WHY WE MAKE OUR BOOKS DIFFERENT

Every Child Deserves to Enjoy Reading

Cristina grew up seeing how difficult reading could be. Years later, that experience helped shape the books we wanted to create.

Cristina's experience shaped one of the ideas at the heart of Jablyx: children's books should be easy to read, but enjoyable for the adults. Because when the grown-up is having fun, the child feels it too.

THE BEGINNING OF JABLYX

How a Broken Foot Led Us to Build Jablyx

What started with a broken foot, sleepless nights and a pile of stories became something much bigger.

In November 2022, an accident at work suddenly put Claudio at home with his foot in plaster and nights he couldn't sleep. There was no five-year publishing plan.

There was a broken foot, a lot of sleepless nights and an urgent need to find something funnier than daytime television.

So he started writing. Ten stories came out of that winter, full of ridiculous characters doing ridiculous things. Every morning, Claudio read the night's work to Cristina. He went deep. She kept it light.

She started adding jokes and silly lines. Somewhere in the middle, they found the books. We tested the early stories on friends in England and their children. They gave us feedback. Lots of feedback. So much feedback, in fact, that some of our English friends have since stopped talking to us — presumably to avoid being asked to read another fairy tale.

We are, genuinely, incredibly grateful to all of them. They gave us their time, their honesty, and quite a lot of patience.

We couldn't have done it without them.

A PRECIOUS MEMORY

The Week I’ll Never Forget

Seven nights, the same story, and a memory I still carry forty years later.

FROM STORIES TO BOOKS

Somehow This Became a Publishing House

We had absolutely no idea what we were doing. So we learnt.

We learnt how to write for children.
We even learnt how to publish — including buying our own ISBNs.

We took courses — lots of them — including a recorded BBC masterclass with Julia Donaldson. We tested our stories on friends, children and anyone else who couldn't escape quickly enough.

Some stories were brilliant. Some were not.
We rewrote them. A lot.

Claudio drew the characters himself, starting while his leg was still in plaster. After hundreds of hours of drawing and painting, he learnt to use AI image tools to turn his artwork into illustrations good enough to print.

The ideas are ours. The words are ours. Not one line of our stories has been written by a machine.

Eventually, two things happened that convinced us we might actually have something.

A friend read one of the early stories aloud and stopped halfway through. She had recognised something of herself in it and couldn't carry on without crying.

Then a six-year-old sent us a voice message to tell us how much he'd laughed.

That seemed like a reasonably good sign.

Jablyx was born.

Where We Are Now

It took almost four years to get from that broken foot to a publishing house.

And this is only the beginning.

It took almost four years to get from a broken foot, a pile of silly stories and a slightly worrying amount of caffeine to an actual publishing house.

Today, we have three Wonky Tales published in English and Italian, each with its own companion audiobook. All three have received five-star reviews from Readers' Favorite.

And now we're doing something rather bigger.

We're taking Jablyx to the whole trade.

We're beginning a systematic, nationwide outreach programme across the UK and Ireland, contacting schools, bookshops, libraries and wholesalers directly to introduce them to Jablyx, our books and our audiobooks.

From 2027, we're also opening the doors to other authors of children's, young adult — fiction and non-fiction — who may want to be published by Jablyx or explore a partnership with us.

And somewhere in all of this, we're supposed to write seven more fairy tales.

We'd better get on with it!