September hardback, We Solve Murders. Two others were in the 600,000-plus club: Penguin Michael Joseph publishing director Maxine Hitchcock, led by the 211,000 units generated by one of the hits of the summer, Claire Douglas’ The Wrong Sister; and Cornerstone MD Venetia Butterfield, a good portion of her authors’ sales coming from the orchestration of the James Patterson deals. (Patterson and his co-authors had 11 hardbacks and 16 mass-market paper- backs released by the PRH division this year, moving 508,000 units.)


82% 40%


There are a number of relative tyros, and it is no surprise that many of them work in the BookTok end of the market


Of TCM sales of the titles analysed are from books acquired by a female editor


Yellowface, and thus both benefit in our ranking from the mass-market paperback’s nearly 255,000 copies in TCM sales and its Fiction Book of the Year triumph at the Nibbies. An editor’s maximum prize score is the high-


est point they hit on the pyramid. A perfect pure score, then, would be 30: 15 for more than one million units in TCM sales plus another 15 for a Booker triumph. But one bonus point is given for each subsequent award win. For those on the same score, the higher rank-


ing goes to the editor with greater TCM sales, sort of like goal difference determining positions on a football league table. There are three others on 11 points that miss out on the top 30 via sales differential: Faber associate publisher Laura Hassan, Puffin fiction publisher Ben Hornslen and Simon & Schuster deputy publishing direc- tor for crime and thriller Katherine Armstrong.


Of the editors in the ranking are from Penguin Random House imprints


Prizes are also awarded on a one to 15 scale,


with 15 for the Booker, a 14 for either the Women’s Prize for Fiction or Baillie Gifford, down to one point for a number of various gongs’ short- and longlistings. We acknowledge that this is far from an exact science, though we have tried to assemble the prize rankings by retailer buy-in, rather than perceived eminence. A Booker shortlisting, for the purposes of our listing, is worth twice as much as winning the TS Eliot Prize. We covered over 30 UK and Ireland-based prizes awarded in 2024, all of which had to be for specific books, not full-career nods. Hamish Hamilton publisher Simon Prosser, therefore, has not benefited from Han Kang winning this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. When a title has been bought by more than


one editor, the acquirers are both awarded the full whack of points. An example of this is HarperVoyager publisher Natasha Bardon and her HarperCollins colleague, The Borough Press deputy publishing director Ann Bissell. The duo jointly snapped up Rebecca F Kuang’s


21 1


Hannah Westland


Publisher, Editor score


Isabel Wall Viking


literary fiction PRH 24


22 Alex Bowler


Publishing director Jonathan Cape Penguin Random House


14 26 Laura Barber


Associate publishing director


Granta Granta Editor score


12


Publisher Faber Faber


Editor score 13 27 Maria Tunney


Editorial director Walker Walker


Editor score 12 3 T 19 Romilly Morgan


Publisher Brazen


Morgan ( 3) has led her “books with bite” Octopus imprint Brazen since 2021, a list that has been firing on all cylinders of late. Florence Given’s Women Living Deliciously has been a hit and there has been an astute move into fiction, including Mai Mochizuki and translator Jesse Kirkwood’s The Full Moon Coffee Shop. But the star has been comedian Fern Brady’s memoir, Strong Female Character, with over 36,000 copies sold in paperback along with a trio of award wins (Nibbies, Nero and Books Are My Bag).


23


Emma Matthewson


Publishing director Hot Key and Piccadilly Bonnier Books UK


Editor score 13 28 Maxine Hitchcock


Publishing director, fiction


Penguin Michael Joseph Penguin Random House Editor score


11


he assumption when we first started this exercise was that it would comprise veteran editors, divisional heads or even the MDs who are occasionally wheeled out


for dealmaking because the egos of mega-brand authors or celeb memoirists demand the big cheese signs them up. Those folk are present but there are far more relatively early career entries than we originally thought. Even Wall and Widyaratna might fall into this latter category as they are both around a decade into publishing. But there are a number of relative tyros too, and it is no surprise that many of them work in the BookTok end of the market, such as Piatkus editor Rebekah West or Puffin’s editorial director Amina Parchment-Youssef. West first signed Rebecca Yarros to Piatkus


when she was an assistant editor just two years into the industry. Certainly a vote of confidence for a young editor, but it has paid off: the romantasy author’s Fourth Wing is the entire Hachette group’s bestselling title published in 2024 by a massive 150,000 units and Yarros won the Pageturner Award at this year’s Nibbies. And perhaps that is the link across all 30 in this list: not necessarily experience but an unerring eye for talent and what can work in the marketplace.


24 Harriet Bourton


Publishing director Viking Fiction Penguin Random House


Editor score 12 29


Venetia Butterfield


Managing director Cornerstone Penguin Random House


Editor score 11


25


Amina Parchment- Youssef


Editorial director PRH Children’s


Parchment-Youssef ( 4) is not yet a year into her role at PRH after moving over from Simon & Schuster Children’s, so the bulk of her score stems from her previous job. But you can see why the Penguin Random House division poached her: Parchment-Youssef acquired two of the top three bestselling 2024-published titles for S&S kids’ this year, led by Lauren Roberts’ Reckless, bought in concert with her US colleague Nicole Ellul. There have also been hits and prize listings for the likes of Tolá Okogwu and Katie and Kevin Tsang.


4


25


Amina Parchment- Youssef


Editorial director PRH Children’s PRH Editor score


12 30 Lindsey Heaven


Fiction publishing director


Electric Monkey HarperCollins


Editor score 11 41


Features


Editor 30


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