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

We narrowed the parameters down to the 5,000 top-selling titles published in 2024 – in first or subsequent formats – based on TCM data. A 2024 publication window does, admittedly, 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 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 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. 

The point system has two planks. The first is the most straightforward, 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 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 paperbacks released by the PRH division this year, moving 508,000 units.)  

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 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 highest 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 ranking 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 director for crime and thriller Katherine Armstrong.

The 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.