it off to the printing press. There were ups and downs and incredible goof ups. Just one example is the time when the big boss dumped a sheaf of papers on my table and growled, ‘You will be editing this. But first do a cast off.’ I froze. A cast off? What on earth was a cast off? I dared not breathe a squeak at him, and I couldn’t anyway as he had loped off into his cabin and banged shut the door. I trotted up to a more experienced editor (now one of the top publishers in the country) and asked, ‘Umm, what’s a cast off?’  She sighed. All these young things walking in knowing nothing, she must have muttered under her breath. ‘It’s when you make an estimation of the number of words on a page, then the entire manuscript, and then use that to calculate how many pages your final book will be. A standard paperback has x number of words per page. So first you have to add, then multiply…’ Add? Multiply? Did I not come into the Arts just to get away from all that? Nope. Turns out as an editor you need to be pretty sharp with numbers, and not just for cast offs, but to calculate royalties and advances and more.

I will leave the story of the cast off calculation right there, because I do not cover myself in glory in it (according to my first calculation the book would have been 7.33 pages long).  But I mention it only to tell what kind of learning curve every book, every single line I have edited has been for me.

Once children’s publishing started getting the attention it deserved among trade publishers, I moved naturally in that direction. Penguin, where I worked, decided to revive the children’s imprint Puffin in India, and a couple of editors were assigned to commission and copy edit the books, as well as a similarly small design team. As our list grew, we learnt many lessons. How to evaluate a book accurately; how to edit it; how to design them so they looked as exciting as the imported books from the West in the stores. Some lessons I learnt while editing were: the ability to read the book both as an adult and a child, and both as an editor and a reader. We were working only on chapter books and books for middle grade to older readers, and as the editor I had to be sure that words made sense, that the story went a certain way and did not veer away into dead ends, that the complexity of the ideas, and the length of the book (even the chapters) matched the readership it was aimed at. We were particular about the fact that these were Indian books and that we were not going to create pale imitations of Enid Blytons. So how could we take the best aspects of successful Western writing for children and merge it with Indian characters and settings?

After the publication of Harry Potter, children’s publishing in India took off as well. Now, there are many more imprints, more diverse kinds of books, more experimentation, books of various genres, price points and for different age groups. It’s possibly the most exciting time to be in this area of publishing.

And it was at this time that I got the opportunity to do a completely new kind of editing—one that had been a gaping hole in my experience so far. It was the commissioning and editing of picture books. For various reasons (mostly commercial) the publishing houses I had worked at, had stayed away from picture books. My closest connection with them had been as a mother and reader, when I started reading them only after my son was a toddler. So when editors Bijal Vachharajani and Mala Kumar at Pratham Books invited me to be a guest editor for them in 2017, and commission and edit ten picture books for them, I said yes with equal parts nervousness and excitement in my heart. One part was back to being the poor editorial assistant figuring out what is a cast off, but thanks to the complete trust that Pratham Books showed, I got over those nerves.

In early 2018, all ten books are out and published (except one that is still being illustrated). These range from STEM books where I was told to concentrate on Maths concepts (What? Why Maths again? Why me?) to a beautiful book set in the Himalayas, another one in the jungles of India where a group of children who cannot see are taken on a safari, a story about trees and friends, and another about the unaccountable fears of childhood told through the person of a very unprepossessing sweet stall owner. I worked with some fantastic children’s authors on these books, people mostly with whom I had worked with earlier, and some who I met for the first time. What I learnt while commissioning and editing these books have been superbly eye opening. To put some of them down:

Clarity of idea. The editor needs to work with the author in identifying the heart of the story, and keeping that in mind at all time. In a picture book there is no space or luxury to waffle around with other bits and bobs.

Show not tell. When there are pictures that will bring the story alive, how much should the words say? To find that right balance of just the right Q5number of words and polish the quality of those few words.

Everything can be made shorter and crisper. You can tell a beautiful story in 500 words. Yes, it is possible.

Know the reader. This is true of all children’s writing, but more so for writing for younger children. How simple is simple? And does simple mean not talking about complex ideas? How to get abstract ideas into a story that will hold the attention of a new reader?

The importance of design. The writer, illustrator, designer, editor literally have to be on the same page to bring about true magic.

There can’t be any typos. OMG, is there a typo? There is a typo! I know there is one! My career is finished!

And finally, this holds true for editing books of any length, and for any sort of reader, the value of storytelling. Let the story shine through, and everything else falls into place.

 

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Azad India Foundation (AIF) was founded by Yuman Hussain in 1998 to seed initiatives in education & primary health care. The organisaton's activities reach out to marginalised women, adolescents and underserved children from rural and urban areas of Kishanganj district in Bihar. AIF has learning centres at 73 villages in three blocks of Pothia, Kishanganj and Thakurganj in Kishanganj, impacting 3,500 + children directly in the area. The children in AIF's centres are aged between 6-9 yeas and are either school dropouts or attending Madrassas. The centre's syllabus includes Hindi, English, Science and Maths. The main aim of the initiative is to ensure that children are ready to merge with mainstream education in state-run schools by grade 4. 

AIF is also our first partner translator to have completed its goal of translating 100 StoryWeaver books into Surjapuri. Surjapuri is spoken in pockets of Bihar, West Bengal, Assam and Bangladesh by 1.2 million people. In Bihar, the language is spoken in Koshanganj, Katihar, Purnia and Araria districts. In an email interview Yuman Hussain tells us why creating a hyperlocal library in Surjapuri is important and how AIF managed to reach its goal of 100 books in collaboration with its project and cluster coordinators. 

Tell us more about Azad India Foundation? 

Azad India Foundation (AIF) has been working in Kishanganj district of Bihar from 2001. It started its activities with a non-formal education and vocational training centre for women. Over the years, AIF’s focus has been on the development of poor and marginalized children, adolescents and women. Our activities are in the fields of women’s literacy, formal school education, non-formal education, rural employment, income generating skills, SHG formation, and community health programmes. Currently, we are directly working with 3,500 children in the primary classes through learning centres in 73 villages of four blocks — Kochadaman, Pothia, Kishanganj and Thakurganj. 

What are the long-term effects of a lack of easy access to resources in mother tongue languages for the communities that you work with?

Surjapuri is local language spoken among a large section of people in the Seemanchal area (Kishanganj, Araria, Purea and Katihar) of Bihar. Unfortunately, we have not seen any books or resources available in the local language for the children. There is a possibility that these languages will be lost over a period of time as more and more people now speak Hindi. In fact, when we started translating books in Surjapuri and shared them with the children and community members they were unable to recognize their own written language.

What are the benefits of creating a local digital library of joyful storybooks in Surjapuri?

Creating a hyperlocal library at StoryWeaver will help our children have access to and preserve Surjapuri as their language. It would also enable them develop their reading skills and enjoy stories from all over the world in their own dialect. The digital library is free besides being easily accessible to every one. The mobile friendly feature has made it possible for the books to reach even remote corners of the country.

 

Tell us more about your team of conributors and how you managed to translate and publish the 100 Surjapuri stories? 

The stories were translated by the team of project Badhte Kadam comprising cluster coordinators Aslam, Chand, Juhi and teachers. They were really excited about creating Surjapuri stories as it gave them an opportunity to contribute to the preservation of their own language. Muzzamil, who is the project head, reviewed the stories. The stories were chosen according to the themes and levels of the children accessing them. The toughest part was the typing and uploading of the stories that was done diligently by Saqlain, our computer operator. AIF is really proud and thankful to its team members for completing this programme within the stipulated time period with sincerity and enthusiasm. We will continue adding more stories and hope to bring the joy of reading to all children.

 

AIF's Team Badhte Kadam

How does Azad India Foundation plan to use this digital library of a 100 books?

AIF plans to introduce these stories among the children at our learning centres. We are also spreading the message through social media about the StoryWeaver platform so that the community can access, use these stories and help in building this digital library further with many more books. This is a small step towards the preservation of local languages for which we are grateful to the StoryWeaver platform.

You can read the Surjapuri stories translated by  Azad India Foundation here. 

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