Profile Fiona Watt
sit of Exeter. She worked for five years teaching seven to eight-year-olds in Kent and at an English-language school in The Hague, but then had the itch to do some- thing more creative. She thought of going into children’s television, but then saw an advert for an editorial role at Usborne—it appealed because she was familiar with its books from her teaching career. That was 27 years ago and she has been with the company ever since. People tend to stay on at Usborne. Wat says: “At
[Tyler’s] 40th anniversary part, we were going around the table saying how long we each had worked here. When we got to over 300 years [cumulatively], we decided to stop.” Why is there that longevit? “Over- all, there is a friendliness here. But no two days are the same and it’s a collaborative process. Nobody is precious about what they do, there are no prima donnas, or people saying ‘my book sold more than yours’.” Peter Usborne is now taking a step back—though
Wat says he oſten “plunks himself down in my office chair and says, ‘Show me something amazing’”—with
daughter Nicola taking a more active role in running the company. The ethos will remain the same, though, says Wat. “That’s the nice thing about working for an indie company—Peter has always been willing to take a risk. We have done some things where the testing has been costly, but we know if we are selling in quantit and doing coeditions, it’ll work.” The new lines Wat is working on reflect Usborne’s policy of taking an existing product or format that might have gone out of fashion, updating it, and doing it beter than everyone else: a small-format pop-up range, rubber- stamping books and a resurrection of the magic painting watercolours craze of the 1980s, with new printing tech- nology, are currently on her agenda. The later project came out of a meeting with some
printers at Bologna 2016. Wat loves the Italian fair, not least because “it allows me to be a spy. I can go around to all the stands, see the trends across the world, get inspired. And maybe that’s one instance where it really helps that nobody knows who I am.” ×
WATT’S TOP FIVE
1
333,842 cop es soldopies soli
2
298,644 copies sold
3
234,250 copies sold
4
233,567 copies sol
opies sold
5
185,761 copies sold
Data is from Nielsen BookScan’s TCM, representing print book sales through about 6,500 retailers.
www.thebookseller.com 13
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