David Shelley

David Shelley is a British publisher who is Chief Executive Officer of Hachette UK, the second-largest trade publisher, with divisions including Hodder & Stoughton, Orion, Headline, John Murray, and Little, Brown. Shelley is also Vice-President of the executive board of the Publishers' Association. He began his publishing career at the age of 23 working as an editorial assistant at the independent company Allison and Busby, founded in 1967 by Clive Allison and Margaret Busby, and after five years running the company he moved on to become editorial director of Little, Brown in 2005, publisher at Sphere in 2007, then in 2009 Deputy Publisher at Little, Brown, and Publisher there in 2011. Shelley oversees Hachette's inclusion initiative, "Changing the Story", which he founded in 2016. Biography Education and career David Shelley grew up living above the second-hand bookshop in Lewes, East Sussex, that his parents ran, and after a state education he became the first in his family to attend university, graduating from Oxford, where he read English (1994–97). In 1997 he began his career in the publishing industry by working at Allison and Busby as an editorial assistant ("cum-dogsbody") to the company's then publisher, Peter Day. Shelley went on to run the company as Publishing Director at the age of 23 when his boss retired in 2000.