Dominic Wakeford – Editor

As Senior Commissioning Editor for the HQ imprint, my brief was to acquire and publish upmarket commercial fiction. My acquisitions included Cold Storage, a thriller published simultaneously with Harper’s global offices in September 2019, the New York Times bestseller A Woman is No Man and Pizza Girl, a literary debut which Doubleday are also publishing in summer 2020. I also acquired the major non-fiction anthology The Queer Bible for publication in 2021.

Working closely with HarperCollins’ 360 and Global Publishing Programmes from the outset gave me an invaluable insight into joined-up international publications, building on my existing experience in this area from Hachette.

Given my personal interest in this area, I was also tasked with monitoring potential film/TV-related opportunities for our team, as well as actively looking for projects that could have life in another medium.

As Commissioning Editor for the Piatkus Fiction imprint, I acquired and edited a wide range of commercial fiction titles, project-managing books from acquisition through to final publication, as well as assisting on structural edits for the ‘superlead’ titles. I also acquired fiction and non-fiction for the Dialogue, Corsair and Constable imprints.

Copywriting formed a substantial part of my role – this included writing cover copy, sales and marketing material, as well as preparing social media posts.

I was also tasked with preparing contract, design, marketing and sales briefs for my books, and liaising across in-house departments, all the while communicating with authors and agents, in order to collaboratively produce the best possible product.

I managed submissions to the imprint, reading and reporting on them, as well as logging any communication from agents.

Working to tight and often simultaneous deadlines on a wide range of projects, this role required diligent organisational skills and superior time and people management, as well as foresight and market awareness.