Contact: elizabeth.donnelly@cssd.ac.uk

According to Google Analytics, Storynory.com received 149,468 visits, with 602,261 page views.

Our traffic followed an familiar pattern, with a surge before the half term holiday as people filled up with stories to take away with them. The week of half term was quieter, and then traffic picked up again as people returned.

Feedback suggests our Astropup series has been a hit. One mum on Twitter tells us that her son has played an episode twenty times. We’ve received a colouring-in of Astropup’s portrait, and loads of encouraging comments.

Not everyone is a fan of our poetry – as in Orpheus – but experience tells us the more grown-up episodes get appreciation which comes in later via emails and other contact. Our aim is to have a “rich mixture” of content – from the edifying to the entertaining.

We don’t have up-to-date figures for sales of our new App (by Wizzard) but we know that we’ve sold a few hundred. We receive a dollar for each sale, and we need every cent we can get to pay actors first and foremost, and increasingly to employ illustrators and musicians. We are working hard to add weekly bonus content to the app in the form of factual background talks. We got into this paid-for model by accident. Wizzard made the app for us, and we only later woke up to the fact that people expect extras when they’ve paid for something. We are interested to see how this works out.

The stories for our story-writing competition are steadily coming in, but not quite as many as the noise in the comments section would suggest. There are still a few weeks to go.

It’s clear from the comments that our followers are missing Natasha, but Richard has been brilliant and is building his own fan base. We have recently heard a little word from the ever-illusive Natasha, but no firm news yet about her return. We have loads of plans, including some tentative ideas about stand-alone audio books, perhaps sold at a small price in the Apple store, so when she does finally turn up at the pond there will be plenty of work for her to do ! We also will be introducing a new voice to Storynory soon – so keep listening.

To everyone, thank you for listening to us. We do these stories for you.

We’ve just added our first piece of bonus content – a 15 minute story read by Natasha which you can’t hear anywhere else. It’s a cute story which we dug out of our secret store of treasures specially for the app. We are going to be adding more bonus content regularly including factual pieces – such as short talks on topics of interest to kids including dragons, dinosaurs, famous children’s authors, sport, history…. There will also be some short fables, rhymes, twisters – an eclectic collection of little goodies posted once a week.

If you use our app, you receive our latest story without syncing your iPhone or iPod. Each story comes with a PDF with the full text of the story and a picture which you can download as wallpaper for your device. Just look under extras on individual episodes to find these.

It’s early days for our app. Apparently it’s selling well in Asia. We’ve had a couple of harsh reviews in the US page of the app store. One says it doesn’t work. Well it does. The other bemoans the lack of bonus content – which is a fairer comment – but it’s there now. If you enjoy our app, we would really appreciate it if you say something nice about it in the store to redress these comments. It’s quite an effort to produce a free story every week, let alone bonus content. It’s all a bit of a labour of love, and we want happy customers. There’s no other reason to do Storynory.

Our thanks to Sweetpea3 for sponsoring the competition. Check out their MP3 player which is made especially with kids in mind.

Here are the rules:

1. Send us your story by 21 March 2010 to bertie@storynory.com
2. Tell us your date of birth
3. The story must be entirely your own work
4. The story must be suitable for children
5. You can be any age to enter – but to win a prize you must be thirteen years old or younger.
6. We aim to publish the TEXTS of All entries by EVERYONE of ANY age who enters – but will only do so if we deem them suitable for Storynory.
7. By entering this competition, you are giving us permission to publish your story.
8. The writers of the two stories that we judge to be best will win a Sweetpea3 MP3 player dispatched by Sweetpea3.
9. The story that we judge best will be read, recorded and published as AUDIO and TEXT on the Storynory website and podcast.
10. The story should not be longer than 1700 words.
11. Our decision is final, but of course our judgment is subjective, and you must promise us that if you don’t win, you won’t be put off writing, because life is inevitably just a little bit unfair, and besides, writers have to be tough because there’s an awful lot of rejection and criticism to get used to.

The series of ten stories was an experiment for us. The atmosphere is very different from the beautiful Nordic settings of The Snow Queen or The Little Mermaid that our core audience loves. The Gladys stories are set in suburban modern Britain, and the girls spend a lot of time hanging around bus stops and shopping centres. The older sisters are not very admirable, and seem to think that they deserve their fifteen minutes of fame on a plate. Even I started off by disliking the sisters. But I warmed to them as the story went along.

We know from some comments on Facebook that the chiX were not every body’s cup of tea. But we also know from the nagging message on this site, constantly demanding “the next Gladys”, that she has a considerable following around the world.

We were worried that the stories might be a little old for some of our listeners, as the themes are quite teenage. But in the main, it seems that the same listeners who like Katie the Witch also appreciate Gladys. Of course she appeals mainly to girls, but age has not been an issue.

The heroine of the story is the hard working and sensible Gladys who isn’t even in the band because she is too young and too geeky. She is often underrated and treated unfairly, and the listeners identify with her and want her efforts to be rewarded. And we identify with her too. We know what it feels like to be struggling for recognition.

We weren’t trying to be trendy when we placed the girls in a single parent family with a more or less useless Dad. Nor when we gave them a decidedly “chavvy” style were we celebrating vulgarity. To a certain extent we were venting our feelings against Modern Britain rather that promoting it, but it might not have quite come across that way.

The humour of Gladys is quite dry. We laughed a lot during the recordings, and even we weren’t quite sure why we found it funny. But Gladys is a real heroine, and underneath it’s a serious story about hard work, set backs, determination, and learning to appreciate other people’s talents.

Early on in the series, Natasha did some singing to a backing track. But towards the end we felt that Gladys deserved something more polished and we hired some musicians to record the chiX song Life is a Circus. We didn’t dumb it down. It’s quite a grown up song, but it proved popular, and we really enjoyed doing it. You may also notice that we now have original pictures for all the stories by Tania Fernandes.

Sometimes it amazed me that I could find a load of teenage stuff inside me when I wrote the stories. I think it surprised Natasha too. Natasha’s feedback from the early chapters really helped the story advance in the later chapters. As ever, her voices helped the characters develop and her interpretation looped back into the writing. It was very much her idea that when the chiX achieved fame, they should find out that it wasn’t quite all it was cracked up to be, or at least, there were drawbacks. I suppose that’s the sort of problem that we might like to have one day !

I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas and  a Very Happy New Year!

from

Natasha

We have been subscribers for two years now to Storynory. My children (now 8 and 6) could not imagine life without it… nor could I. Natasha is the prefect story-reader, for this podcast, and my entire family has fallen in love with her reading of such a diverse body of stories, both old and new. Our current fav is the Wicked Uncle.. you have to catch the entire series. Thank you Storynory, thank you Audible ! Our car rides are a completely new experience due to the excitement and fantasy that this has brought to our lives. Bravo ! I would recommend this to anyone with children of all ages (and I do)!

Thank you Natasha. My daughter absolutely loves Storynory and sometimes gets addicted to a single story (like this winter when we had to listen to Christmas in Iceland on repeat every night at bedtime for literally 2 months). She also loves the Gladys stories and has already learned “Life is a Circus” on the piano. Thank you for the amazing work.

There are lots of other lovely comments on the site, and in iTunes and on Facebook, and Twiter, as well as in emails. I couldn’t pick them all out. But thank to everyone because this is what makes it worthwhile for us.

He studied Classics and Oxford University before becoming a financial journalist. He lived in Russia between 1990 and 1993 and was married in Moscow on the day that the 1991 coup ended. When he returned to London he joined the BBC World Service as a radio producer.

During his time at the BBC, he edited a weekly feature programme called Global Business. He worked closely with the presenter Roger White. Their programmes had an informal style, with lots of human interest, and they developed a warm relationship with the audience around the world.

Around the year 2000, Hugh worked briefly for an online publication before setting up as a freelance reporter and covering the internet boom and bust. Since then he has been an online media consultant, picking up skills in computer programming and developing useful, user-friendly websites that they perform well in search engines. His clients include Mallika Basu, whose Quick Indian Cooking blog has established her as the “Miss Masalla” of the internet.

Hugh believes that all his previous experience pre-destined him for Storynory. The strands that come together include his urge to write, his radio skills, his fascination with the internet, and the satisfaction he feels from reaching people in every corner of the world. Even his Classical Education has finally been put to use in his adaptations of myths and legends. His greatest challenge with Storynory is switching between the creative and the technical parts of his brain. His greatest piece of good fortune is to have Natasha as Storynory’s wonderful narrator.

This clever feature is thanks to a technical change by Wizzard, who host our audio and broker our sponsorship deal. Audible have always only paid us on the basis of our North American audience, but in the past we had to play the book recommendation to everyone, no matter where they are. We are pleased about this change because we realise that listening to a book recommendation on every story can get in the way of the enjoyment – but we hope it’s fine for most people if the recommendations are on only a few of the stories. We are also working through our older stories manually removing the older ads.

In general we hope that Audible is a welcome service for you. We believe that Audible complements our offering because it has so many book that we simply can’t do – even if we had the time we don’t have the copyright.

If you are new to Audible, they have a special Thanksgiving offer. You can download a free book without filling in any card details. It’s a great way to get started.

I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has helped us by buying an audio book from Audible. Keeping our sponsor happy also supports Storynory – because we do run this on a very tight budget.

If you need an ad-free story for school or a similar good reason, then you can always email us and we’ll see what we can do.

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“I found out about your site from other cochlear implant user that was before Christmas and now i look forward to hear new stories.. I still use the script to help me follow what the story says. I use it as my listening skill training every weekend using my iPod and print out of the script.”

It’s the sort of message that really delights us and keeps us going. We’ve always understood the importance of texts to young readers, language learners, and others who just like to read along. But of course they are very important to those with impaired hearing.

We have ambitions to add more music to our stories, but we realise – thanks to this listener pointing it out – that we should not mix music under the words as it makes them harder to catch.

And just as a reminder to others, our stories are printer-friendly. Just use file / print in your web browser and it should print a clutter free story. And our very recent stories have the texts embedded in the MP3 file, so you should be able to read them off the screen of an iPhone or iPod touch.

Just double click the page and you will be presented with a long list of languages. After selecting yours, you can now double click any word for a quick translation. It’s all done by the magic of computers, which sometimes get it wrong, but on the whole language-learners tell us that they find this tool useful.

Check back for more news here soon.

Double-click a word on the page. A menu of languages will pop-up. Select your language . Now any word you double-click will give you a pop-up translation.

The menu is quite long, and you may have to scroll down the page to see your language.

To reload this service, either refresh the page or go to another page.

Some words have more than one meaning, and the computer does not always get the right context, but it is accurate on most occasions.

Languages currently on offer are :

Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian (Farsi), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

This service works with Google Translate and jQuery SundayMorning. We will add other languages as soon as Google adds them to its service.

How do I play an audio story on my computer?

Just press the play button:

How do I download a story to my computer?

Look for the link that says:

Download the audio to your computer (right click, save as)

Right Click the link (on a Mac ctrl-click), and you will see a pop-up box. Select “Save Target As” or “Save Link As” and save to your computer.

How do I put your latest stories onto my iPod?

The easiest way to put our latest stories onto your iPod is to subscribe (for free) with iTunes. This link will launch iTunes. iTunes is a free software application made by Apple with versions for both Mac and PC. Once our stories are in your iTunes library, they will sync with your iPod next time you plug your iPod into your computer .

How do I put your stories onto my MP3 Player (it’s not an iPod)?

All MP3 players are a bit different, but with most it’s quite easy. Download and save some stories to your desktop or a folder on your computer. Plug your MP3 player into your computer via the USB. On a PC open up “My Computer”. On a MAC open the finder (the square icon with a face). You should be able to see an external drive represented there. This is your MP3 player. Simply drag our story files onto it. That should transfer them.

Can you email your stories to me every week?

Yes, please subscribe to our email service here. Please use the email address of somebody who is 13 years or older (perhaps mum or dad’s email if you are a kid). You will receive an email asking you to confirm that you want to subscribe. Please remember to confirm.

How do I put other stories (not just your latest) onto my iPod?

Go to one of our archive pages (such as “Original Stories“). You will see that each of our sub-categories has its own feed.

• Category Feed

Copy the URL (web address) of the feed. Open up iTunes. Click the “Advanced” button at the top of iTunes. Select “Subscribe to Podcast” from the drop-down menu. Paste the URL into the dialogue box. You are now subscribed to that category.

Why don’t you have more stories on your iTunes feed?

There are some technical reasons, but see above…. all our categories have their own feeds.

How do I make iTunes download individual stories from your feed?

If you have subscribed to Storynory, click “Podcasts” in the left menu of iTunes. Look for our icon (or it might show an picture from one of our stories). Click the picture. You will see a list of our stories with options to “Get All” or just to “Get” an individual episode. Click the appropriate button.

I’m tying to download your stories, but it’s not working properly, what’s happening?

We are really sorry, but the internet is a strange place and there are sometimes blocks on the way between our server and your computer. The blockages are usually temporary and clear after an hour or so. If you are at school or work, it could be that a firewall prevents MP3 downloads. All our audio is hosted on the Libsyn network which serves about a billion downloads a year, so it’s not lack of capacity at our end.

Can I use your stories in my school, kindergarten, or hospital?

Although our stories are copyrighted, we do allow you to use them in schools and educational / medical / therapeutic institutions so long as you do not sell them or remove any references we make to storynory.com. You may print the texts and copy the audio so long as it is for use in your own school, nursery, family etc. Wider commercial use is not allowed. If in doubt, you can always email bertie@storynory.com and we usually reply swiftly.

Can I rebroadcast, distribute, print as a book, or sell your stories in some way?

Not without our permission. Please get in touch – bertie@storynory.com.

Can I link to you or write up my story on my blog?

Yes, please do. You can use our icon for reviews. http://storynory.com/images/bertie-icon.jpg

Why do you allow critical and ungrammatical comments on Storynory?

Children clearly enjoy the interaction with our stories via the comments section. Commenting on Storynory is entirely safe because we do not ask for email addresses or identification. We do moderate the comments before they appear, and we disallow anything offensive, totally non-nonsensical, or in a language we do not understand. But we do allow reasonable criticism because it would be cheating not to. That said, we have the last say. If we think criticism is gratuitous or just mucking around, we don’t let it through. As for grammar, we haven’t got time to change it, and besides we want the comments to be authentic.

Why didn’t you reply to my comment, Bertie?

There are so many comments, but Bertie tries to reply to as many as possible. Usually, if you really, really insist, you will get a reply. But please don’t pester him too much !

Can I email you, Bertie / Natasha, and will you be my friend?

We prefer kids to use the anonymous comments section. Grown-ups can email us any time at bertie@storynory.com.

How do you make money from free stories?

Well it is a bit of a struggle, but we do have Google ads, and we are grateful to AudibleKids for sponsoring us. If you buy an audio book from AudibleKids via the link from our site, it helps keep them happy with us.

Why don’t you charge for stories?

We want our stories to reach as many people as possible.

Can you help us build a site as good as yours?

We have a consultancy, Blog Relations . We can build a great site at a reasonable price, and we can advise on building traffic, but in the end it’s up to you to win-over the audience.

When will Bertie turn back into a Prince?

That day could mark the end of his stories, so not just yet.

Download the audio to your computer (right click, save as)

And over to YOU! Hear Jack and the Beanstalk told by Children in their own voices, and in their own words.

This is the result of the first Storynory Workshop. Natasha helped a group of children prepare to record their own version of this famous fairy tale. For two hours on Sunday afternoon, they developed their parts through games, physical actions and other creative devices. And towards the end of the workshop they gathered around The Storynory Microphone and told us Jack and the Beanstalk in their own way.

We are planning to do more of these workshops in and around London to start with. If you are interested, please email bertie@storynory.com. And we are also interested in hearing from any schools.

(The Little Mermaid Part Two follows shortly !!!!)

Many thanks to our talented group of young story-tellers: Emerald, Chrystal, Isabel, Maria, Jasmine,Eleanor,Joe, Victoria, Alexander,Amelia, Genevieve, Jonah, Lucy, Toby, Eleanor,

Download the audio

In Seo from Korea has sent us both Birthday and New Year Greets. And Happy New Year to you In Seo !

And thanks for recommending Baba Yaga

Download the MP3 audio (right click link, save as)

Storynory was three years old towards the end of 2008. As anyone who has been three years old knows, it’s a very special age to be. We asked you to tell us what your favourite stories are and why, and to send us mp3 files with your voices.

And Bertie and Natasha would like to thank everyone for listening to Storynory over the first three years. We’ve got plenty more stories for you to come.

Introduced by Natasha. Voices by you.

Update ! You didn’t send us your MP3? Don’t worry there’s still time. Miguel from Spain has sent us his voice which you can listen to here.

In Seo From Korea has sent us New Year Greetings ! … You can listen here.

You can listen to Isabelle over at her podcast, Silly Popsical, which she makes with the help of her papa. And she really does read remarkably well.

‘Audiobooks are a great way to introduce children to reading, and the quality of production and range of titles available has never been so good.’

It gives nice write-ups both of Storynory and our sponsor, AudibleKids. Two of its top five picks are from Storynory: Alice in Wonderland and our Troy series.

Of our Alice it says:

Serialised in bite-sized pieces (perfect for one night’s bedtime story) the adventures of Alice In Wonderland have been a childhood favourite for generations. Natasha Gostwick has a fluid and beautiful voice that conveys all the wonder and (sometimes quite scary) imagination of the original text.

And if you are interested in some of thinking behind Storynory the article has some background:

One of the most interesting sites on the web at the moment is storynory.com. The site is neatly set out, and easy for children to navigate, and has a list of more than 100 titles to download for free. Co-founder Hugh Fraser tells us that, ‘Our mission is help children learn to love language and books, and to inspire their imaginations.

We also want to help make parents’ lives easier. Our stories bring peace and harmony to the backseats of family cars on long journeys. They are also used in many schools around the world, and in home-schools by parents who are educating their children. The downloads are also helpful for children with learning difficulties, and for people of all ages who are learning English as a second language.

‘We choose the fairy tales mostly from The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Charles Perrault, quite simply because they represent most of the well known fairy tales and many of the lesser known ones. These stories are also good because we are limited to choosing out-of-copyright stories. But we love the fairy tales regardless of this because they often have depths of psychology that adults can relate to.’

Actually, it’s much more than a redesign – it’s a major content reorganisation too. Our most visited page has always been the archive pages of stories – so we know that you love to browse. Our archive has grown and grown, making it harder to find what you are after. To make life easier, we decided to divide it into four categories – Original Stories, Fairy tales, Classic Authors, and Educational. There’s a fifth tab – “Junior” which picks out some stories from the other pages for younger listeners (this is a much requested feature).

When you go onto the archive pages you will see that there are further categories- so fairy tales is divided into the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault etc. Each of these categories has its own feature page with thumbnail pictures and brief summaries of the stories.

We’ve also go something for slightly more advanced iTunes users. Each category has its own feed so that you can conveniently download a batch of stories into iTunes and onto your iPod. There are instructions on how to do that here.

We’ve put it through some fairly rigorous testing, but there are bound to be a few bugs that we’ve failed to notice.   We hope to spot them and swot them ASP.   Overall, we really hope that you will quickly get used to the new Storynory and we very much hope that you like it.

iTunes creates a library of your audio and video files on your computer. It also contains an online store where you can buy downloads of music and videos. But there is an important part of the store that is FREE.

The free part is the podcast section. This is divided into categories and you will find Storynory under Kids and Family.

We also have a page for Alice in Wonderland under Arts / Literature.

A shortcut is to use this link which will launch iTunes and take you directly to Storynory’s page. If you don’t have iTunes yet, you will be given the option to download it.

When you are on our iTunes page, look for the “Subscribe” button and press it.

Once you have subscribed, click “podcasts” in the left sidebar of iTunes. You should now see Storynory in your library.

By “Storynory” there will be a little triangle pointing sideways. Click it so it points down and you will see all our stories.

All you have to do is press “get” to download each one into your iTunes library. Or press “Get All” to download all of them.

If you have an iPod, your our stories will transfer to it next time you plug it in to your computer and “sync” with iTunes.

Podcast Preferences

If you have subscribed but haven’t listened for a while, iTunes stops updating automatically. To resubscribe, press the exclamation mark next to Storynory in your iTunes library.

You can set more preferences for your podcasts. Press “Settings” at the bottom of your iTunes podcast library. There you will see various options for how and when to download.

Apple has produced a helpful movie to introduce you to podcasts like Storynory. You can watch it here.

Get individual Storynory categories in iTunes

If you want to download a whole category of stories into iTunes, you can. It’s not difficult -but it is a little hidden secret.

Go to our story archives and you will see that the last link in each section is for the category feed. Click on this and go to the feed page. Block the URL in the address window at the top of the page (e.g. http://storyory.com/category/bertie-stories/feed) and copy it.

Open up iTunes and click “advanced” in the top menu. Choose “subscribe to podcast” from the drop-down menu. A option box opens up. Paste the feed’s url into it and click “OK”. You are now subscribed to that category feed, and the episodes will appear in the podcast section of your iTunes. (see left sidebar).

Burn to A CD

With iTunes you can also burn our stories to a CD. As it is an MP3 CD it may only play in newer CD players – but any fairly recent equipment should play it.

To burn a CD first you have to make a play list. In your iTunes library block and select the stories that you want to burn . Then go to File at the top and choose “New Playlist from Selection”. This will make your playlist. Now look at the bottom right of iTunes. A button will have appeared saying “Burn CD”. Insert a blank audio disk and press the “Burn CD” button.

The feed takes our audio stories to other parts of the web, including the iTunes store where you can find our page in the podcast directory, under Kids and Family.

I walked into the living room
And much to my surprise
There’s a bump in the rug
Oh my, Oh my!

It is rolling and wriggling and moves from
Side to side Oh what could it be?
I think I’ll run and hide.

But no, I must be brave
I will not run away
This bump in the rug will not chase me away

I go get a broom
To poke it just to see
The bump lets out a gurgle
Then moves towards me

The bump has reached my feet
I am frozen in one place
Suddenly I can feel something tugging on my shoelace.

I crouch down very quietly
To have a little peek
I finally have the courage to go ahead and speak.

“Are you a monster?”

The bump does not answer

But grows bigger and bigger
Until al last……………

POPS OUT MY LITTLE SISTER!

We laugh and we giggle
And both crawl under and hide
Suddenly we hear footsteps
And mom lets out a cry.

There’s a bump in my rug!
Oh my, Oh my!

Next Thursday (6th March 2008) is Word Book Day. To Celebrate, Puffin Books will be giving away The PuffinCyclopedia of Children’s Classics for free at Waterstone Books in Piccadilly.

Natasha will be there from 10am till 3.00 pm dressed as The Wicked Witch of the West and reading from a classic children’s book. She will be around and about the store, so ask for the Puffin Witch – and that will be Natasha !