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2nd December 2008

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Elton heads new paperback list

05.08.08 Benedicte Page

Random House’s CHA company will launch a new literary paperback list next February under Arrow publishing director Kate Elton.

Windmill Books is to be a “prestigious” B-format paperback list for fiction and non-fiction, sitting alongside Arrow, and fed by titles from Hutchinson and William Heinemann.

There will be around 20 Windmill titles next year, with the launch books set to include Nick Harkaway’s The Gone Away World, Patricia Wood’s Orange Prize-shortlisted Lottery, Andrea Wulf’s The Brother Gardeners and Andrea Barrett’s The Air We Breathe.

Barry Unsworth, recently acquired for Hutchinson, will also be a Windmill author in paperback. However CHA literary authors who are currently paperbacked by Arrow or Vintage, such as Sebastian Faulks, are to continue with those imprints so as not to disrupt existing relationships.

CHA m.d. Susan Sandon described Windmill as “a key plank in CHA’s growth strategy”, following an expansion of the company’s literary publishing as Hutchinson and Heinemann refocus under Caroline Gascoigne and Jason Arthur.

Elton said: “It’s a project we all feel passionately about, and we have an incredibly strong launch list - in both fiction and non-fiction - lined up for next year.” She expected launch title, The Gone Away World, to be “huge”, she added.

The Windmill name has links to the Heinemann windmill colophon and is “timeless”, Elton said, while an added design feature of Windmill titles is that they will carry the author’s signature on the title page. Jackets will have inside printing.

Looking forward, Windmill is also intended to publish paperback originals from 2010, and to build backlist through repackages such as Arrow’s recent treatments for P G Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy.

Early copies of Windmill’s first titles will go out to the trade and reviewers from the end of this month.

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