The Bookseller’s Alison Bone profiles Guy Hallowes, who came out of retirement to pursue one last job. Not so unusual, but that “last job” happens to be spearheading Mills & Boon and its single title and series romance releases. So how did someone who admits he “doesn’t epitomise M&B’s core readership” end up running the whole company? Well, start with his native Australia, where Hallowes got a phone call from a headhunter saying, as Hallowes put it, “‘I’ve got this Mills & Boon thing in a mess in Australia’. I said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it’.” But eventually he took on the managing directorship of Mills & Boon Australia, sorted out the mess–and didn’t leave. Mills & Boon, he says, runs on a “fast-moving consumer goods [FMCG] basis, it’s a brand. Many people in the business now even come from FMCG rather than publishing.”
Then retirement, and then another well-placed phone call for a different situation, and Hallowes was back in London. “It was interesting to be asked to come back, but in a personal sense London is a home from home. My wife was happy to come, we’ve got two kids in London [he has four altogether] and it’s a nice challenge.” And it’s a challenge Hallowes likes, thanks in part to his liking the romance genre. “If I couldn’t understand what we are selling I’d be no good. I read them regularly and have done forever. It’s not a penance–I quite like them…They’re not intellectually challenging but they are good simple stories, to some extent predictable but that’s no different to Agatha Christie, Ian Rankin or John Grisham. You know what’s going to happen before you start.”
He might be an unlikely romance publisher, but it seems to suit him just fine…