Francesca Pathak’s path at Pan winds towards bestseller lists and breaking talent
Rising Stars 2019 alumna Francesca Pathak talks through her commercial list’s strategy to make established brands bigger, all while breaking new voices of the future.
What Francesca Pathak has really loved in her publishing 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, it is the nature of the game that some stars leave: Pan lost Ken Follett, after a 35-year relationship, to a global Hachette deal, but that has been mollified by Pathak winning a five-publisher bidding war for Stuart MacBride. The Scottish crime writer has got off to a cracking start with Pan: sales for May’s This House of Burning Bones, his first in the new deal and the 13th DI Logan McRae title, were up 25% on his previous outing.
There have been breakouts and new early-career voices, too. Of the latter, social media creator-turned-author Lucy Jane Wood’s cosy fantasy debut Rewitched has been a hit (the follow-up, Uncharmed, is out in September), as was Simone Soltani’s two “spicy” Formula 1-set Lights Out romances. An example of the former is Alice Feeney bagging her first Original Fiction top spot this year with her seventh book, Beautiful Ugly. And then there is Kristin Hannah. The American had been published by Pan for 15 years, edited by publishing director Trisha Jackson (whose authors also include Steel and Confessions of a Forty-Something F##k Up creator Alexandra Potter). Hannah had sold solidly but not spectacularly until 2024’s The Women became a monster hit in the US and later on this side of the pond, too: the mass-market edition was launched in February and has sold just under 145,000 units through the TCM, making it the top-selling adult fiction paperback released in 2025.
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A good editor can spot the books people want to read – and a good manager can spot the people who can spot the books
Pathak feels particularly chuffed by examples like Feeney and Hannah, as it shows Pan is in it for the long haul. She adds: “I love those breaking brands. I love publishing authors that I think, ‘oh I just know you’ve got it’, but we just have to pick the right book to do it on.”
Big-brand commercial publishing in general is not straightforward at the moment, though, with many year-in, year-out authors hit by sales contractions. Partially, Pathak says, that is due to some retail channels cutting back: “Supermarkets are not taking as much as they used to... What they are taking is what they know will sell. So, actually, breaking new ground is the real difficulty. But new [routes to market] are sprouting up. What’s exciting to me is what The Works is doing; we recently did a special edition with them for Autumn Woods’ dark- academia novel Nightshade, bought by Kinza [Azira, commissioning editor and a Class of 2024 Rising Star]. I loved seeing all the TikTok videos around it and a lot of the content was about people discovering The Works for the first time.”
TikTok has been beneficial for many a commercial list. Pathak says: “What’s so fun about TikTok is it reminds us who is in charge. That’s why it is exciting: readers decide [what goes viral], not publishers saying ‘this is our big book’. We have editors who live and breathe TikTok. But they are not [on the platform] in order to find an author, they are just there watching and reading stuff they love – and acquiring as a result of it. The more authentic a ‘TikTok book’ is, the more successful it is. Publishers can’t reverse-engineer it.”
Pathak grew up in Manchester and – in a frequent refrain of Rising Stars past and present, particularly those from outside London – had no idea that the making of books could be a profession. But as a teen she got a part-time role at an indie bookshop, started meeting publishers’ sales reps and thought she had found her calling. After her undergrad at Nottingham, she did a publishing master’s at City St George’s, University of London, snagging her first full-time editorial assistant role at Random House.
She started on the non-fiction list, “which was great as non-fiction teaches you how to go out and find ideas, as opposed to just waiting for them to come in”, before moving over to become Selina Walker’s assistant at Century, just in time for Fifty Shades mania. Pathak says: “I was new and thought: ‘Publishing is great – it’s champagne every week and you’re always selling 700,000 copies.’” The commercial side was always the plan: “When I first started thinking about a career in publishing, my favourite thing was, on a Sunday, to steal the culture magazine from my mum to look at what the bestsellers were. I wanted my books to be in that list; I wanted to be in the part of the company that makes the most money. I’ve always been very respectful of commercial publishing and it infuriates me when others are anything but.”
Reporting to Pan managing director Lucy Hale, Pathak oversees a team of 11, with Sarah Hodgson – who has come over from Corvus in the new role of crime and thriller publishing director – the most recent hire. Upper managerial roles often take editors away from the books but Pathak will be keeping a hand in. She says: “When I joined Pan, I told Lucy that I didn’t want to be a manager, I didn’t want to be a player, I wanted to be a player-manager. I think the best way to show your team how to do something is for you to do it. And I love my authors, though I do have a smaller list now. If you’re a good editor, you can spot the books people want to read – and it’s the good manager who can spot the people who can spot the books.”
