EVENTS


The Bookseller Children’s Conference Keynote speakers


Call the Midwife: Fickling reveals advice that has shaped his four-decade career


During spells at OUP, Doubleday and Scholastic, David Fickling published some of the biggest names in 20th century publishing. He reveals how he has managed to balance commercial nous with creative freedom


Charlotte Eyre @charlotteleyre


‘‘I


don’t know!” David Fickling laughs when asked why so many brilliant children’s authors have wanted to work with him over the course of his career. The founder of David Fickling Books can count discovering Philip Pullman and partnering Jacqueline Wilson with Nick Sharrat among his professional achievements, but says he is not a calculated editor and has only recently learnt how to describe what he looks for in a manuscript. “I’m always looking for the essence of the story: the voice, the feel, how good the prose is,” he says. “If I read something and really love it, then I know it is right and that means I must do something about it.”


Back in the 1970s Fickling was


a “dirt arts graduate” who didn’t know what to do as a career. But he had used books as a means to escape his four “noisy” brothers growing up, and remained an inveterate reader. He first worked at Dillons Universit Bookshop


04 7th September 2018


(now a branch of Waterstones) but aſter geting married he wrote to Oxford Universit Press and took a job as a “readers adapter”, meaning he rewrote classic books for foreign students. At OUP he met the man who became his mentor, Ron Heapy, who got Fickling into kids’ books when he announced: “Children’s books—come on, we’re making them!” Heapy had been charged with taking over OUP’s children’s department aſter Mabel George, who ran that side of the business successfully for many years, stepped down. “Replacing her was hard,” Fickling explains. “I think we were the third people sent in to have a go, but there was such an opportunit because we inherited these fantastic authors—like K M Peyton, who had just published Flambards— and Rosemary Sutcliff, who was an extraordinary woman.” Fickling spent 10 years at OUP and adored the job, despite having to cycle in from outside


Oxford every day because he couldn’t afford to either run a car or live in the cit. And it was there he met and befriended Pullman, who sent him the manuscript for Ruby in the Smoke. Fickling also worked with some of the biggest names of the late-20th century, among them Wilson and Gillian Cross—the later he published as part of a series of exciting and accessible titles he had commis- sioned called Eagle Books.


Double Act


In 1987 he was hired to put together Doubleday’s first (and celebrated) hardback list, and took Pullman, Cross and Wilson with him. In 1991 he moved to Scholastic, where he had a “tremendous” time publishing Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy, as well as the bestselling Goosebumps and Horrible Histories series. “At Scholastic I worked with the most tremen- dous young editors. When I arrived, an executive of some kind


KIDS’ PUBLISHING, DAVID FICKLING SAYS HE IS RELISHING BEING PART OF A SMALL, NIMBLE BUSINESS


AFTER A NOMADIC CAREER IN


told me to ‘cut some dead wood’ but I realised people had been locked in by financial restraints,” he says. “So instead, I let the genies out of the botles! When I leſt turnover was, I think, £17m— up from around £700,000.” Now, of course, Fickling runs his own business. He says one of the advantages of being a small outfit is that its authors feel like they are “inside” the company. “People in large corporations have no control over contracts and if a book isn’t successful, they are moved around willy-nilly. We like to give the author some continuit.” Heapy used to tell Fickling “it’s not your book David”, advice he still puts into practice. “Writing a book is a very, very hard thing, and I was taught as a young editor that authors choose you; you don’t choose them,” he says. “As an editor you have to tell the truth but authors need to know you want them to do their best work. I’m a midwife, really.”


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