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2nd December 2008

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Picador a priority for Forbes-Watson

21.05.08 Benedicte Page

Pan Macmillan's acting managing director Anthony Forbes-Watson has said that planning Picador's future direction would be one of his key priorities, and ruled out selling or closing down the imprint.

He was speaking after it was announced that the literary imprint's deputy publisher Ursula Doyle would leave the company on Friday (23rd May) after 12 years. With former Picador publisher Andrew Kidd yet to be replaced, there is now a gap within the imprint's senior management, although Forbes-Watson insisted that it was "not the Marie Celeste", with editors Steph Sweeney, Charlie Greig, Sam Humphreys and Kate Harvey still at Picador. "There are acquiring editors still in place, they just need some direction and extra experience," he said.

Forbes-Watson said that Doyle was leaving because she "felt it was time for a change", and denied that the move came because she had been refused the publisher role. "I tried to persuade her not to go, but she had made up her mind, I suspect, before I arrived," he added. He said he would now be working closely with the Picador editorial team until the empty posts had been filled."I'm very mindful that the publisher job has been open for a while," he said.

"It's very unsettling for everyone. I'm only in my third week, but my task is firstly to look at Picador and decide where that wonderful imprint should be going, and then decide how to fill the post. Macmillan will not want to delay that process." However Forbes-Watson said that while he could come up with a longlist of candidates, the final decision would have to be made by the future permanent m.d. of Pan Macmillan.

Forbes-Watson described himself as "very optimistic" about the future of Pan Macmillan as a whole, saying that it was a company full of opportunities: "It's very voguish to talk of how publishers have to be the size of a ten-tonne truck to be interesting, huge and ugly, or else pretty little ones. A mid-size company is not so big that it's impersonal and not so small that it's irrelevant."

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