Hannah Smith – Editor

An Editorial Director at Penguin Michael Joseph, the home of commercial fiction in the UK. We publish authors such as Jojo Moyes, Marian Keyes and Dawn French.

At Michael Joseph I work with authors across commercial fiction with a primary focus on publishing romance, historical women's fiction and general fiction. I also lead our romance publishing programme from a strategic stand point.

Alongside this strategic work, I have my own curated list of authors that I work with editorially from the point of submission to publication. I work closely with my authors through the editorial process, offering editorial letters brainstorming larger ideas alongside my line-edits which looks at the manuscript at a much closer level.

I was a founding member of Embla Books, the commercial fiction, digitally focused list at Bonnier Books. As part of the team at Embla I published global bestsellers - Dandy Smith's ONE SMALL MISTAKE, Becca Day, Lucy Coleman and others. I also advised on publishing strategy across the company ranging from Sunday Times bestsellers to audio number ones.

Editorial Director for Aria and Aries. Specialising across commercial genres fiction I was responsible for the overall publishing of the list as well as the editor and publisher for authors such as Faith Hogan (I published the number one bestseller THE LADIES MIDNIGHT SWIMMING CLUB), Julie Houston (A VILLAGE AFFAIR), Andie Newton, Mandy Baggot and Lucy Coleman. Authors that were USA TODAY bestsellers, Number One Amazon Bestsellers and have sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

With Aries I published across action and adventure as well as historical fiction aimed in the 'swords and sandals' category. Titles I published include THE NIGHT AGENT (now a Netflix TV show), Simon Turney, Tim Hodkinson and Matthew Harffy.

Within my remit I managed the Aria/ Aries team, lead on our publishing strategy - from cover design to pricing and have years of experience seeing a book through from manuscript delivery to becoming a bestseller.

Working primarily on the Mills and Boon and HQ Digital lists, I built a portfolio of successful digital-first authors. These included USA Today bestselling, Terry Lynn Thomas, UK Kindle bestsellers Darren O'Sullivan, Rebecca Raisin, Amanda Brittany and Rachel Burton.