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Michael Murpugo’s Dimbleby lecture last night, ‘Set our Children free’, was passionate, inspiring, and delivered a blistering assault on library closures, social disconnection, the league-table mentality that denies children that basic life-blood, real education, and is grounded not in exams, but in healthy and inspiring relationships, at home, in school, and in society. He is a natural teacher. It was an encomium to connection and the notion of the ‘Liberal Education’ and spoke, beyond class or cultures, beyond Nations, to the responsibility of all adults, especially those who have succeeded, to give something back to all children. Murpugo knows how to use words, to live inside them, to tell stories we respond to through his talent for performance, and in that he is the poet he talked about being at the end, if he wasn’t reincarnated as an animal. His poetic sensibility lives and breathes in nature too, his home in Devon, and his relationship with his partner Claire, who started the School Farms project, getting inner city kids into the wild.

I found myself thinking how old-fashioned it was too though, forgetting the notion that ‘childhood’ itself is in part a Victorian invention, and, in the US especially I think, can become a glorification of childhood or supposed innocence, at the expense of the necessary journey into adulthood. That old-fashionedness is not necessarily a bad thing at all, especially as a rallying cry for idealism and action in an increasingly vicious, accountant led environment, but what would a children’s author like Roald Dahl have said, I wonder? His stories, though there is plenty of gentleness in many, are much more engaged with the darker elements of human and thus childhood psyches, as were the old Fairy Tales. So although Murpugo says in the real world all children are innocents, in Dahl’s world other children are often the enemy, as above all are adults. Think of all those horrid kids in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, falling foul of the nasty side of human nature and their own, before Charlie triumphs. Think of James’s journey with his peach, and the crawling things of life, made friends and allies now, or his brilliantly violent and irreverent Revolting Rhymes. Many have said that children’s brains, and especially teenagers, are actually constructed differently, presumably because they are still wiring, to adults. It is through stories that children are allowed to safely explore these darker elements of us, the world and themselves too, and so hopefully grow to full maturity and responsible adulthood, in a world that involves threat, competition, and the natural cruelty too that real children can sometimes engage in. Perhaps Dahl is closer to the child’s psyche, the exploration of which for a writer often begins in a place of sudden threat, like James’ parents being eaten by a rhinoceros at London Zoo, and Murpugo comes to it from the other side, more like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, talking with the at times nostalgic longing of the truly responsible adult, that brings an entire life baggage with him too, and a great deal of articulacy. What is certain is that both are great storytellers, and both are rightly and essentially on the side of the growing child. Perhaps that can indeed inspire an entire society with the wonder we once all felt, and many still feel, for life. DCD

Phoenix Ark Press are proud and delighted to announce the publication today of our first book, to Kindle, across the world, Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies. The next Cultural Essay, ‘The Child’s Eye’ by Donald Sturrock, will be published on Friday February 18th.

After the impressive and serious minded children’s author Michael Murpugo did his report today on children in the Gaza strip for Newsnight, I thought about something on Sebastian Faulk’s rather limited series on the novel. It was Martin Amis, sallow and precise in his own intelligence about himself, telling Faulks he could never write a ‘children’s book’, unless he had been somehow brain damaged, because for him language and the novel represents ‘freedom’. I quite understand that journey far beyond ‘childhood’, but he clearly does not understand the journey of so many committed ‘children’s authors’, often not placing themselves in that category at all, or their attempt to bridge the psychic worlds of childhood and adulthood. In that is an attempt to guide imaginatively towards adulthood, and to address the losses and challenges that are the very nature of fantasy fiction, because they are the challenge of imagination and freedom too, versus adult ‘reality’, responsibility and death. Murpugo’s report was moving, sad, and may have failed to address the problem of Palestinian children being used as suicide bombers, as well as the devastation the Israeli army has wreaked, or naturally inheriting the ideologies, hatreds and resentments of their parents. He did sensitively touch on that deepest instinct of children to play and connect, and how in the future it is protecting that idealism that may be a road to human peace. DCD

Ah, the day that really counts, St Valentine’s. Blind cupid, winged with his naughty arrows, is flitting around doing his mysterious transformations. There were fourteen blokes called Valentine matryred in Rome, it seems, and little or nothing is known about the one buried in the Via Flaminius, on February 14th, although perhaps his head was cut off for refusing to deny Christ, before the Emperor Claudius. The link to lovers doesn’t seem to have appeared until Chaucer, and then to have been established in the 18th Century. At least it’s more of a real tradition than that famous marketing fake, once so beloved of UK pubs – The Ploughman’s Lunch. Love, joy and luck to all lovers then, from Phoenix Ark.

I went to Vegas, and Reno, with editors at Abrams, but if the implication of the US Authors Guild’s article below is the House always wins, what exactly did Abrams win in my long battle? A waste of time and money, the destruction of a US career, the loss of a potentially winning or valuable book, indeed three, and above all a complete disrespect to me, and to my own fans and readership too. It is a point the Guild does not make, in talking only about economics. The relationship between editors and writers can be an extremely important and sensitive thing, while there is also a cultural pact, an act of trust, between readers and authors, and that the publishing industry very rarely respects, indeed often mutilates, unless a straight success story. It’s why when editors’ eyes turn like searchlights on their own internal political ambitions, led by the big marketing phenomenons, in Abram’s case Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Hello Kitty, or The Sister’s Grimm, they start to lose their souls, if they ever had any. It’s a money machine, especially in the US, that’s very hard to control, since the engine is so big, but of course editors rise too on their success stories. In terms of culture though, the House loses all round, because we’re all impoverished in the end by that tyranny. It is unique stories that really matter, books of wonder, forged by a writer, enjoyed by a reader, bottom line, not a publisher’s ‘power’ or profits, and in that the protection of the author is vital. Abrams should read the Guild’s last line, about the old partnership, that out of the disrespect to a private relationship too, they so distorted and abused. But, as they say in the US, what happens in ‘Vegas’ should stay in Vegas, so we can believe and express the values and ideals we find within the pages of books! DCD

THIS ARTICLE IS CIRCULATED BY THE US AUTHOR’S GUILD

February 11, 2011. To mark the one-year anniversary of the Great Blackout, Amazon’s weeklong shut down of e-commerce for nearly all of Macmillan’s titles, we’re sending out a series of alerts on the state of e-books, authorship, and publishing. The first installment (“How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble. Probably.”) discussed the outcome, of that battle, which introduced a modicum of competition into the distribution of e-books. The second, (“E-Book Royalty Math: The House Always Wins”) took up the long-simmering e-royalty debate, and showed that publishers generally do significantly better on e-book sales than on hardcover sales, while authors always do worse.

Today, we look at the implications of that disparity, and suggest an interim solution to minimize the harm to authors.

Negotiating a publishing contract is frequently contentious, but authors have long been able to take comfort in this: once the contract is signed, the interests of the author and the publisher are largely aligned. If the publisher works to maximize its revenues, it will necessarily work to maximize the author’s royalties. This is the heart of the traditional bargain, whereby the author licenses the publisher long-term, exclusive book rights in the world’s largest book market in exchange for an advance and the promise of diligently working to the joint benefit of author and publisher.

Now, for the first time, publishers have strong incentives to work against the author’s interests.

As we discussed in our last alert, authors and publishers have traditionally acted as equal partners, splitting the net proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a fifty-fifty split of proceeds, and the standard hardcover trade book royalty — 15% of the retail price — represented half of the net proceeds from selling the book when the standard was established.* But trade book publishers currently offer e-book royalties at precisely half what the terms of a traditional proceeds-sharing arrangement would dictate — paying just 25% of net income on e-book sales. That’s why the shift from hardcover to e-book sales is a win for publishers, a loss for authors.

The Pushback
The publisher’s standard reply to this — which we heard yet again after last week’s alert — is a muddle, conflating fixed costs with variable costs. Let’s address that before we move on.

For any book, a publisher has two types of fixed costs: those attributable to the publisher’s operations as a whole (office overhead, investments in infrastructure, etc.) and those attributable to the particular work (author’s advance, editing, design). The variable costs for the book are the unit costs of production. These costs (print, paper, binding, returns, royalty) tell a publisher how much more it costs to get, say, 10,000 additional hardcover books to stores and sell them. The publisher’s gross profit per unit (unit income minus unit costs) is the amount against which the author’s royalties are traditionally and properly measured. With this sort of analysis, a publisher can compare the gross profitability per unit of, for example, a hardcover to a trade paperback edition.

Investments in technology change nothing. Publishers never argued, for example, that hardcover royalties needed to be cut when they began equipping their editorial and design staffs with expensive (at the time) personal computers, buying pricey computers and software for their designers, tying those computers together with ever-more-powerful Ethernet cables and routers, and hiring support staff to maintain it all. Publishers simply took their share of the gross profits from book sales and applied it to all of their costs, as they always have. What remains after deducting those costs is deemed the publisher’s net profit. Similarly, authors take their share of the proceeds of their book sales and apply it to their overhead (food, clothing, shelter, and computer technology) and costs (their labor and out-of-pocket costs to write the manuscript). What remains is the author’s net profit.

The proper question is this: how much better off is a publisher if it sells a book, print or digital, than it is if it doesn’t? That is what we measured. We then compared that to the author’s print and digital royalties per book.

Publisher’s E-Gains + Author’s E-Losses = E-Bias
Applying standard trade hardcover and e-book terms to Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help,” David Baldacci’s “Hell’s Corner,” and Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken,” we found that publishers do far better by selling e-books than hardcovers (realizing “e-gains” of 27% to 77%), while the authors do much worse (suffering “e-losses” of 17% to 39%). Publishers can’t help being influenced by the gains; e-bias will inevitably drive their decisions.

Some simplified examples show how e-bias plays out in publishing decisions:

1. Promotional Bias. Assume a publisher is contemplating whether to invest a portion of a book’s limited marketing budget in stimulating the sale of digital books (paying for featured placement in the Kindle or Nook stores, perhaps) or in encouraging print sales through a promotion at physical bookstores. Either way, the publisher expects the investment to boost sales by 1,000 copies. A sensible publisher would spend the money to promote digital books, pocketing an additional $1,570 to $4,170 on those sales compared to hardcover sales. Such a decision, however, would cost Ms. Stockett, Mr. Baldacci, and Ms. Hillenbrand $1,470, $1,570, and $670, respectively, in royalties.

2. Print-Run Bias. E-gains of 27% to 77% become irresistible when a publisher looks at risk-adjusted returns on investment, as any businessperson would. Once a book is typeset for print, the publisher must invest an additional $30,000 to have 10,000 hardcover books ready for sale, using the figures from our prior alert. Once the digital template is created and distributed to the major vendors, on the other hand, there is no additional cost to having the book ready for purchase by an unlimited number of customers. Even the encryption fee (50 cents per book, at most) isn’t incurred until the reader purchases the book. In this environment a publisher is nearly certain to keep print runs as short as possible, risking unavailability at bookstores, in order to decrease overall risk and maximize the publisher’s return on investment.

Publishers, in short, will work to increase e-book sales at the inevitable expense of hardcover sales, tilting more and more purchases toward e-books, and their lower royalties. Publishers, as sensible, profit-maximizing entities, will work against their authors’ best interests.

An Interim Solution: Negotiate an E-Royalty Floor
This won’t go on forever. Bargain basement e-royalty rates are largely a result of negotiating indifference. The current industry standards for e-royalties began to gel a decade or so ago, when there was no e-book market to speak of. Authors and agents weren’t willing to walk away from publishing contracts over a royalty clause that had little effect on the author’s earnings.

Once the digital market gets large enough, authors with strong sales records won’t put up with this: they’ll go where they’ll once again be paid as full partners in the exploitation of their creative work. That day is fast approaching, and would probably be here already, were it not for a tripwire in the contracts of thousands of in-print books. That tripwire? If the publisher increases its e-royalty rates for a new book, the e-royalty rates of countless in-print books from that publisher will automatically match the new rate or be subject to renegotiation.

So, what’s to be done in the meantime? Here’s a solution that won’t cascade through countless backlist books: soften the e-bias by eliminating the author’s e-loss. That is, negotiate for an e-royalty floor tied to the prevailing print book royalty amount.

Turning again to our last alert for examples, here are the calculations of e-losses and e-gains without an e-royalty floor:

“The Help,” by Kathryn Stockett
Author’s Standard Royalty: $3.75 hardcover; $2.28 e-book.
Author’s E-Loss = -39%
Publisher’s Margin: $4.75 hardcover; $6.32 e-book.
Publisher’s E-Gain = +33%

“Hell’s Corner,” by David Baldacci
Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.20 hardcover; $2.63 e-book.
Author’s E-Loss = -37%
Publisher’s Margin: $5.80 hardcover; $7.37 e-book.
Publisher’s E-Gain = +27%

“Unbroken,” by Laura Hillenbrand
Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.05 hardcover; $3.38 e-book.
Author’s E-Loss = -17%
Publisher’s Margin: $5.45 hardcover; $9.62 e-book.
Publisher’s E-Gain = +77%

Here are the calculations with an e-royalty floor:

“The Help,” by Kathryn Stockett
Author’s Adjusted Royalty: $3.75 hardcover; $3.75 e-book.
Author’s E-Loss = Zero
Publisher’s Margin: $4.75 hardcover; $4.85 e-book.
Publisher’s E-Gain = +2%

“Hell’s Corner,” by David Baldacci
Author’s Adjusted Royalty: $4.20 hardcover; $4.20 e-book.
Author’s E-Loss = Zero
Publisher’s Margin: $5.80 hardcover; $5.80 e-book.
Publisher’s E-Gain = Zero

“Unbroken,” by Laura Hillenbrand
Author’s Adjusted Royalty: $4.05 hardcover; $4.05 e-book.
Author’s E-Loss = Zero
Publisher’s Margin: $5.45 hardcover; $8.85 e-book.
Publisher’s E-Gain = +62%

While this wouldn’t restore authors to full partnership status in the sale of their work, it would prevent them from being harmed as publishers try to maximize their revenues. This is only an interim solution, however. In the long run, authors will demand to be restored to full partnership, and someone will give them that status.

My one time editor at Abrams, Susan Van Metre, was once kind enough, before her metamorphosis, to pass on a sort of commission, doing the picture book of the Pixar movie – Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. It was not my story and I didn’t reap any huge benefits, certainly no royalties, but liked the artist who did the drawings, William Maughan, and going into Pixar too for a screening in London. It tells of a stallion, caught up in the ‘modern world’ of the Iron Horse, the American railway, and finding his freedom among native American Indians, and other wild horses, especially a lady. Many times readers of my animal fantasies have asked if I would write a novel involving horses, and while I love riding, I was also rather obsessed with Black Beauty as a boy. Very girly, I know, but it must have been the music, and you never know.

But a horse came up in a TV programme recently that so astounded, it must be blogged. It highlights so much of the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ guff that surrounds much modern and conceptual art, since Marcel Duchamp didn’t sit on his loo seat. I don’t for a moment mean the kind of work and ideas so brilliantly expressed in Philip Mount’s paintings and cultural ‘short story’, below, I mean the Neanderthal triumph of rubbish, and it’s orchestrated victory in the world of money. But if you want to know something of man, art, and the human mind too, then just take a look at a little piece of carved horse bone. The picture below is badly lit, so doesn’t capture the effect of the cross-hair mane, scratched at the top, but does catch the astoundingly simple line, the clarity of perception, the realism, and movement in the running creature too. The simple point is this, as art looks back at us in wonder at what we are – the ‘Ochre Horse’, found in Crewsell’s limestone gorge in 1876, and now housed in very industrial Sheffield, is thirteen thousand years old. DCD

Philip Mount is 39, and currently sporting a beard. He is of course a painter, and a remarkable one. You can see his mastery of the very texture of paint, the marvel of colour, form and space, right now, in the window of Codogan Contemporary in South Kensington (Below).

Among his many incarnations, he was Artist in Residence at the House of Commons, following in the noble footsteps of no less a genius than JM Turner. Philip though has taken many footsteps, wielded many brushstrokes, and will take and wield many more – we’re sure with the universal recognition such talent deserves. In the opinion of the editors at Phoenix Ark Press, he should also turn a hand to the short story too, but sadly, like poetry nowadays, there is no money in it – certainly not at Phoenix. Sorry, Philip! Philip has a studio in Shoreditch, and a heart in many artistic and intellectual houses, so is one of the young guns and true inspirers of the new artistic buzz emerging from the Phoenix Ark community. Bravissimo.

You can see his work, and learn more about the artist, by clicking here.

Well, to celebrate Chinese New Year, a ‘Dragon’ and ‘Phoenix’ recipe – with stir fry chicken and shrimp with ginger, onions, snow peas, carrots and broccoli, soy sauce and wine, all served in fried wonton skins shaped like a lotus flower – is simply too irresistable not to make the company dish, worthy of the great Bouchebold himself. So we’re posting Martin Yan’s recipe from the Today Show and it’s the Year of the Rabbit too, filled with prosperity and fun for all! For a little film (sorry about the toothpaste ad) and the full recipe just click

DRAGON IN THE POST – NEXT INSTALMENT, AND A LITTLE MOVIE TO SPREAD THE ONLINE MAGIC!.