Nine’s Future Women and Hachette sign two year ‘publishing and entertainment’ partnership
Future Women (which is 50% owned by Nine) and book publisher Hachette will begin a two year partnership in January, spanning both publishing and entertainment initiatives.
The publishing agreement will involve Hachette publishing two Future Women books, to be released in 2021 and 2022. On the entertainment front, the two businesses will partner on live-streamed events, and an online book club.
McCabe and Rizvi
Authors signed with Hachette locally such as Maxine Beneba Clarke, Louise Milligan, Gretel Killeen, Rebel Wilson, and Claire Coleman, will also be part of Future Women panel discussions, social club events, newsletters, and the annual Future Women Summit.
Hachette will sponsor the Anonymous Was a Woman podcast, hosted by Future Women’s chief creative officer, Jamila Rizvi, and writer and teacher Astrid Edwards. The book publisher will also have access to Future Women’s membership tiers, including its leadership development program and leadership summit.
The Nine-owned title was founded in 2018, and now offers twice-weekly online events, leadership courses, podcasts, and scholarships. Founder and managing director of Future Women, Helen McCabe told Mumbrella: “It was clear to both parties we had a lot in common and a shared desire to produce more books under the Future Women brand.
“But then we started talking about book clubs and interviews with authors and it just kept going.”
The Future Women site
Hachette’s publisher-at-large, Louise Adler, added that Future Women’s McCabe and Rizvi are “women of the future”.
“They understand the aspirations, challenges and hopes of women and I’m confident the books we create together will influence the national conversation,” she said.
Adler
Those books include a September 2021 release on how Australian women’s lives have been changed by COVID-19, featuring words from Jane Gilmore, Santilla Chingaipe and Emily Brooks. In 2022, another non-fiction book will be released, bringing Future Women’s book tally to three (its first, Untold Resilience, was published in October by Penguin).
Rizvi, herself a bestselling author of books including Not Just Lucky, said that the first release in partnership with Hachette next year is “a rallying call to make the future better than the past”.
“At home and at work, with friends and family, and more intimately women’s sense of themselves and their bodies has all been brought into question by the pandemic,” she noted.
McCabe is certain the partnership will allow both brands to connect with women even better. As for what else is ahead in 2021, McCabe confirmed to Mumbrella that Future Women will be expanding its Platinum+ leadership and development offering for mid-career women.
“We are moving quite fast at the moment, so there is a lot on,” she said.
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Brittney Rigby was Mumbrella's deputy managing editor - news and analysis. She left Mumbrella in April 2021.
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