It’s our Halloween show, and the most horrifying item on tonight’s agenda is unfortunately all too corporeal: one publisher has summarily announced their new e-book royalty rate will be a meagre 20% – not of the retail price, but of the net amount received.  Truly gruesome.

Apart from that, we’re looking at book titles –how choosing the right one can land you in the bestseller lists.  Then there’s the increasingly spooky Large Hadron Collider – are people in the future trying to send us a message?  The latest bout of political correctness gone bonkers sees the quintessentially English Fentiman’s Traditional Victorian Lemonade investigated by the US drugs Gestapo.  The success of the True Blood tv series is a lesson to us all.  Why should books have a sell-by date (hint: they shouldn’t, but publishers behave as if they do).  And Noddy – what the heck’s going on with him, then?

Our beautiful and talented panel tonight consists of business guru and Litopia Star Columnist Martyn Daniels, Emma Shortt from the Colony dazzles us all with her debut appearance, advertising legend Jamie Mollert dispenses some shrewd authorial promotional advice, and Dave Bartram’s second Commissioning Meeting victory in two weeks suggests that he’s really a secret publisher in disguise.

This week’s titles for the Commissioning Meeting are:

EMMA
“Flatland: A Romance Of Many Dimensions”
Edwin Abbott Abbott, 1838-1926

MARTYN
“Humpty Dumpty’s Little Son”
Helen Reid Cross

JAMIE
“How to Do It”
Edward Everett Hale, 1822-1909

DAVE
“A Filbert Is a Nut”
Rick Raphael, 1919-1994

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