13th December 2024


re-emphasise that this focuses on the acquiring editor, who is not necessarily the person who brings a book to market. Indeed, some editors on the list’s greatest hits (in terms of the ranking) are from previous roles. A prime example is fourth-placed Shavit. She has been going great guns since setting up her Vintage imprint, Fern Press, in 2023. But her haul is largely due to her buy of Samantha Harvey’s 2024 Booker Prize- winning Orbital when she was publishing director at Jonathan Cape. (The now-retired Dan Franklin had brought Harvey to the list.) To be eligible, the editors must work at a UK


or Ireland-based house. This means we did not factor in titles such as McFadden’s work published under Illinois-based Sourcebooks (distributed in the UK by DK) or Sarah J Maas’ House of Flame and Shadow, bought for Bloomsbury by New York-based executive editor Noa Wheeler. We also excluded in-house IP projects/series


off the advances (to name a few roles). But we have focused on editors as the first port of call in an author’s journey to publication. We narrowed the parameters down to the


9 Maria Rejt


Publisher Mantle


It was a 2024 of bestsellers and prize recognition for Rejt and Mantle, the boutique Pan Mac imprint she has run since 2010. Kate Morton’s Homecoming and Kate Mosse’s ( 2) The Ghost Ship led at the tills, combining to shift 200,000 units. Percival Everett was the critical star as his retelling of Huckleberry Finn, James, was shortlisted for the Booker. A year tinged with sadness, though: the great CJ Sansom passed away just as his backlist was reissued to coincide with the launch of the Shardlake series on Disney+.


5,000 top-selling titles published in 2024 – in first or subsequent formats – based on TCM data. A 2024 publication window does, admit- tedly, miss some of the biggest titles of the past 12 months, including the year-to-date’s third (Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid), fourth (Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us) and fifth (Sarah J Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses) bestselling books. Plus this ignores all backlist, a crucial revenue stream – perhaps the primary revenue stream – in some categories; managing Julia Donaldson’s catalogue is arguably the most important job at Macmillan Children’s Books and Scholastic’s Alison Green imprint. We determined the editor for all 5,000 of


these titles by either accessing The Bookseller’s own rights database or canvassing agents and publishers to identify the dealmakers. We should


11 Liz Cross


Managing and publishing director


David Fickling Books David Fickling Books Editor score


16 16 Bea Hemming


Deputy publishing director


2 40


Jonathan Cape Penguin Random House Editor score


15 12 Ann Bissell


Deputy publishing director


The Borough Press HarperCollins


Editor score 16 17 Lucy Pearse


Fiction publisher Simon & Schuster


Children’s Simon & Schuster Editor score


15 13 Simon Prosser


Hamish Hamilton Publisher Penguin Random House


Editor score 16 18 Cindy Chan


Editorial director Souvenir Press Profile


Editor score 14


Samantha Harvey’s Booker winner Orbital was acquired by Michal Shavit while working at Jonathan Cape


Richard Osman’s editor Harriet Bourton was tops in TCM terms


and licensed character releases, as the model is somewhat different than much of the rest of trade publishing: deals are often conducted by a team of people and can be global partnerships that do not originate in Britain. Of course, this part of the market can be wildly lucrative. Take Ladybird’s Bluey and Peppa Pig businesses, just two properties of PRH Children’s extensive IP portfolio overseen by a department led by licensing publishing director Leanne Gill. There have been 44 new titles released in the past 12 months across both characters, with TCM sales standing at 715,000 copies.


T 14


Helen Garnons- Williams


Publishing director


Fig Tree Penguin Random House Editor score


16 19 Romilly Morgan


Publisher Brazen Hachette


Editor score 14


he point system has two planks. The first is the most straightfor- ward, with an editor’s cumulative authors’ TCM volume on a sliding scale between one to 15, with 15


awarded if sales were over one million units, 14 for 900,001 units to one million, and so on, down to one point for sales between one and 5,000 copies. No editor earned a 15, but yet another Viking publishing director, Harriet Bourton, was the top scorer on nearly 720,000 units, 651,000 copies of which were from Richard Osman’s paperback of The Last Devil to Die and his


15 Emma Jones


Editorial director, fiction and YA


Macmillan Children’s Pan Macmillan


Editor score 16 20 Ellen Holgate


Publisher Bloomsbury


Children’s Bloomsbury Editor score


14


Features RUTH CRAFER


Editor 30


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