Buoyant Quercus recruits top executive at HarperCollins

Quercus, the independent publisher behind Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, today hired a top executive at Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins as it announced an eight-fold surge in profits to a record £7.5 million.

Susan Watt, the HarperCollins publishing director who commissioned Jeremy Paxman, Boris Johnson and Conn and Hal Iggulden's Dangerous Book For Boys, will launch her own Quercus imprint, Heron Books.

While Watt's position at Quercus is understood to be a full-time role, she will continue to oversee several top HarperCollins authors, including Johnson and novelist Bernard Cornwell, in a part-time capacity.

Quercus chief executive Mark Smith is keen to launch new publishing subsidiaries as he builds on the success of Stieg Larsson's Girl With The Dragon Tattoo books - known as the Millennium Trilogy which have also been made into popular films.

Larsson's books have sold 22 million copies in the English language, with 15 million of those coming last year as the trilogy became a global phenomenon. The UK accounted for about three million and the US most of the rest.

Quercus revenues surged 66% to £31.8 million, helped also by other top-sellers, including The King's Speech, a book inspired by the Oscar-winning film. E-books, which leapt 18-fold, amounted to 3% of turnover. But Quercus expects digital to generate as much as 10% this year.

Booming profits mean that Smith, who co-founded Quercus in 2004, is paying a first-ever dividend of 5p and a further one-off dividend of 7p to recognise the success of Larsson.

Smith and his family own a stake of more than 20% so they should receive payouts worth about £430,000.

Watt's Heron Books, which will publish quality fiction and non-fiction, joins other subsidiaries such as foreign imprint MacLehose Press, run by Christopher MacLehose, who signed Larsson.

Smith said separate divisions, with their own profit-and-loss account, was helping to woo talent: "It's a fantastic way to make our publishers entrepreneurial. They live and die by their own P&Ls."