Madeleine Milburn

Since founding Madeleine Milburn Agency (MMA) in 2012, Madeleine Milburn was awarded Literary Agent of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2018 and was shortlisted again in 2020. She has been responsible for discovering some of the highest-selling and award-winning contemporary authors who consistently hit the bestseller lists in the New York Times, The Sunday Times and The Globe and Mail.

Madeleine is currently reading Ann Napolitano's Hello Beautiful for a second time, enjoying how the family story’s escapism takes her away from today’s harsh reality of politics and social unrest.

"Ultimately I want my agents to take on books that they feel passionate about because they will be the best agent for that work."

You set up MMA in 2012, and it has continued to grow both its list and its team exponentially. Did you find that building your own agency was different to agenting? How did you navigate the move to being your own brand ambassador?

Although I had some experience of setting up a business, it was basically just me for the first few years because I didn't have the funds to employ anyone at that stage. I wanted to steer my own ship and be in charge of my own time. I respect people who start their own business – it’s a tough thing to do because it’s a huge responsibility. If your business is successful, you tend to have to grow it, which is a whole different experience, and you’ve got to be interested in supporting other people rather than just doing it because you want to be an independent agent. To grow your authors into brands, you need to to invest in departments that benefit them, for instance international rights, film & TV, contracts support, legal and finance, and then to fund that support you need more agents, and then you need assistants to support your agents, and so it goes on! It's challenging but hugely rewarding, especially when my husband joined after the birth of our daughter to help us grow, and it became a family business.

From the start, growing the brand was about being very accessible to new writers and showing them how things are done. I remember seeing an article that listed the most transparent agencies and MMA was #1. I wanted to agent differently to ‘old-school’ agents where a deal was done, the publisher took over, and then you’d see the author again in two years to negotiate a new contract. I wanted to be far more collaborative, which was essential with the rise of social media and online publicity. Back when I started it was a very mysterious industry: lots of agents found their talent through friends of friends or recommendations from their authors. Agents weren’t reading the submission pile and finding talent there, yet that is where I found my authors. I was very commercially minded. What's going to work? What do publishers want? How can I make a bestseller? I’ve handled a lot of commercial brands of different genres but my taste is very voice-driven: a really strong protagonist always draws me in. You always remember the protagonist but you might not remember the plot! Think Harry Potter, Romeo & Juliet, Jack Reacher! I made it known whatI was looking for and I encouraged unsolicited submissions and offered feedback to debut writers. I even started one of the first agency competitions to encourage writers to submit their work to me. Then I went and auctioned their manuscripts around the world and I started to get a reputation for launching new talent in the US and on the global stage. I remember selling Fiona Barton’s The Widow directly to a US publisher at auction, and it became an instant New York Times bestseller and, from that point, American publishers were asking what I had next.

It was a real learning curve when I started to do big deals and become successful; people always wanted a reason. ‘How could you be doing another big deal?’ ‘You didn’t discover that book.’ It hurts when you hear stuff like that. The rumours got even worse over the years; they were very much about not being the person to find a particular author but then they became more personal. It became about the agency or about my marriage… There were crazy rumours that my husband and I were selling the agency and dividing it down the middle! Then I heard that other agencies were using this as an excuse to get in touch with my authors to try and poach them. It was at this point that I’d had enough and and started to speak out: I sent an email to all the literary scouts and editors, I spoke to the The Association of Authors’ Agents where I was on the committee and I did have to tell some authors as well. I had support because I was able to tell people very quickly that these rumours were complete lies. Before then, when there was a rumour, I would ignore it, feel really low for a day and then believe that the only way I can stop these rumours is to keep going and keep selling, but this time I had a voice. The reason I left to set up my own agency at the very beginning is because I couldn’t stand office politics and gossip. Now that I have a bigger agency, having 24 members of staff and a lot of strong women, it has been brilliant supporting them and mentoring them to grow into brilliantly successful agents. We can stick together and they can squash rumours as well. The beauty of having our own agency is that Giles and I can choose the right people and right team. We admire different types of voices and so there is this wonderful energy and community with real support for each person's success. We've got great people and I value them all enormously so it works really well.

How have you evolved as an agent since you started?

I've become far more selective over the years. I started as an agent who was given a certain category. I was told, ‘You can do chicklit and commercial women's fiction because that's the gap for you here’. I hadn't read much commercial women's fiction; I was into classics and literary fiction! So I read masses of it because this was my opportunity. I became so knowledgeable in the area that I was able to learn exactly what worked and publishers started to trust my taste. Though my authors may have started out in that area, I was able to move them into other genres as the market trends evolved.

Agenting feels quite niche and talent-spotting is a crucial part of the role, but it’s so much more than that. It's about looking after your authors, trying to get them as many rights deals as possible all over the world, ensuring they have the best opportunities with their publishers and that their voices are heard when it comes to their books covers and editorial vision, and championing them day-to-day. With the shift of social media and publicity, the job of an agent has changed completely because we have to support our authors online and that takes time and investment, too. It’s much more about working with the author to create a profile and working as a team with the publisher. Readers want to engage with authors and they want to have access, so social media is a powerful tool for word-of-mouth publicity. There’s an expectation for a debut author to build mailing lists and newsletters because that will encourage more people to pre-order the next book and help with their brand building. Publishers offer a lot of support but it’s still down to the agent to manage it all. An author's career has become all-consuming because of the publicity they have to do on top of writing.

"Before then, when there was a rumour, I would ignore it, feel really low for a day and then believe that the only way I can stop these rumours is to keep going and keep selling, but this time I had a voice."

Our recent workforce survey showed that author-facing roles such as agenting and publicity were more likely to feel their workloads weren’t sustainable and to suffer from burnout. Can you speak to this in your experience either personally or in leading a team?

There’s a lot of pressure being an agent because there’s just so much reading that you can’t do at work. When you’ve got five deliveries in a week from your current clients and you’ve called in a couple of manuscripts that you’re keen on representing, you’ve got to read them in your own time. You really have to love the job because it’s a lifestyle decision. I have addressed it at the agency because I think that level of reading can feel overwhelming at times. And all the emails! Agenting has become such email heavy work, and email has now become like WhatsApp with constant back-and-forth all the time. We have an in-house editor and a lot of assistants who really do support our agents, which helps when there are a lot of deliveries, and we’re constantly looking at ways to help and celebrate more when we do have successes. Burnout happens because there isn’t enough support. When an agent is new and starting to grow their list, I can sense when they reach the point where they really need more support – they need an assistant. I’ve got to make sure they’ve got one before they get to that point. And then we’re giving someone an opportunity to learn from an established agent – part of the reason I encouraged my team back to the office post-Covid. It’s something that I’ve noticed since lockdown, which is that we need to have time together, especially to support one another. A lot of publishers are bringing people back 3 to 4 days a week now because they’re noticing that newer employees are not learning as much by osmosis. I think burnout can also happen if you are working from home too much. I remember during lockdown not being able to celebrate anything that happened that year. When you are stressed and you’ve got your colleagues around you, you can talk through things with them, you can get their ideas, you can brainstorm, you have that support that comes naturally from being in the same space together.

It’s very emotional being an agent. You know your authors inside out; you know their struggles so you’re invested, and that can take its toll if you are hit with disappointments on the publishing side or it takes longer to sell a debut than you anticipated. It’s important to structure your time effectively and set boundaries. We’ve got a very successful agent at our agency who gave a talk on how to manage time efficiently, and to categorise and structure your day in a certain way to not spend your whole day in front of a screen. The more you email, the more you receive, so one of the best and simplest pieces of advice is to break it down by having a point in the morning and a point in the afternoon, and dividing up the editing, admin and reading time.

What’s something that has helped you battle stress, and what did you learn from it?

I’ve been extremely stressed at points, especially with growing a business. Plus, I’m a perfectionist so I have high standards. I’ve battled with that over the years. Pressures in your personal life can add up and affect your working life, too, like motherhood. When I got to that level of stress, I decided not to sign any new authors so I could focus on growing the agency and my family. I spent six months not signing anything and I supported other agents in signing clients, which I enjoyed but felt like I wasn’t doing what I needed to do and what I loved. I had some sessions with a business coach, who said to me, ‘What are you doing? What do you love doing? Why aren’t you doing it anymore? Go and look at your submission pile and find some talent.’ That night I opened my submission inbox and found a book that sold for £1,000,000! Having those brilliant, exciting moments helped me cope with the stress of everything else and balanced them out. It’s about making sure that you’re doing what you really love. Some people are not on the right path: an agent might be much more suited to editorial and publishing, and they find being an agent a real struggle because they don’t actually like doing the deals and just love the editorial side. You’ve got to really assess what you should be doing and what really suits you. If you’re miserable on a Sunday and you don’t want to go to work on Monday, I would ask, ‘Is this the right job for you?’ I see a lot of conversations about work-life balance, but for me my work is my life. I wouldn’t want to have the majority of my time working in a job that I didn’t like and then just having my life at the end of the day and on weekends, because that’s not living to the full. I want to be loving what I do, and I’ve always loved being an agent, so I think part of it is finding what you absolutely love.

"Burnout happens because there isn’t enough support."

You’ve helped cultivate talent and develop skills in a supportive and inclusive environment. What are the most rewarding parts of doing this? Are there any parts that you find challenging?

We tend to grow talent from within, so I've had assistants I've grown into associates and then agents; we typically haven't had any agents that have brought an established list with them. You can’t teach someone how to find talent – that’s that 1% that they’ve got to have already. Everything else we’re able to guide and mentor and work through: our contacts, the submission lists, the negotiation methods. So seeing someone build to success like that is so rewarding.

I think the hard part is being truthful about the reality of agenting. I think that’s the kind of support I give: a lot of honest conversations. When a new agent goes out with their first submission, I tend to tell them, “You’re probably not going to sell that. You’re probably going to get all these rejections which will feel horrendous.” When my first book got rejected, it felt like someone was punching my child. I really took them to heart. I wrote back, I was angry, I felt depressed for the whole submission process. Morale can really feel low if you’re not selling something, but it’s all a learning curve and you’ve got to go through that. Then you’ve got to see what’s next as you hone your taste as an agent. You start following the trends more or you start knowing what publishers want and the more you do, the better you get at it. Equally, if someone does have sudden success early on it can be hard to manage expectations because you might not be able to sustain that level of success. Success is addictive; you want more and more, and that can cause burnout because you’ll just want to do more and more deals. But then you’ve got to think about the other side of agenting: the author care, the problem solving, the publishers, the marketing and publicity. We have agents in particular areas so they feel supported because they ‘own’ an area, for instance fantasy, or literary fiction, or romcoms, and they can build a reputation in that area. Everyone knows what they're doing. Some areas of the market are harder but they know that’s not their fault, it’s just the market trends. If you become the market expert, you’ll have more success. Though it’s not as rigid anymore because the market trends have changed and shifted. There’s a lot of genre-bending fiction, thrillers bleeding into horror, romance mixing with fantasy, and it’s not so straightforward so you can’t just categorise. It then becomes about what voice you love and want to represent.

Ultimately I want my agents to take on books that they feel passionate about because they will be the best agent for that work. I strongly believe an agent values the book they’re selling financially and that they determine the level of the deal and what publishers will pay for it, and that is a totally unique skill. Some agents could sell a brilliant book for a modest amount compared to what another agent could get for the same book depending on the auction process and how they can persuade a publisher to invest more. It’s also more fun and that brings more joy for them, so that helps with burnout too, when you’re working on books you feel that real passion for.

"You’ve got to really assess what you should be doing and what really suits you. If you’re miserable on a Sunday and you don’t want to go to work on Monday, I would ask, ‘Is this the right job for you?’"

What advice would you give to others in the industry who are in a position to mentor junior colleagues? Do you have any tips for junior colleagues on how to get the most out of a mentoring relationship?

Mentoring is so important. At the moment I am just doing it in-house, but it’s interesting to mentor people from other places and other agencies or other publishing houses, too. It’s very much a guiding relationship, making sure that someone’s doing what suits them most and working out a path for them. For the business and the individual it’s better that they’re doing something that they love. Mentoring is about finding out someone’s passion and talent, and honing that talent! I love finding the right people for the right role and developing their skills in that area, or working out what people want and guiding them. I think lots of people who start in publishing don’t know exactly what department they want to be in so it’s about navigating that as well and being very open about different opportunities. 

Everyone’s so invested in the younger generation. I have noticed a difference with Gen Z and their expectations, wanting everything very quickly. I’ve had people wanting to be an assistant for a year and then move on. It can be very hard to manage because in agenting it’s just about spending time learning the job. It’s impossible to know the ins and outs of a business in a year; I’m still learning something new every day. It takes time. You only see how important the groundwork is when you look back, but it’s hard to tell someone that they have to go through all that. 

The way I see it is that when you have a new junior member of staff, you’re training them for the first year, then the second year is when the business starts to get something back after all the training that you’ve given them and you start to benefit from their work. Increasingly I’ve seen in publishing that an assistant will be with you for a year and then want to move on to the next challenge, which can be hard when you’ve invested the time and energy. The longer you do a job, the more you realise you don’t know! There are just so many layers and problems to solve, but this is when it becomes most satisfying. 

"You only see how important the groundwork is when you look back."

Tell us about a woman in publishing who inspires you. 

Lucy Abrahams, who also set up her own scouting agency. She inspired me to set up on my own. On my first day on my own in my basement flat, she sent me Richard Branson’s book, Screw It, Let's Do It! I speak to her a lot because she's dealt with rumours as well... another woman who's been through it. She gives me a lot of advice. Seeing her work ethic and how dedicated she is to international publishers, and bringing them the most exceptional talent from around the world, is just so inspiring.

*The FLIP are proud supporters of independent bookshops and are an affiliate of Bookshop.org. If any of our recommendations take your fancy, we'd be so grateful if you click through our links directly to make a purchase as we earn a small commission - all of which goes back into bringing The FLIP's mission to life and to allow us to keep bringing you the content you want to see.