13th December 2024


Editor 30


Editor 30 Criteria


The Editor Score is based on a ranking of an acquired author’s combined sales through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market Top 5,000, plus literary prize performance, with two gradated tables of one to 15 points. TCM sales are for the first 46 weeks in 2024 and are for titles published in 2024 (in any print format) only. Prizes must have been awarded since 1st January 2024. Acquiring editors must be based in the UK or Ireland. For sales, 15 points


are awarded for TCM sales of more than one million units; 14 points for 900,001 to one million units; and so on, down to one point for sales of between one copy and 5,000 units. For prizes, an editor


receives 15 points for a Booker Prize win; 14 for a Women’s Prize for Fiction or Baillie Gifford triumph; and down to one point for various prizes’ short- and longlistings. Prizes must be awarded by a UK or Ireland-based organisation. An editor’s prize score corresponds to the highest level one of their authors attains. Therefore, a maximum “pure” score is 30, for sales over one million units and a Booker Prize win. However, an editor is given one bonus point for each additional prize win.


Wonder Wall leads The Bookseller’s inaugural ranking of acquiring editors


Using a formula based on Nielsen BookScan TCM sales and literary prize success, The Bookseller’s first editor ranking highlights those making waves in the sector


REPORTING Tom Tivnan W


Editor 30 The Top 10


1


Isabel Wall Viking


Publisher,


The Editor 30 ranking continues overleaf


38


literary fiction Penguin Random House Editor score


24 2


Kishani Widyaratna


Publishing director Fourth Estate HarperCollins


Editor score 22 3 Selina Walker


Publisher Century Penguin Random House


Editor score 21 4 Michal Shavit


Publishing director Fern Press Penguin Random House


Editor score 21


ith an enviable year of critical and commercial success for her authors, Viking’s publisher for literary fiction Isabel Wall has topped


The Bookseller’s first-ever ranking of British and Irish acquiring editors. Wall scored a 24 on the list, based on a formula


that factors in sales of books published in 2024 through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market’s Top 5,000, alongside literary prize wins, shortlistings and longlistings (more on the methodology left and below). Wall edged out Fourth Estate publishing director Kishani Widyaratna, while Century publisher Selina Walker, Fern Press publishing director Michal Shavit and Chatto associate publishing director Clara Farmer round out the top five. It has been an acquiring editor’s dream of a 12 months for Wall, undoubtedly topped by


VV Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night, picked up at auction from Stephanie Cabot at Susanna Lea in 2022, bagging the Women’s Prize for Fiction. But that wasn’t all at the awards podium: Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds scooped the Dylan Thomas Prize, Hisham Matar’s My Friends captured the Orwell political fiction gong, while Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep was Booker shortlisted. Wall also steered heavyweights including


Elif Shafak and Elizabeth Strout to market, while publishing one of the most talked-about (if somewhat controversial) literary events of 2024, Gabriel García Márquez’s “lost” novel, Until August. All told, Wall’s authors shifted a hefty 215,000 units through the TCM, led by 65,000 copies of the paperback of Alice Winn’s In Memoriam, which also won the Nibbie for Debut of the Year. That’s not all: Wall was also named among this year’s The Bookseller Rising Stars tranche (14 of this top 30 have appeared on previous Rising Stars lists). Wall heads a ranking in which women domi-


nate: the top five acquiring editors are female, along with nine of the top 10 and 27 of the top 30. This is a scenario that plays out not just in this top 30. A shade over 36.1 million units were sold through the TCM used in our ranking against titles in which an editor could be identi- fied, and a huge 82.3% of that volume (29.7 million copies) was acquired by a woman.


Caleb Azumah Nelson’s hit Small Worlds helped Isabel Wall top the ranking


Features


Editor 30


CALEB AZUMAH NELSON


MARK GUEST


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