What’s Mushens Entertainment been up to in the past year?
It’s been a big year for Mushens Entertainment! Today, on our second birthday, we decided to look back at some of our biggest moments of the past year.
The team grew…
This year, we’ve welcomed two new members to #TeamMushens! Den joined us last year as office manager, dealing with all things postage and organisational, and Rachel is our newest addition, starting as an Associate Agent in February. Her background in editorial has been a great asset to the team, and she quickly started building a list of her own alongside working on Juliet’s authors. You can read all about what Rachel is looking for in submissions here.
We moved house…
A bigger team means a bigger office! As you may remember from our blog post (or from looking at our Instagram!) we moved into a gorgeous former Print Works in Shoreditch last summer, complete with exposed brick, original floorboards, and steel-framed windows. We’ve definitely put the Mushens Entertainment stamp on the space, filling it with plenty of pink, leopard print, and hundreds of our authors’ books.
It's been so fun to host meetings with publishers, have clients come into the office, and use the (many) gorgeous backdrops to up our Instagram game. Our favourite features are the hand-painted sign on the wall above our desks, and the filing cabinet we get our authors to sign when they visit!
The Osmania intensified…
The record-breaking Richard Osman has continued to go from strength to strength this year, with the hardback publication of The Man Who Died Twice last September catapulting him to the double number 1 spots. He continues to feature on both the hardback and paperback charts (the latter with The Thursday Murder Club), and we were thrilled to finally throw a party to celebrate Richard’s international success. We may have had to rearrange from 2020, but that just meant we could invite even more of his 43 international publishers! Liza has negotiated a staggering 30 foreign contracts for Richard in the last year, and we have been loving the reaction to the announcement of his third book in the series, The Bullet That Missed – featuring our favourite fox illustration yet!
#TeamMushens hit the charts…
Our authors have had an incredibly successful year, with Richard Osman, Abigail Dean, Claire Douglas, Jennifer Saint, Stacey Halls, Laura Purcell, and Susan Stokes-Chapman all hitting the Sunday Times Bestseller list. Abigail Dean and Richard Osman hit the New York Times Bestseller list and Elodie Harper, Robert Gold, Amy McCulloch and Anna Mazzola were all top 20 in the UK!
Juliet made history…
Last October, Juliet became the first agent to represent the three bestselling novelists in the UK when Richard Osman (The Thursday Murder Club), Claire Douglas (The Couple at Number 9), and Abigail Dean (Girl A) occupied the top three places in the paperback charts. Osman’s second novel, The Man Who Died Twice, was also on top of the hardback chart. Juliet’s historic feat was featured in The Times (and we celebrated with cake, of course!)
We could attend events again…
This past year saw lots of events reopen for the first time – we loved seeing so many of our authors at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival last summer, and Juliet kicked off her tenure as British Fantasy Society President by moderating panels, attending conferences, and organising a day of online events for their Golden Jubilee.
Juliet and Liza travelled up to York to run a workshop with Writing Squad, demystifying the author/agent relationship and publishing process for aspiring authors. After two years of virtual book launches, we’re thrilled to have attended some physical events, including for Amy McCulloch’s Breathless, Sophie Haydock’s The Flames, and Mary Chamberlain’s The Forgotten, Sarah Day’s Pride and Prejudice on Social Media, and Laure Van Rensburg’s Nobody But Us. It was also lovely to meet with so many of our international co-agents, scouts, and publishers at the London Book Fair, back in person for the first time since 2019!
We judged prizes…
Silé collaborated with Avon to set up a prize for commercial fiction writers of colour, with the winner, Mimi Deb, being signed by Silé for her debut novel Ben & Gia. Juliet was on the judging panel for the First Novel Prize 2021, and will be helping to decide the winner of this year’s Cheshire Novel Prize.
Thank you to all of our authors, publishers, co-agents, and scouts for such a wonderful second year at Mushens Entertainment – we love working with each and every one of you, and can’t wait to see what our third year brings!
