Juliet Mushens on Auctions and Pre-empts in The Bookseller

The Bookseller ran an article on July 14th regarding the recent increase in auctions and pre-empts in the wake of the COVID lockdown. Publishers have turned towards big debuts during the pandemic which has generated many deals for Mushens Entertainment authors.

Juliet Mushens is featured while talking about Saara El-Arifi’s debut, The Final Strife, which was pre-empted in the US for a six-figure deal by Del Rey, and sold at auction for six-figures in the UK to HarperVoyager.

Quoting from the article, Mushens said, “My own belief is that because of Covid-19, the [London] book fair cancellation, and widespread furloughing, we didn’t see the flurry of big book submissions and acquisitions in March and April that we would normally expect to see. I think publishers are being acquisitive right now, but I think that it’s because there were six to eight weeks where no one really submitted anything, meaning there’s now quite a flurry.

“From my own perspective, I’ve had two UK auctions and two UK pre-empts during lockdown. I think that publishers are really looking forward to strengthening their 2022 publishing programme, and looking in a positive way to the future.”

The whole article can be found by clicking here.