About Jonathan Earl

Books have been a lifelong passion for me, as well as the basis of my profession.

Leaving university with a degree in English, I joined Macmillan’s Graduate Recruitment programme in the early 1980s. This took me into three distinct, but all highly rewarding, areas of the business, as Circulation Manager for the science magazine Nature in London, Marketing Manager for Grove’s Dictionaries in New York, and then, back in the UK, Academic Marketing Manager for Macmillan’s scholarly and professional division.

The 1990s were spent with two smaller, independent businesses: Concept Media, established by the Aga Khan to bring together his diverse publishing interests, and the venerable general publishers Duckworth, where I worked as Sales and Marketing Director.

From Duckworth I moved to Oxford University Press, as the Head of Academic Marketing for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and then to Thames & Hudson. My first role there, as Head of Distributed Books, was to manage the company’s relationship with its large and prestigious group of distributed publishers, which included Abrams, Aperture, Flammarion, Laurence King, Skira and Steidl. I was then appointed Head of Sales for Thames & Hudson as a whole.

It has been a varied career, therefore, with a wide range of roles in a number of different publishing fields. But whether organising author tours for emerging British novelists, telemarketing to American libraries, setting up new distribution systems in Japan, researching the European market for online scholarly resources, or promoting the publications of some of the world’s greatest museums and galleries, it has been a working life full of diverse and fulfilling experiences: the fruits of which, in this new phase of my career, I plan to pass on to my clients.