Duffield to leave Pan Mac, Bond promoted

Pan Macmillan's creative director Geoff Duffield is leaving the publisher to found an author-brand agency, with Anna Bond taking on a "new and broader" role as sales and brand director.

Duffield will leave the publisher this summer after 16 years at the company, to set up his own independent agency and to give more time to nature conservation and his work with the Essex Wildlife Trust, where he is a trustee, the publisher said.

Bond, currently UK sales director, will take on her new role from April, with senior brand manager Charlotte Williams and brand executive Jade Tolley reporting to her. Art director James Annal will meanwhile report directly to m.d. Anthony Forbes Watson.

Bond will work alongside Duffield until his departure in July.

She told The Bookseller her new role naturally builds on her previous one, with the disciplines of sales, marketing and brand complementing one another. Altogether Bond will work across 20 to 30 author brands, she said. "I don’t think it will be as straight-forward as spending one day on sales and the other on branding. The question is how to do it all.

"We will speak to all the authors and to the sales team. There will be a lot of different growth stages [in terms of planning and prioritising the brands]."

Bond described the new role as "hugely exciting". 

"Brand is such an important part of Pan Mac and what we have really focused on for the last few years, it is something we are really passionate about. I am delighted to be taking on the responsibility for our author brands and to lead our very talented cross-divisional teams who continue to find new ways to connect our brands to wider audiences, and to grow their sales," she said.

Forbes Watson said that “creating and building brands across all market segments” would continue to be a “major factor” in the publisher’s next phase of growth.

“Over the last five years, our capability to work with our authors and customers to build and develop outstanding author brands has been a clear point of difference for the company, and this has been a key driver of our consistently competitive performance," Forbes Watson said. "Our focus on creating and building brands across all market segments will continue to be a major factor in our success through our next growth phase too, and I’m delighted that Anna has agreed to take on this new responsibility as Geoff departs with our thanks and best wishes.”

No further details about Duffield's new venture have been disclosed. He joined the book trade in 1980 as an assistant at The Penguin Bookshop in Covent Garden, and worked in sales, production and bookshop management for seven years with Penguin. He then became London sales representative for Cape and Virago until Barry Cunningham invited him to join HarperCollins as children’s sales manager in 1990. Duffield stayed with HarperCollins for 10 years, as marketing director for their children's division in 1991, then as Thorsons marketing director three years later. In 1996 he became marketing director for the HC Trade Group. He joined Orion as group marketing director four years later, and then moved to Pan Mac in 2002 as sales and marketing director.

Formerly group sales and marketing director, Duffield was given the newly-created role of creative director at Pan Macmillan in 2012 following a company reshuffle to meet the demands of a “rapidly changing market”. The move saw him take on responsibility for author brand development internationally across Pan Mac’s adult and children's publishing in a bid to drive sales in all markets, and he added design to his brief. Forbes Watson said at the time that the “new market is redefining marketing, publicity and so on. A lot of it has to be focused on the author, and a lot of it has to be focused on the reader”.

Since 2012 Pan Mac sales have risen by 38.5% in the TCM value, from £50.1m to £69.4m in 2017, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Bond told The Bookseller that Forbes Watson's focus on brand "was forward-thinking for the time". She said: "I think as an industry we could have been better [at foreseeing the need for brands]. It was ahead of its time… It is something we strive to be the best at." 

Bond worked in marketing for a digital start-up before starting her career in publishing in the sales department at Orion Publishing in 2000.  She then moved to Sydney and worked in marketing for Allen & Unwin before returning to the UK to join Pan Mac as a key account manager in 2003. She was made UK sales director in 2005, aged 27, and is a member of the executive board.

Pan Macmillan was named Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2017 for the second time in three years.