THIS WEEK HAYLEY CAMIS LITTLE, BROWN F


or four and a half years Hayley Camis has worked across the Little, Brown, Abacus, Corsair, Fleet and Virago imprints, and odds are you have seen a few of her eye-catching campaigns as she has chalked up a number of Publishers Publicity Circle award nominations.


She is particularly adept at helping to break out early career authors, and for the past two years Camis spearheaded L,B’s “must-read” campaigns for débu- tants C Pam Zhang and Rahul Raina. She enjoys the creative freedom she has been given in promoting books on issues close to her heart, such as feminism, diversity and inclusion. She was part of the Hachette-wide team that launched this year’s Feminist Book Box subscription service, which has been a big hit. For the future, she says that “building long-term trusted relationships with my authors throughout their career would be incredibly rewarding... I am also excited by the possibilities that come with the blurring of boundaries between jobs and departments”.


Rising Stars Class of 2021


NATALIE BUTLIN BOOKOUTURE


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talie Butlin was Bookouture’s fifth hire: “I think [founder] Oliver Rhodes decided to offer me


a job the day I told him his submis- sions system was dreadful...” She became commissioning editor after a string of e-book hits—Helen Pollard’s The Little French Guesthouse and Frances Vick’s Bad Little Girl both hit the Kindle UK top five—then decided to move into a commercial role, in order to drive Bookouture’s original ethos. She is now head of commercial analysis and manages a small team. “We have gone from publishing a couple of books a month to a book every day,” she says, “and Amazon and Facebook are constantly making changes to keep us on our toes. But we have retained the original spirit of fighting for each title and always looking to improve, and this year have been rewarded with three UK number ones.” Butlin hopes to dedicate more time to analysis “in order to influence strategy in all areas of the business, from promotions to acquisitions” and, as “we’ve just had a year of bringing in new readers,” she says, “let’s retain them!”


LAURA CASSIDY, CLAIRE HENNESSY & EIMEAR RYAN BANSHEE PRESS


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he genesis of Banshee was “some ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ and ‘some- day we should…’ conversations” between friends and fellow writers Cassidy, Hennessy and Ryan six years ago. Partially, they wanted to do their part to help better publishing’s author care and up its recog-


nition of the achievements of women writers. The biannual Banshee literary magazine was born—and quickly established itself as a literary tastemaker, publishing up-and-comers of Irish (and further abroad) letters such as Sinéad Gleason, Niamh Campbell and Ruth Gilligan. The books arm launched in 2019 with Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s rapturously reviewed collection of stories, and its latest is I Want To Know That I Will Be Okay, by acclaimed YA author Deirdre Sullivan. The magazine remains vital, but there will be more welly put into the books: “Small press titles by their nature are often niche, but we want Banshee titles to be accessible and interesting to the general reading public.”


BEA CARVALHO WATERSTONES I


f you think of the books of the past few years that Waterstones has “made”, the odds are that Bea Carvalho was behind them, as she has masterminded Waterstones’ unmissable campaigns for the likes of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light and Richard Osman’s The


Thursday Murder Club. It is not just helping those mega-sellers succeed that appeals; her biggest satisfaction is “when you read a book, and you think, ‘I absolutely love this, and I know how we can make it successful’.” She cites the chain’s June 2021 Book of the Month, Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, which sold 25,000 copies in the month. She’s been an “accidental” Waterstones lifer, joining on the shop floor at the Hampstead shop in 2008 after university, then moving into management and then the head office buying team in 2011; she is now category manager for fiction and food and drink. The highlight of the past year was “just the excitement of having customers in the shops, back open” and she will “do what I can to help make the bookshops even better”.


08


9th July 2021


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