Storymix celebrates five years of 'making a real, impactful change'

Inclusive fiction studio Storymix celebrated its fifth birthday, with a party in Shoreditch, London.

The business was founded by award-winning author and entrepreneur, Jasmine Richards to help racially minoritised writers get published. It has since sold 17 series to publishers, while 48 books will be published by the end of 2025 from chapters books and middle grade, through to Young Adult titles. According to Storymix, 300,000 copies of books originated with the agency have been sold in the UK and US.

Successes include The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries (Farshore) written by J T Williams, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and "Breakthrough" winner at The Week Junior Children’s Book of the Year; Fablehouse (Bloomsbury), written by E L Norry, which was nominated for a Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the Historical Association Young Quills Award and is on the 2024 Read for Empathy book collection.

Richards said: "Storymix is a fiction studio dedicated to making compelling and commercial stories that bring children and teens of colour to the centre of the narrative. I realised at the beginning of all this that instead of writing one book a year as an author, I could collaborate with writers, illustrators and publishers to produce multiple books annually, creating tangible career paths for creators and making a real change to the publishing industry, ultimately transforming what we see on our bookshelves."

Richards won a FutureBook award in 2022, and was awarded a special commendation in the Editor category at The British Book Awards in 2023; she was also a finalist in the PublisHER Excellence prize and is a finalist in the MEWe360 Deutsche Bank Awards for Creative Entrepreneurs.

Earlier this year, Storymix launched StoryInk an incubator of illustration-led board books, picture books, chapter books and graphic novels for readers aged between 0-18, and StoryRebel, a YA fiction list that disrupts the status quo, working with new and established writers seeking to redefine or explore their writing identity.

Storymix has worked with over 50 authors and illustrators from across the Global Majority and now has 11 new projects in the development pipeline. Richards employs three full-time staff members and works with a host of creative freelance editors and designers from an extensive range of backgrounds to deliver projects direct to publishers, both independent publishers and bigger publishing houses.

At the party, Richards said she had not written a speech: "I’m last minute. It’s energy, about creating in the moment."

She thanked a number of people who had helped her along the way, including Working Partners’ m.d. Charles Nettleton, Kate Harris, former m.d. of Oxford University Press, and Storymix consultant Sara Grant, along with freelancers, authors and those publishers who had taken on the books.

Recalling the early period and the pandemic, she said that after the George Floyd murder, the door for what she wanted to do was thrown wide open. "All of a sudden the thing I wanted to change was actually what publishing wanted to do. I went really hard at that point. I wanted this to be a moment that would would remain, but I couldn’t trust that would be the case."