Francesca Main on the rise of the Phoenix imprint

Francesca Main is known for having one of the best noses for bestsellers in the business. The past year has been a particularly stellar one for the publisher of Phoenix. The Orion imprint, which celebrates its fifth anniversary this summer, was already riding high when The Wedding People by Alison Espach grew by stealth into a paperback phenomenon and Florence Knapp’s The Names became the bestselling hit debut of 2025. The two books were the fourth and sixth bestsellers of the entire Orion group since Main joined.

As the sole commissioner on the imprint, Main’s taste carries weight and she rails against the ‘Sheinification’ of the industry, when we meet at The Barrow pub in Bank. “There are lots of challenges in the market, but some of those challenges come from oversaturation, don’t they? When you walk into a bookshop and it’s completely overwhelming and that bookshop is not even stocking every single title that was released this week or this month. So I feel like there is a place for curation more than ever.

“What I hope Phoenix can offer is a really well-curated selection that is varied enough that it’s not just the same kind of book over and over again, but hangs together well enough that if you like one or two of our books you might well like most if not all of the others.”

Main needs to be more discerning than ever with manuscripts. She receives around 350 submissions a year, for around 10 frontlist titles. And then there’s the perennial problem of squeezing all the reading in. “It is difficult when you’re juggling a busy job and wanting to be present as a parent and do a lot of hands-on editorial work – which is something that’s really important to me – and do the reading as well. So sometimes a lot of the reading is done on tube journeys, first thing in the morning, last thing at night, when I get some time to myself on weekends... You know, during the kids’ half -hour swimming lesson. You just 
sort of fit it in where you can manage. But it’s tricky until it’s not. What I am looking for, on submission, above all else, is the book that doesn’t make it feel like work.”

Main’s meticulous eye and strategic long-view make a valuable combination. “Sometimes we make a case for acquiring rights because a manuscript needs a lot of editorial work and so [we talk about how we] might be able to add value to the book by doing that level of editorial work… Sometimes that really pays off. There are manuscripts that we’ve taken on for a low advance and then put in the dedicated time with the author and then sold in the US and translation for much more as a direct result.

“Tom Newlands [of debut Only Here, Only Now] is an example of an author who we put in a huge amount of editorial time and care and that is all to his credit… It felt like a really brilliant old-fashioned editorial process of meeting up and spending two or three hours on the manuscript, and the notes were all handwritten on the manuscript, and we went back and forth and we talked about the big picture thing and the tiny things and so much of that was about his creativity and brilliance. But that editorial process really paid off and then his book was Waterstones’ Scottish Book of the Year.”

What I am looking for on submission is  the book that doesn’t make it feel like work 

And then there was Knapp’s Sliding Doors-style debut, The Names, which dropped into her inbox in September 2023 amid “a buzz from scouts”, becoming one of the year’s most-talked about deal. Main was “so mesmerised and so moved” from her first look at the manuscript in the evening, but the next morning she was dismayed to hear that a major pre-empt had already come through. “I hadn’t finished it at the time, and I said [to Knapp’s agent Karolina Sutton at CAA], that’s a big amount of money to turn down… I really hope you don’t take it because I love this book so much, but I want to take the time to get everybody else on board."

For Main is “very rarely a pre-empt person…  for a start, I don’t read fast enough”. She says of the value of building up support in-house: “Whether it’s an auction or just the acquisitions process, I find that process invaluable in terms of setting up a book for the long-term because you get everybody’s investment right at the start. If you pre-empt something so fast, often either no one in the company has read it or they’ve all read a chunk of it and you kind of miss that moment to get people to engage deeply.” Eventually it became “one of the most nail-biting auctions I’ve been involved in because there were 13 bidders and it was huge”.

Continues…