EXCLUSIVE: Following a competitive auction, Legendary Television has snapped up rights to the hugely popular ‘romantasy’ novel Assistant to the Villain for development as a series.
Published by Red Tower Books, an imprint of Entangled Publishing, on August 29th, Assistant to the Villain is the first novel from Hannah Nicole Maehrer, a rising fantasy romance author and BookToker whose TikTok account has nearly 25M views, 280,000 followers and 26.5M likes.
Described as The Office meets The Princess Bride, the story follows the young Evie Sage who, with ailing family to support, takes a job as an assistant to the most infamous Villain in the land. No job is perfect, of course, but even less so when you develop an infatuation with your terrifying, temperamental, and undeniably alluring boss. When Evie suspects that something nefarious is afoot amongst their villainous ranks, she must figure out who is sabotaging her boss before this rat wipes out their empire and puts her out of a job.
Prior to literary development with Entangled, Assistant to the Villain began its life as a series of viral TikTok videos starring Maehrer as the title character. The novel debuted at #2 on the New York Times Bestsellers List for fiction, coming in only behind another Entangled title, the hugely popular fantasy novel Fourth Wing.
Translation rights to the book have already been sold in more than a dozen territories. Maehrer will exec produce the series take with Liz Pelletier for Entangled Publishing and Sharon Hall through her company, Mom de Guerre.
Founded in 2011, Entangled Publishing is one of the largest 100% women-owned independent publishers in the adult, young adult, and children’s book markets. At present, its Red Tower label is one of the hottest in American fiction, as a fixture on the NYT bestseller list. Another of its titles currently being developed for television, as we were first to report, is the aforementioned Fourth Wing, which was acquired at auction pre-strike by Amazon MGM Studios and Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society, alongside other books in The Empyrean series from Rebecca Yarros, including recently released sequel Iron Flame.
Reps for Assistant to the Villain are Independent Artist Group, Nicole Resciniti at Alliance Rights Agency and CDAS, LLP on behalf of Entangled Publishing.