Design agency Young signs book deal with Penguin
Manchester design agency Young has signed a worldwide publishing deal with Penguin to make a book out of its Learn Something Every Day website.
The site was inspired by a pub conversation between Young's founders Pete Jarvis and Geth Vaughan and started life online in August 2009.
It is home to a range of weird and wonderful bitesize facts - such as koala bears sleep 22 hours a day and George Bush was a school cheerleader - that have been sent in by its legions of readers. The facts are accompanied by doodles designed by Young.
Jarvis and Vaughan said they created the site to help get their fledgling design agency noticed: ''Being a new studio without many contacts within the industry, we needed to get our name out there. We came to the conclusion that something that was updated daily would keep our company in people's minds.''
Although the pair admit the site attracted very few visitors upon its launch on August 1, spreading the word through Twitter and the blogging community soon garnered attention. Within two weeks it was recording 10,000 unique visits a day.
Soon after Jarvis and Vaughan started to receive publishing offers. They hired literary agent Jason Ashlock of Moveable Type Foundry, NY to handle the negotiations.
The publishing contract went to auction and Harper Collins and Chronicle pitched for the concept before Penguin landed the winning bid.
Penguin's Meg Ledger said: "Our tentative plan is to publish this as a four-colour, 368 pages, 5 ½ x 6, paperback format.
"We publish a number of strong-selling quirky books (Keri Smith’s titles Wreck This Journal, How to Be an Explorer of the World, This Is Not a Book, and the forthcoming Mess), as well as very successful trivia miscellanies (the NY Times bestselling Book of Useless Information series), we see this as a perfect fit for our list and a title we think we could do very well with.''
The book is set to be released in spring or early summer next year.