Summary of the Editor, Avon job at HarperCollins UK

Key Responsibilities

• Ownership of and main point of contact for own stable of authors as agreed with the Publisher, working across romance, women’s fiction, and some crime titles, seeing them through from acquisition to publication for both physical and digital editions.
• Work on structural and line edits of own authors.
• Desk editing the publisher’s list of titles, and a number of titles for the editorial director.
• Desk editing own books, working closely with the production team and pub ops team to keep them in line with critical path.
• Understanding and wider reading of UK and international commercial romance and women’s fiction markets, ensuring strong market knowledge and market-focused publishing strategies.
• Briefing jackets and liaising with designers, seeing covers through from start to finish.
• Copywriting and checking sales/marketing material, e.g. catalogues, sales presenters etc.
• Build and foster relationships with agents, with a view to bringing in the best new talent and commissioning new titles for the Avon list.
• Creating vision documents for new acquisitions, and presenting these at acquisition meetings.
• To produce timely launch documents in consultation with the Editorial Director, Key Account Manager and Marketing Manager.
• Ownership of metadata/AIs for individual authors, ensuring this fits with emerging trends in the market, and is completed in line with critical path.
• Liaising with in-house digital teams to ensure understanding of digital promotions, and securing selections for books on the list

• Negotiate deals for new acquisitions with agents, with support from the Publisher and Contracts team as necessary.
• Ensure a strong awareness of what physical retailers are looking for.
• Create content for customer presentations and other presentations where necessary.
• Ensure that Sales, International Sales, Audio, Digital Sales and Rights teams have all the advance sales information that they require for own titles.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Experience of working within the publishing industry (at Assistant Editor level or Editor level or equivalent)
• Experience of desk editing processes
• Be able to demonstrate sound market knowledge of and passion for commercial ‘trend-led’ fiction
• Experience of working directly with authors
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Takes initiative
• A problem solver
• Quick-thinking
• Creative
• Extremely organised
• A keen eye for detail
• Interpersonal and diplomacy skills
• Technically competent, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint
• Passionate, energetic and enthusiastic
• Enjoys a challenge

Additional Information