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Women dominate first Rising Stars list

20.06.11 | Bookseller Staff

Women dominate the first-ever The Bookseller Rising Stars, an annual listing which highlights the people who will shape the British book trade. Two-thirds—26 of 39 entries—of Rising Stars 2011 are women.   

The list is divided into six categories: publicity, sales and marketing; design, production and supply chain; digital; bookseller; editorial; and agents and rights. Digital was the only category which had a majority of men, with five out of seven entries. All six agents and rights professionals on the list are women, as are six of eight booksellers.

Tom Tivnan, The Bookseller's features editor, who led the selection committee, said: "It's an interesting result, particularly when you compare it to The Bookseller 100. As we did with the 100, we were simply judging on merit, but the outcome probably does reflect the gender make-up of people in publishing and bookselling at the level we were looking at."

The 2010 Bookseller 100, which was released in November and lists the most influential people in the trade, had 29 women out of 100 entries.   

For the larger publishers, Random House leads the way with five entries—four from the RH group and one from Transworld—while Hachette has four. HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Bloomsbury, Faber and Canongate all have two Rising Stars.

There are five indie booksellers—Foyles' Rebecca Hart and double entries for Storytellers, Inc (Carolyn and Katie Clapham) and the Gutter Bookshop (Bob Johnston and Ann Geraghty).

Waterstone's has two entries: range manager Sarah Clarke, and Manchester and East Midlands acting regional manager Luke Taylor.

For the full list: The Next Generation.

Blog: Is the future female?

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By Joe Pickering

Huge congrats to all on this list: some names I know well and deserve recognition. Particularly pleased, as a Penguin person, to see superstar designer Coralie Bickford-Smith on there.

But where are the publicists? There's a category called 'sales, marketing & publicity' and there's not a single PR person mentioned. In cases where there isn’t a marketing budget publicists are the front line in trying to get word out there, through new and traditional media, to get people to read the books. Isn't that what it's all about? I strongly believe that, in some cases, the general public simply wouldn’t hear about our books if publicists weren’t doing their jobs.

It feels like the message to PR folk is 'give up - you're not relevant to the future of your industry'.

Fri, 17/06/2011 - 15:18
By Louise Allen-Jones

As an ex-publicist, I absolutely agree with Joe Pickering's comments - what a shame there aren't more PRs on the list. But whilst we should of course celebrate and congratulate those named - all the people I know on the list are all excellent at what they do - publishing such a list is a highly controversial, dare I say, undermining thing to do in this uncertain climate. Most people in the industry are pretty stellar to have made it here in the first place, and could all be described as either rising or risen, so singling out a few is potentially inflammatory. We all know what they say about comparisons, well a list of rising stars is, by default, the same thing, and may well leave those who didn't make it to contemplate their unstarry futures.

Fri, 17/06/2011 - 16:40

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