MiMs INSIGHT
A new chapter for MiMs: Penguin Michael Joseph joins our community
We’re delighted to welcome Penguin Michael Joseph as the Official Publishing Partner of Mums in Marketing.
13 November 2026 • 5 minute read
MiMs, this is BIG, and we have been absolutely BURSTING to tell you.
Penguin Michael Joseph, part of Penguin Books, is joining Mums in Marketing as our new publishing partner.
Together, we’re creating a new monthly MiMs Book Club, with our MiMs participants affectionately known as the ‘book clubbers’. We’ll bring you live conversations with featured authors, carefully chosen recommendations, early access to exciting new books and some rather lovely exclusives, competitions and giveaways along the way.
This will not simply be a list of books we think you should read. It is a chance to discover brilliant stories, read alongside other MiMs and then join the author LIVE to talk about the book you have just experienced together.
Why MiMs and Penguin Michael Joseph?
Penguin has been changing the way people access books since 1935, when founder Allen Lane launched the first Penguin paperbacks and made quality writing available at a price ordinary people could afford.
Today, Penguin is part of Penguin Random House, the world’s leading global trade book publisher. Its mission remains wonderfully simple: “We make books for everyone, because a book can change anyone.”
Penguin Michael Joseph is one of its leading publishing houses, specialising in commercial fiction and non-fiction. Its extraordinarily varied list includes bestselling page-turners, crime, romance and fantasy alongside memoirs, cookery, history and transformative books from trusted voices.
There really is something for everyone, whether you want a story that keeps you awake until 2am, a book that changes how you think, something that helps you learn or simply a much-needed escape from the eleventy million things competing for your attention.
That is where this partnership makes so much sense.
MiMs is built around connection, shared experiences and supporting one another through every stage of work and life. Books can do exactly the same thing. They can start conversations, introduce us to lives very different from our own and give us the rare opportunity to stop, think and occasionally do something purely because we enjoy it.
Life moves FAST. Between careers, businesses, children, family and the background hum of life-admin, reading can easily become another thing we used to have time for.
This partnership is designed to support us not only in finding time to read, but in enjoying the whole reading experience: how a book makes us feel, the connections it creates and those moments afterwards when we find ourselves thinking about it again.
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“A book gives us a place to begin, but the conversation around it is where the community comes alive.
That connection is why this partnership makes so much sense. Penguin Michael Joseph brings the books, authors and publishing expertise. MiMs brings a generous, curious community of women, gloriously open to all points of view, who know how to turn shared experiences into honest conversations.”
This is not just a book club
Each month, Penguin Michael Joseph will help us choose a featured book for MiMs to read together.
We’ll introduce the title, explain why it has been selected and invite our MiMs Book Clubbers to get involved. You can read at your own pace, join the community conversation and share your thoughts as you go.
Then comes the particularly exciting bit.
After reading the featured book, we’ll come together for a live Author in Conversation session. Claire will interview the author about the book, the thinking behind it, their experiences and the story of how it made its way from an idea to the page.
Each online session will last approximately one hour and include an audience Q&A, with questions either submitted through the live chat or sent in advance.
This means we will not only read the book. We’ll have the opportunity to go behind it, hear directly from the person who wrote it and ask the questions that came up along the way.
And, because this is MiMs, we are loving where those conversations might take us, from confidence and creativity to family, ambition, life and all the interesting bits that rarely fit neatly inside a standard author interview.
Much more than one featured book
Alongside each Book Club choice and live author conversation, Penguin Michael Joseph will introduce us to some of the other titles its publishing teams are particularly excited about.
The Monthly Book Club Choice
Our main featured paperback will be the book we read together.
Recommended Reads
We’ll share a small selection of brand-new hardbacks published that month, carefully chosen across different genres and interests.
Rather than leaving you to fight your way through hundreds of new releases, you’ll receive a manageable shortlist of books worth knowing about. Our live sessions may also finish with a quick round-up of these titles, helping you discover your next read or find something lovely for a friend or family member.
Your Next New Old Favourite Read
Each month, we’ll also highlight an older paperback as our Discovery Title.
Because a brilliant book does not stop being brilliant when it is moved off the new-release table. It may be something you missed the first time, a much-loved title worth rediscovering or a book that suddenly feels particularly relevant now.
There may also be some VERY lovely extras
The partnership will create opportunities for competitions, giveaways, signed copies, special editions, early proofs, author Q&As, gifts and other Penguin Michael Joseph treats.
We cannot promise that every month will involve a signed book landing on somebody’s doormat, but there will be regular opportunities for MiMs to discover books and authors in ways that go beyond an ordinary recommendation.
We’ll share these through the MiMs community, our emails and social channels, so keep an eye out for announcements.
A partnership built around connection
There is something powerful and brilliantly unpredictable about reading the same book as other people.
We might recognise ourselves in completely different parts of a story. One person may love a character that another person might want to launch out of a fictional window. A sentence that one reader barely notices may stop somebody else in their tracks.
A book gives us a place to begin, but the conversation around it is where the community comes alive.
That connection is why this partnership makes so much sense. Penguin Michael Joseph brings the books, authors and publishing expertise. MiMs brings a generous, curious community of women, gloriously open to all points of view, who know how to turn shared experiences into honest conversations.
There is no reading test. Nobody is checking whether you finished every chapter. Audiobooks absolutely count. Reading three pages before falling asleep counts. Joining a live conversation because the subject interests you, even if the book remains untouched on your bedside table, also counts.
The aim is for our ‘Book Clubbing’ to feel like something fabulous to be part of, not another obligation.
What happens next?
We’ll reveal our first featured book soon, explain how you can join the MiMs Book Club and, of course, share details of our first live Author in Conversation session.
For now, we are absolutely DELIGHTED to welcome Penguin Michael Joseph to Mums in Marketing.
A new chapter is beginning for MiMs, and this one comes with brilliant books, fascinating authors and plenty for all of us to talk about.
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