Hodder & Stoughton MD Carolyn Mays steps down

Hachette UK announced that Hodder & Stoughton Managing Director Carolyn Mays will be stepping down after ten years as MD of Hodder and more than three decades with the company. She will be leaving at the end of 2022.

After a first publishing job at Hodder as secretary on the Sceptre list, working for Roland Philipps, Mays worked in New York for Maria B Campbell Associates, returning to the UK in 1992 as a commissioning editor at Hodder. She moved through the company’s editorial ranks, becoming H&S Managing Director in 2013. Over that time she has published an eclectic range of authors, from literary bestsellers such as Charles Frazier, whose debut novel Cold Mountain topped charts around the world on its release in 1997, to crime headliners like Sophie Hannah, Sara Paretsky and Peter Robinson. She has worked with number one bestselling authors John Connolly and Jasper Fforde for many years, and with number one bestseller Jodi Picoult from her first UK publication.

Carolyn Mays said: ‘Being the Managing Director of Hodder & Stoughton has been challenging, exciting, enormous fun and hugely fulfilling. We have a spectacular roster of authors and it’s been a privilege to oversee so many amazing publications – the range of voices we work with has been inspirational. I’ve been tremendously proud to work with those authors, their agents and our brilliant teams to create so many bestsellers together and see our sales and profits rising year by year. My years at Hodder have been very happy – it’s the only publisher I’ve worked for. This feels like the right time for me to explore new opportunities elsewhere in the book world and for Hodder to take a new direction under Katie Espiner’s leadership. I know the incredibly talented publishers, editors, sales, marketing, publicity, production, design and rights people who I’ve had such an amazing time working with will have a stellar next chapter.’

Katie Espiner, CEO of Orion and Hodder & Stoughton said: “Carolyn is a brilliant, instinctive publisher as well as an excellent and intuitive manager of people. She is beloved by everyone at Hodder & Stoughton and I know she will be enormously missed by everyone here and across Hachette, as well as by so many authors, many of whom she has worked with since their very first books. I have loved working with Carolyn over the last year and could not have asked for a more generous and supportive colleague. We all owe her an enormous debt of gratitude for building such a happy, successful team and delivering publishing excellence for our bestselling roster of authors.”

David Shelley, CEO of Hachette UK, said: “Carolyn has been a brilliant MD for Hodder & Stoughton,
overseeing its growth over the last decade into one of Hachette’s largest divisions. She has been a
brilliant editor and publisher for some of our biggest authors including Jodi Picoult, Peter Robinson,
Sophie Hannah and John Connolly, as well overseeing recent agenda-setting bestsellers such as
Vaxxers. We all thank her for her enormous contribution to Hachette and I wish her extremely well with her next adventure.”