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HQ celebrated 24 of its crime authors with a Crime Fiction Showcase, coinciding with the second anniversary of the imprint.
The event took place on Monday evening (12th November) at the News UK building with views of London from the 17th floor, accompanied by champagne and canapes, as bloggers, writers and journalists mingled with publishers to celebrate HQ’s two-year anniversary and growing crime list.
Some of the 24 authors included American-born Canadian author Linwood Barclay, author of Elevator Pitch, who was fresh from a transatlantic flight, along with writers such as Khurrum Rahman, whose recently published novel East of Hounslow was recently shortlisted for the Staunch Prize.
Also in attendance were Melanie Golding, author of post-natal thriller Little Darlings, which has been snapped up for TV and author and HarperCollins staffer Phoebe Morgan, whose HQ titles include The Doll House and The Girl Next Door.
Other HarperCollins staffers at the event included publishing director Kate Mills, marketing director Jo Rose, and editorial director for fiction at HQ Manpreet Grewal, who recently made a six-figure pre-empt for two books from writing duo Simon & Schuster US senior editor Christine Pride and writer Jo Piazza during the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Executive publisher Lisa Milton paid tribute to the HarperCollins imprint. “I can’t believe in the two years that we’ve achieved so much,” she said. “We have had so many phenomenal successes and I just wanted to take this moment to say thank you to HarperCollins for giving us this opportunity because setting up a new imprint, as everyone knows, isn’t easy and what you do need is somebody who is prepared to help you do that… I am incredibly, incredibly proud.
“We are definitely outperforming my expectations and yet, my expectations are greater than I can put voice to. We have had amazing successes, we’ve been shortlisted for awards and had bestsellers and I really want to be standing here next year saying we’ve won awards… and I really, really hope to see more of our awards on the shortlists on the years to come.”
The addition of the HQ imprint was first announced in 2016 carrying the tagline “One Place. Many Stories”, and covering a range of genres including book club and YA as well as crime. Recent successes include Adele Parks thriller I Invited Her In, which has sold 53,876 copies so far, and Sarah Morgan’s The Christmas Sisters, which is on 5,797 copies one week after publication (all figures according to Nielsen BookScan).