Francesca Pathak’s path at Pan winds towards bestseller lists and breaking talent
As part of The Bookseller’s 2025 Rising Stars issue, 2019 alumna Francesca Pathak talks Tom Tivnan through her commercial list’s strategy to make established brands bigger, all while breaking new voices of the future.
‘What’s so fun about TikTok is it reminds us who is in charge. That’s why it is exciting: readers decide [what goes viral], not publishers saying ‘this is our big book’... The more authentic a ‘TikTok book’ is, the more successful it is. Publishers can’t reverse-engineer it.’
Francesca Pathak
What Francesca Pathak has really loved in her publishing career “is getting in, rolling my sleeves up and building something”.
That was certainly the case in her near-six-year stint at Orion, where she revitalised the Hachette division’s crime portfolio. Amid that run, Pathak was named a Rising Star in 2019, primarily for what her then-colleague, Emad Akhtar, said in a nominating submission was her “entrepreneurial approach to acquisitions, creative vision for launching debuts and relaunching authors mid-series, as well as working with major brands”.
Read the full interview in The Bookseller here.
