Phoenix chief rises to take the reins at David Fickling Books

Tom Fickling, the editor of comic The Phoenix, has taken on the role of managing director at sister company David Fickling Books (DFB), and is now working across the two businesses.

Fickling moved into the m.d. position when the previous holder of the title, Simon Mason, took up a new opportunity with a different publisher. (Mason recently said he was working on an as-yet-unspecified venture at Pushkin Children’s Books.) “With [Mason] leaving it was a natural fit,” said Fickling, who is the son of founder David Fickling. “We are close geographically and I’ve been involved with DFB for a long time. They are two small companies and having one person overseeing both made sense.”

As m.d. at DFB, Fickling said his role will be to look after the financials and strategic overview, and make sure all employees understand and feel involved with the aims of the business. But he was keen to stress that DFB and The Phoenix will still be run as separate companies.

DFB is and will remain a small, boutique publisher of “high-quality” books, with David’s strength in forming relationships at the heart of the business. “I don’t want to turn it into a huge company, I just want to make books readers will love,” said Fickling junior, who picked out the upcoming YA novel by Jenny Downham and the début novel by Chris Wormell—the illustrator of the cover for Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust—as some of this year’s highlights from the DFB list.

When asked about what the challenges are in terms of running a small children’s publisher, he said children’s publishing had become more competitive and one of the big questions was over publishing books and getting them noticed in the trade. “At the heart of that is David’s career and track record. It’s about making sure standards and his legacy are maintained.”

Tom Fickling said that, with regard to The Phoenix, he plans to find more readers, potentially overseas, and to get the name of the business better known in the publishing trade. “We want more people to read comics, as [many as is] humanly possible,” said Fickling, who added that he is incredibly proud of the business he launched back in 2012. “The readership has grown 50% over the past couple of years and we get a huge amount of fan art and letters. There’s a lot of love out there for the comic.”

When the business launched the readers were mainly from the “middle-class heartland of the south-east [of England]” but they are now based much further afield, with “hotbeds” of subscribers in Manchester and Bristol, thanks, in part, to the outreach work the business did in terms of events in schools and festivals, Fickling said. Around 45% of the readers are girls and Fickling is passionate about including a mixture of stories, from sci-fi and action, to comedy and non-fiction. There are currently plans for a comic about DNA in conjunction with The Wellcome Trust, for example.

The perfect Present

Fickling is also delighted by the success of The Phoenix Presents titles, which are book editions of comic strips that have run in The Phoenix, repackaged and published by DFB. The range includes titles such as Philip Pullman’s The Adventures of John Blake and the Corpse Talk series by Lisa and Adam Murphy. Sales of books in the series have been consistent despite no major retail support, Fickling said. “Our print runs are relatively low—we do a 5,000 run for most books, but books we published in 2014 sell as many copies a month now as they did then,” he said. “When children read them, they love them.”

In the future Fickling would like The Phoenix to create stories that go beyond the comic, including the possibility of a TV show for the BBC or a streaming service. “Our dream is to start making comics that become important in people’s lives. Our rivals have been around for 80 years, and we would like The Phoenix to be around for 80 years.”

In terms of splitting his time between The Phoenix and DFB, Fickling said he would make decisions on a “minute to minute” basis, depending on what is important at that particular time. “I enjoy having 1,001 things to do, and figuring out what is most important.”