Tell us a bit about your current job. 

I’m the co-founder and director of Caskie Mushens Literary Agency, a boutique literary agency based in Soho. I founded the agency in January 2017 but I’ve worked as a literary agent for over eight years now. My job – in simple terms – is finding authors, working with them on their manuscripts, and then selling the rights to those manuscripts to publishers all over the world. Our business is commission-based – we take 15% in the home market from the advance and royalties, and 20% internationally and in film/TV. The relationship with an author is part creative, part strategic, part emotional support. You work as a liaison between them and their publishers, interrogating every part of the process from publishing plans to events and marketing. My clients include writers like no. 1 bestselling author Jessie Burton, Sunday Times bestseller Stacey Halls, and Pointless presenter Richard Osman.

What and where did you study after school?

I took a gap year first and worked in a financial call-centre, and one day a week volunteering in a museum. I then went to Cambridge and did a degree in history.

How did you get from answer 2 to answer 1? 

I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do when I graduated. Originally I wanted to work in heritage (having done work experience in a museum, and various other museum internships) but over time realised that it wasn’t best suited to my skills and interests. I then considered doing a law conversion, or even something like accountancy. I felt that at Cambridge the careers advice was heavily weighted to industries like banking, accountancy and law, with lots of firms recruiting at graduate fairs. There was a limited amount of information available about the arts, which I didn’t find hugely helpful. I was signed up for all of the arts work experience mailing lists and saw that HarperCollins were running a paid month-long internship. I ended up working for their fiction marketing team and at the end of my internship they offered me a fulltime role as their assistant. I worked there for two years and was promoted to Marketing Executive but realised that actually, I wanted to be an agent – I wanted the freedom to develop a broad list of clients across the genres, and to have more independence, rather than working within a big publishing house. I started applying for jobs and was hired by a literary agency as an assistant to two agents and worked my way up from there to agent: starting out making coffee and reading submissions before moving on to contract processing, editorial notes, and relationship building across the industry. I was headhunted by a music agency and moved to The Agency Group as head of the literary division, and stayed there for four years, before setting up Caskie Mushens with another agent, Robert Caskie.

How does your formal education feed into your present career (if at all)? 

My history degree meant that I had to learn to read quickly, and synthesise complex arguments and ideas into simpler versions to use in essays. This was of huge help to my job! I read a lot of manuscripts (I receive between 4,000 and 5,000 submissions a year) and being able to read them fast and tell you what I think about them, and why, is hugely beneficial.

What things have you learnt outside of formal education that have been helpful to your career? 

My job working in a call-centre taught me to have an excellent phone manner which is key to my job: so many tricky conversations or thorny issues can be solved by picking up the phone. I also volunteered in a charity shop, and a museum, for years, which helped me develop good interpersonal skills and a cool head when dealing with some difficult people. My job is about smoothing out relationships and breaking bad news, as well as good news, and being able to find common ground with people, and just being able to make them laugh, has stood me in really good stead.

What are the really useful skills for someone in your job to possess? 

Being able to read critically is key – knowing why you like a manuscript, as well as why you don’t like one. Knowing the points where the pacing lags, or where the characterisation doesn’t make sense… these are crucial skills to have when editing. You have to be very good at multitasking because the job requires dealing with multiple clients at once. In any one year I can receive 4,000 submissions, submit 15 books to publishers, negotiate 50 contracts, have 30 books published, do editorial notes on 10 books, and answer hundreds of emails a day. You have to know how to prioritise, and use your time in a disciplined and productive way. I think it’s really helpful to be good with people as I talk to clients and editors all the time, and you build up close relationships with them. There’s also a lot of maths! We’re very close to the business end of publishing as we don’t make money unless our clients make money. So you have to like numbers but also thrive on the pressure of knowing that it’s tax year end and you’re £15,000 short on your commission target… 

What does an average day at work look like for you? 

No two days are the same, which I love. But usually it goes something like this: wake up and check my emails. Overnight I might have had emails from people working in different time-zones. Perhaps an LA producer has made an offer to option one of my books, which requires a response, or a Chinese publisher needs the final edited manuscript of a client novel, or a US film-agent wants a list of reviews for a release they’re submitting to producers. I read on my kindle on my way into work - normally client manuscripts. These might be a manuscript that is out of contract that I will be submitting to publishers, or edits on a manuscript I have signed from someone new. Sometimes I read full manuscripts that I’ve called in from my slushpile as well. I make notes on my phone which get turned into editorial notes at my desk. These can be simple things like ‘the pace lags pp51-62, think about cutting’ or ‘the murderer’s identity comes from nowhere and feels unsatisfying, how do we weave breadcrumbs earlier through the text?’

At my desk I respond to more emails: commenting on book jackets, editorial notes, marketing campaigns, author book ideas, sales figures… I might also send a manuscript out on submission, which means calling 15 editors to pitch a book to them and sending out the manuscript in the UK, US and internationally. I’ll also normally be in the midst of a contract negotiation, or chasing money, or tax forms. We travel quite a lot, to international book fairs or to conferences, so I might be booking flights or hotels too. 

Then there’s all the ‘business’ side of the job: paying our VAT, approving payslips, meetings with our accountant, uploading invoices to our accounting software (god bless Xero), tracking the income which has come in each month and projecting what will come in next month. I might have a call with a client to talk about their manuscript or discuss their editorial notes, or go into a publisher for a presentation about their publication strategy for an author’s new book, or accept an offer in a foreign territory for rights to publish a manuscript there. Then in the evenings there are often book launches or events, and I quite often speak at publishing events on how to get published.

What’s the best thing about your job?

I absolutely love getting to call a debut author and tell them their novel is going to be published! Hitting the New York Times or Sunday Times bestseller list is amazing as well.

What’s your least favourite aspect of your job?

Alongside breaking good news to authors, I also have to deal with a lot of breaking of bad news, for example telling them if a book isn’t performing well, or a publisher has rejected it. Luckily, I’m naturally extremely pessimistic so I always have considered the worst case scenario and have a plan to move beyond it!

What advice would you give to someone seeking a job like yours? 

Read, read, and read some more – and don’t be snobby about what you read, try different genres, bestsellers, prize-winners, and figure out what appeals to you in a book and what makes you want to put it down. When applying for jobs, make sure that you specifically reference some of the books represented by their agent, or published by that publishing house, rather than just a generic letter. Treat internships like a job interview: if you work hard and impress them, they might turn into a job or they will recommend you to other people in the industry looking for an assistant.

Since publishing this profile, Juliet has left Caskie-Mushens to found her own agency, Mushens Entertainment! Check out Juliet’s agency here.