THIS WEEK
Mundy, Mundy: the agency boss and prize director doubles up
Toby Mundy prepares for a busy autumn of a full-up Frankfurt and a robust defence of the Baillie Gifford Prize
TOBY MUNDAY: INTERNATIONAL OUTREACH
Tom Tivnan @tomtivnan ‘‘A
genting needs scale these days,” Toby Mundy says. “We have to have great services for clients and a
global perspective. We have to be able to justify our 15%.”
Mundy and I are in the swish yet cosy
Aevitas Creative Management UK offices on Great Ormond Street, talking in the main about the agency and the state of play in sector, but also why five years ago he decided to fold his Toby Mundy Associates into the big US player ACM and launch the company’s British outpost. Size was part of the equation, but it wasn’t the thing that won the day. Mundy says: “Sure, ACM is a big agency with Hollywood stars, Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished journalists and all kinds of interesting folk on their roster. But I liked the culture: junior staff ran meetings; there is an archive and resource of problem solving forums; there is a robust back office. This does sound like corporate flag waving—but it also happens to be true—that they have thought of every possible aspect of running a good agency.
04 4th October 2024 “So I realised that if I hitched my litle
wagon to their big wagon, I would have access to more international clients—and that we could try and continue to build here in the UK a creative and collaborative agency.” Build is the apposite word as part of
Mundy’s remit was to add experienced agents to the mix. ACM UK heads into this Frankfurt Book Fair with two brand new additions: Valeria Huerta, coming from her eponymous agency, and Morwenna Loughman, who joins from The bks Agency. This brings the roster up to 10 full-time agents, plus subsidiary rights director Vannessa Kerr. Part of the strategy apes Mundy’s own entrée into the agency: inviting sole traders into the tent. In the last two years Charlie Brotherstone, Emma Sweet, Charlie Viney and Jack Ramm have all brought their agencies under ACM’s aegis (there have been depar- tures, though, including Sara O’Keeffe moving to Andrew Nurnberg and Max Edwards leaving to relaunch Apple Tree Literary). So, is the plan to keep ACM UK growing ad infinitum? Mundy says: “Maybe not forever
but we want more scale; we’d certainly like to have more fiction agents. And our model works well with owner-agents at a certain point in their careers. As a sole proprietor/ agent, in your first year you’ll spend about 5% of your time on admin, about 95% chasing clients. Those percentages then start to shiſt when by, say, year 10 it’s about 95% admin. And it gets to the point where you have to find another solution: hire more staff or plug your business into another.”
Mundy is an east Londoner (Hackney-born,
Walthamstow-raised) and “son of a shop- keeper” who had not considered books as a career. But a suggestion at a dinner part led to one of the three slots on the first HarperCollins graduate training scheme (not a bad strike rate in that initial intake as now-Cornerstone m.d. Venetia Buterfield was one of the other two).
He spent a few years at HC, then moved to
Weidenfeld until being approached in 2000 by Grove Atlantic owner Morgan Entrekin to found an affiliated outpost of the American indie. Mundy launched Atlantic Books a
Frankfurt Book Fair Preview Aevitas Creative Management Profile
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