EXCLUSIVE: Final week was a busy one for departing Channel 4 boss Alex Mahon.
Mahon revealed her exit from the Gogglebox community on Monday after eight years and by Wednesday her new gig working dwell leisure agency Superstruct had emerged.
A day later, we are able to reveal her agent was sending a guide proposal to publishers and TV execs for Mahon’s debut novel, a thriller titled The Wealthy Bitch Membership penned with Walter Presents founder Walter Iuzzolino underneath the pseudonym Alex Walter. Peters Fraser Dunlop CEO Caroline Michel, who’s repping the novel, advised us The Wealthy Bitch Membership “generated a major quantity of media and publishing curiosity in a matter of hours.”
“The Wealthy Bitch Membership is conceived as an iconic, style defining story,” reads the guide’s promotion. “If Bonfire of the Vanities created the male-centric Masters of the Universe that was to dominate novels, movies and TV sequence about energy success for nearly forty years, The Wealthy Bitch Membership is about to show that on its head.”
Mahon’s agent included a 34-page proposal with character definitions, chapter samples and a three-page creator be aware. Mahon and Iuzzolino plan to ship the guide by Jan 2026 – which means it should doubtless publish later that yr or early 2027 – and it’s being conceived as the primary in a sequence.
The Wealthy Bitch Membership follows an elite trio of highly effective feminine CEOs, Olivia Huntingdon-Gough (internet price £1.1B), who runs a world cleaning soap and perfume empire, Fleur Winthorpe (internet price £27B), the “richest of the wealthy bitches,” a maths and physics genius whose hundreds of thousands have come from the Silicon Valley tech world, and Natasha Jenkins (internet price £750M), the CEO of a world lodge, journey and cruise chain.
The protagonists are all CEOs on the high of their recreation. Every year, they decide one candidate with potential to make it massive and take her underneath their wing for 12 months, propelling many ladies to success. However what founder Olivia doesn’t know is that burning resentments on the coronary heart of the membership are about to blow up in a single act of betrayal and backstabbing.
Mahon earned £1.5M ($2M) in 2023, making her the highest-paid CEO within the community’s 40-year historical past, though this dropped the next yr amid the financial disaster. Her tenure was characterised by peaks and troughs as she fought off authorities makes an attempt to denationalise the broadcaster and steered it by the worldwide pandemic and difficult financial occasions.
“The glass ceiling has been cracked”
In Mahon’s creator be aware, the Channel 4 boss stated The Wealthy Bitch Membership was born over lengthy walks in Hyde Park with Iuzzolino as they plotted characters and their journeys. She cited the current success of books like Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, a success for Disney+, and A Girl Of Substance, which Channel 4 is remaking, and stated, “It hit me—why had nobody written that form of saga, however set in immediately’s world of high-flying feminine CEOs?”
Mahon stated her and Iuzzolino had determined to write down the guide as a result of, “The world is at a tipping level. The glass ceiling has been cracked, however not shattered. Ladies are seizing boardrooms, commanding industries, and rewriting the foundations of energy. But, their tales—the uncooked, ruthless, and triumphant realities of rising to the highest—stay largely untold.”
Whether or not the still-to-be-finished guide makes the profitable journey from web page to display might be intriguing. Mahon is about to depart the TV trade behind for now however used to run Shine and led Channel 4 for practically a decade. Iuzzolino is the co-founder of Eagle Eye Drama – the producer behind reveals together with Professor T and The Couple Subsequent Door – which has simply been acquired by ITV Studios.
Michel stated: “We don’t touch upon ongoing negotiations however PFD are delighted to be representing the novels of Alex Walter, the joint brainchild of Alex Mahon and Walter Iuzzolino. Their first novel captivated us from the primary web page and it has generated a major quantity of media and publishing curiosity in a matter of hours.”
Channel 4 declined remark.
