18th July 2025 Rising Stars Feature


Pathak’s path at Pan winds towards bestseller lists and breaking talent


Rising Stars 2019 alumna Francesca Pathak talks Tom Tivnan through her commercial list’s strategy to make established brands bigger, all while breaking new voices of the future


W


hat Francesca Pathak has really loved in her publish- ing career “is getting in, rolling my sleeves up and building something”.


That was certainly the case in her near-six-year stint at Orion, where she revitalised the Hachette division’s crime portfolio. Amid that run, Pathak was named a Rising Star in 2019, primarily for what her then-colleague, Emad Akhtar, said in a nominating submission was her “entrepreneurial approach to acquisitions, creative vision for launching debuts and relaunching authors mid-series, as well as working with major brands”. That skill set is why Pathak was poached by


Pan Macmillan in 2022, initially as publishing director for the Pan Fiction imprint before becoming publisher in January 2024. Pathak says the Pan role first appealed as it was much like her remit at Orion, “but on a much bigger scale. That was really exciting: the idea of coming in and working with authors that I’ve read for years and years and years. But a big part of any commercial fiction publisher is to sell as many books to as many readers as possible. We can do that in two ways: one is to look at the authors we have and how to reach new readers with those writers; the other is to bring new authors and audiences in”. Pan certainly has monster brands: Danielle


Steel, Ann Cleeves, Peter James and David Baldacci collectively shifted £9.1m through NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM) in 2024 – a quarter of Pan Mac’s entire TCM Fiction sales. Though, like Trent Alexander- Arnold departing Anfield for the Bernabeu,


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Lucy Jane Wood has been a breakout star for Francesca Pathak’s Pan list


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