Notes on an internship…

Hi everyone! My name is Kiya and I have been interning with Juliet and Liza over the past two weeks. 

I graduated last year with a degree in History and English, but had absolutely no publishing experience prior to this internship. Despite attending every online seminar and reading every blog post I could find, I couldn’t seem to get my foot in the door, and the publishing industry was a huge mystery to me. So, I took a chance and reached out to Mushens Entertainment to see if there were any positions open. Luckily for me, it turned out they’d been planning to run a placement for a while and my email happened to come at the perfect time! Even better is that it's a remote internship that pays London living wage, so I can access it from where I live in the Midlands.

My path into the experience was pretty unusual. However, I would definitely say that people are very willing to help you out if you ask. You are always your best advocate, and it’s important to showcase your personality and make it clear what you’re asking for. And who knows what kind of a response you might get? (**Liza has asked me to note that she will post any open positions on the About Us page, so please don’t send speculative emails!**)

Every day at this internship is different, but it always starts with a Zoom call with Liza, or a seminar run by Juliet. I especially enjoy the seminars because they shed light on different parts of the industry - although most of my morning calls with Liza also turn into seminars because I keep asking questions! It’s such an invaluable resource to have access to such a wealth of expertise and experience, and I really admire how hard they both work to represent a diverse range of authors and help make publishing more accessible and transparent through the ME blog. It’s been such an honour to work with them both, and it gives me a lot of hope for my future and the book industry as a whole.

Once our Zooms are done, I get started on my daily tasks. This generally involves reading as many manuscripts as possible, giving my opinions on their strengths and weaknesses, and also helping to keep the website up to date. I’ve learned to trust my taste and instincts more, be forthcoming with ideas and opinions, and always have questions. I am also helping to assemble the Frankfurt Book Fair Rights Guide by double checking rights, publication dates, author information and blurbs so that everything presented to foreign publishers is up to date. Apart from these practical tasks, I’ve also learned about how co-agenting works, what scouts do, how agents prepare for the book fairs, what happens once an author gets signed for representation and much more. Overall, and I’ve gained a greater understanding of agenting and the publishing world in general. 

I have also found that I love different aspects of agenting. For example, I enjoy how agents build relationships with authors, and help guide their vision from start to finish. I also like that you can choose to do a little bit of everything if you want to - editorial, marketing, rights, finances - and that it’s inherently quite a social job. In a small company like Mushens Entertainment, it requires you to adopt a lot of different roles and really get stuck in with everything.

This has been a unique experience for many reasons, but particularly because Juliet and Liza were really looking for people hoping to get their foot in the door and learn more about the industry. Looking back, I really knew very little about how the industry worked, and even less about agenting. However, Liza and Juliet have answered all of my questions and lifted the veil on the industry which has brought a lot of surprises. For example, I never knew how intricate of a process it is to get a book published! I was stunned by the number of steps a manuscript goes through from submission to publication. I used to joke that books were so expensive, but now that I know how much manpower goes into them I feel like I’m stealing! The amount of work going on behind the scenes is incredible, and I definitely have a newfound appreciation of book publishing because of it!

At the end of this experience, I’m mainly taking away the best advice I received from Juliet and Liza. Juliet said to always trust in your abilities and the work that you’re doing, and that it’s important to absolutely love and believe in your authors and their books. Liza has encouraged me to not give up on applying for things, and to view each rejection as a learning experience. Take every failure or negative and spin it into a positive. Learn and never stop growing. There are a lot of different jobs you can do working with books, so you should follow what you genuinely enjoy and not be afraid to go down a path you didn’t expect to.

I will take all of this learning forward - and also the knowledge that there are some really cute pictures of authors’ pets on the Mushens Entertainment website!