Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

We do research to find the answers… and then the fun starts! We all have lots of ideas to make the project a success, from how the cover should look to what exciting things we can do at the launch party. We put all these ideas together to create a plan, and make sure everyone else working on the project knows what the plan is and what we are aiming for. It’s also our job to tell the rest of the world, and let people just like you know about our book and why you should read it.

For Peter and Wendy, our plan is to celebrate the centenary of the book. 100 years is a long time, yet the story is loved just as much today as it was back then. You can read more about the 100 years of Peter Pan in the On the Page section, but in 2011 we hope our version will bring J.M. Barrie’s magical words to a new generation of children, and be an exciting rediscovery for parents and those who have experienced it before.

boy who never grew up turns 100 merchiston publishing

Our focus group with the Family Council, a parent support group run by the hospital, brought up a number of points that we hadn’t fully considered and was hugely helpful for us in the text layout, illustrations, cover images and our website. A questionnaire completed by the Bedtime Readers volunteer group confirmed our findings from the focus group. Together these two groups allowed us to view the project from a different angle and make Peter and Wendy as enjoyable as possible for you, the reader.

boy who never grew up turns 100 merchiston publishing

Over the past few weeks we’ve been reading Peter and Wendy cover to cover, splitting up the chapters, checking other group members’ work and making sure everything looks fine before we pass the pages to the Design team. Since we’ve all read the book, we know the Peter and Wendy story inside out and we always like to have our say in other decisions that the team makes about the book. If you’d like to experience what it’s like to be an editor, why don’t you go over to the Interactive section of the website and do the “Find the Mistakes!” exercise?

boy who never grew up turns 100 merchiston publishing

Fast forward to 2011, however, and things are a little different.

It was a crisp, sunny March morning at Craighouse Campus…and three members of the Peter and Wendy team were holed up inside recording parts of chapters one and three to upload to the Boy Who Never Grew Up website. Audio specialist Iain generously offered his time, technical expertise and a top-notch radio mic to facilitate the recording and Angela, Ralph and Mairi were the lucky team members who got to play voice artists for the day. ‘Radio voice Ralph’ took on the role of the narrator, Angela stood on tiptoe to bring the elfin Peter to life and Mairi tried her hand at Wendy. After much scribbling on a spare manuscript copy and a few false starts in rehearsal, they managed to record the texts in one take apiece.

Click through to the Storytime at Merchiston Publishing page to hear the recordings!

Many thanks to Iain MacKay for all his help in recording and to Dave McCluskey for his assistance (and performance notes…).

boy who never grew up turns 100 merchiston publishing

We started out with a vision that strictly adhered to our Design Brief, which asked for a classic, nostalgic feeling and layout to represent the centenary aspect of the title and to match the unabridged version of J.M. Barrie’s story. We also decided to feature illustrations of details of the story that are not Peter Pan but nonetheless well known, such as the pirate ship, the crocodile, or the clock.

However, the absence of Peter remained a point of discussion, especially because research into existing covers had shown that nearly all feature him. Thus came to be our only cover with Peter on it.

Another issue that was raised during the course of this project was that with children as our audience, the cover might actually have to be more modern no matter how much we all liked the classic feel. These considerations led to the following cover:

The last two covers were then taken to a discussion with a focus group by our Marketing Department, which confirmed our thoughts that Peter himself is not a necessary feature, but also that a less classic cover might be more attractive to children. We were also made aware of the problem of a gender neutral cover: the classic one we had was more appealing to girls, the modern one to boys.

All these considerations led to our final version, which we feel is a successful compromise between modern and classic while appealing to both boys and girls.

Will this cover survive unchanged? We shall see.

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Update 16 March 2011: Lo and Behold! The cover went through yet another period of tweaking, until we handed in our final, final version:

boy who never grew up turns 100 merchiston publishing

boy who never grew up turns 100 merchiston publishing