On The Art of Biography

Andrew Lownie talks to JJ Marsh about all things biographical

Andrew Lownie

As a biographer yourself, (The Presbyterian Cavalier - of John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, MP and Governor-General of Canada) what do you see as the key elements to writing a successful biography?

Clearly it needs to be well researched and have both new material and interpretation but it also needs to be well written. The qualities of the fiction writer are needed in terms of sketching in character, description and narrative pace. It’s important to engage the sympathy of the reader and make them want to know what happens next. My next biographical subject is Guy Burgess - a gay, dissolute , English Communist who is very different from the Scottish, Presbyterian , Conservative John Buchan – but the trick in both cases is to humanise them . Everyone has their good and bad sides and everyone is seen differently. The role of the biographer is to show all sides and let the reader make up their own minds about the person though clearly the way the material is selected and story is presented means it’s never entirely objective. It’s also important to set the person in the context of their times – what I call pulling the camera out – and to spend time on sketching in secondary characters to balance the central focus on the biographical subject. A good biography needs to be about the times almost as much as the life. The more you can quote first person testimony such as interviews, diaries and letters the more the book will come alive.

Apart from reading history at Cambridge, what attracted you to the art of the biographer?

I find people fascinating and want to know what make them tick. As an historian, I’m more drawn to people shaping events than inexorable historical forces because that’s what happens in life. History hinges on particular events which often are affected by the smallest things. If Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car had taken a different route in July 1914 perhaps twentieth century history might have been different. A biography is an easy way of humanising history – local, family and house histories are another way - and allows one to take the reader into a particular world whilst still having a strong narrative arc.

The research process must be immense for someone like Buchan. How long did it take to gather all the information, create the structure and actually write the book? 

As I had a full-time job, it took several years not least because I had to read over a hundred of Buchan’s own books, several hundred other books touching on his life and widespread interests , read hundreds of letters (he wrote to his mother everyday) and visit archives across the world. The writing took only a few months as the material then simply slotted in. I’m finding the Burgess biography more difficult because Burgess left no papers and much of what he did was secret.

How far should an author be familiar with the politics, social mores and general circumstances of the time? I recently read S.T. Joshi’s biography on H.P. Lovecraft, and his analysis of the period helped me comprehend Lovecraft’s apparent racist perspective. 

Crucial. One can’t understand Buchan without understanding Scottish Presbyterianism and Burgess without having a real sense of how some of his generation were deeply affected by the political events of the 1930s. Part of Burgess’s rebellion was personal but it was determined by his very genuine belief in Communism. Buchan is sometimes accused of being a racist and anti-Semite. I show that he wasn’t but there is no denying he was a product of his time. Thinking yourself back into the period is so important - the more one can immerse oneself in contemporary accounts whether newspapers or films the better - and one mustn’t fall into the trap of historical relativism.

Do you believe the writer needs to like the person who is the subject of the book? How much subjectivity is involved in terms of interpretation? 

No, one doesn’t need to like one’s subject but unless one is interested in them then one isn’t going to want to spend years researching and writing their lives. And unless the biographer makes the subject interesting no reader is going to read 100,000 words on them. I actually like Buchan and identify with him in many ways but was accused by some reviewers of being hostile to him. Burgess had many qualities such as intelligence, wit, loyalty and strong beliefs but he is not an attractive character - the trick is to show the good and bad sides and to explain why people behaved in the way they did. The greater the understanding of motivation and character, the more likely the reader is going to want to go on reading.

And what about the subject’s field of expertise? Paul Kildea’s book on Benjamin Britten seemed to marry the human and musical angles so well I had to listen to his work all over again.

Absolutely. The point of a literary biography, for example, is to send the reader back to the author’s books and to give new insight to one’s reading of those books.

Andrew at WriteCon in Zürich

You founded The Biographers’ Club, which offers awards and support to first-time biographers and host of member benefits. What motivated you to set up such a charitable organisation?

It all began in September 1997. As a literary agent specialising in biography, I had arranged several lunches at Elena’s Etoile in Charlotte Street for my authors to meet film producers, publishers and journalists. It was an expensive business entertaining twenty to lunch but everyone thought it was a worthwhile networking exercise and said they would be prepared to pay their way. And so was born the Biographers’ Club.

I invited friends and contacts who were biographers to come to the lunches and others brought their friends so it simply evolved. I ran it for the next twelve years simply as a monthly dining club with speakers as an opportunity for biographers to meet and exchange ideas and contacts. Knowing as an agent that many writers needed financial help to research their biographies, I persuaded the Daily Mail to support an annual prize for proposals for un-commissioned biographies. That has proved to be a great success launching the careers of some twenty first-time biographers – some runners-up were in fact more successful subsequently than the winners - and I set up further prizes for the best biography of the year, for the best first biography and a lifetime achievement award. A few years ago I decided my benevolent dictatorship needed to be replaced so it has operated with a committee and been a charity for the last few years. I’m still involved but now as President.

What do you see as the key differences in writing a biography of a person, as opposed to a country, such as Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy, or Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine?

I don’t believe you can write biographies of anything except people. Books on animate objects etc are really narrative non-fiction. The key difference is that the biography is about another human being who was born, lived and died. Personally I think even ‘slice of life’ biographies which look at a particular moment whether it’s a dinner party or a period of years isn’t really a biography. The childhood and roots of a person are key and we don’t have a sense of the whole person unless we follow them from cradle to grave. It’s much more satisfying emotionally and intellectually. John Buchan’s story is of semi-rags to semi-riches, of the provincial who rises to the heart of the Establishment but who always felt an outsider. Burgess is the rich kid born with every opportunity who frittered away the advantages he was born to. One can’t really understand a life unless one is presented with it in its entirety.

Looking at the bestseller lists, full of football managers, footballers, TV stars, and ghost-written celeb memoirs, do you feel optimistic for the future of biography?

I do feel optimistic about the future of biography not least after Lucy Hughe-Hallett won last year’s Samuel Johnson Prize for her life of a largely unknown figure – the Italian writer and politician Gabriele d’Annunzio. Look through the Literary Review each month and you’ll see pages and pages of reviews of serious biographies and many of the most successful recent films come from biographies such as Philomena and The Invisible Woman. Of course some football and celebrity memoirs do well but their success is often short-lived and one of the most exciting recent developments in publishing , in my view, is that the voices of ‘ordinary’ people are increasingly being heard – memoirs by foster carers, midwives, policemen, people who been inspirational through the way they have dealt with tragedy or conquered the elements. The growth of self-publishing has meant we are hearing many more different voices and memoir is even displacing biography.

As Words With JAM’s favourite agent, can we talk the commercial side? How easy is it to persuade a publisher to take a punt on a biography of someone who hasn’t been on Big Brother/The X Factor/tabloid front pages?

Looking back at my sales for last year they include biographies of: Peter Watson a gay art collector who set up the literary magazine Horizon; a group biography of Britain’s living non-royal duchesses; a 19th century French courtesan called the Valtesse de la Bigne; John Bingham a writer and spy who inspired John Le Carre’s Smiley; Moura Budberg an adventurer who was the mistress of HG Wells and Maxim Gorky and John Randall one of the last surviving SAS officers of World War Two. Almost all of them are by first-time writers. It wasn’t easy selling the books and no one will become rich from them, unless the film rights are sold, but it’s clear editors are still buying serious non-fiction. What supports these books are the celebrity memoirs and football biographies so long may both streams continue.





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By JJ Marsh – author, reader, Triskelite, journalist, Nuancer, reviewer and blogger. Likes: pugs, Werner Herzog and anchovies. Dislikes: meat, chocolate and institutionalised sexism.

Andrew Lownie talks about his agency’s initiative – Thistle Publishing

Interview by JJ Marsh, author of the Beatrice Stubbs series

Thistle Publishing was born out of a combination of frustration and opportunity. As an agent, I was finding publishers were increasingly cautious about commissioning books, even by established authors. Books which I thought very commercial , often with serial potential, were being turned down, sometimes because of concerns about the legal ramifications and sometimes because editors couldn’t obtain full in-house support.

It often seemed power had moved from the editorial departments to sales and legal. Editors were taking longer to make decisions and publishers to publish – books could take up to 18 months to come out after delivery – in what was becoming a very fickle and competitive market. There was also a remorseless drive down in terms of royalties and share of subsidiary rights income and increasing insistence on world rights.

This seemed crazy as, in my view, power had shifted from the publisher to the author. The digital revolution meant authors could easily self-publish and buy in any required services such as editorial and marketing. Amazon had created the largest bookshop in the world and were courting literary agencies offering attractive terms – such as 70% on e-book income compared to 25% from publishers, and licences which could be cancelled at any time – and help with digitisation and cover design. I was also impressed by Amazon’s professionalism, ‘can-do’ attitude and flexibility.

Many agencies were dipping their toes in the market pushing reverted backlist titles or filling territorial gaps where books had not sold such as in America. I decided to be more ambitious and was influenced by your very own writers’ conference in Zurich last October where it was clear changes in the industry were being driven by authors and agents who would be left behind if they didn’t embrace the revolution taking place.

Twenty years ago, I had self-published the complete short stories of John Buchan in three volumes, under the imprint Thistle Publishing, complete with a silk bookmark and handsomely printed by Clays. A thousand copy run of the first volume had sold out quickly so I rapidly printed another thousand copies of a boxed set of the three volumes and sold them through a few key bookshops, ads and mailings. I made more money from that piece of self-publishing than the five editions of my Buchan biography from major publishers and since then I have always been a great supporter of indie publishing, under certain circumstances.

The Thistle imprint was revived, a new company set up with my agency colleague David Haviland as an equal partner, the company registered for VAT, bank accounts set up, a website created and publicists interviewed. We began to scour the agency backlists for suitable titles for reissue and our current submissions for books in which we had a confidence that had hitherto not been shared by publishers. We would not take on books which were not up to our existing quality standards, and we would not be publishers – Amazon was the publisher and we took only our usual 15% agency commission – but we would lend our authority, contacts and expertise to the list.

Though many authors were self-publishing very successfully, it seemed to me that their books looked self-published – not least because it was clear they came from Amazon – and lacked marketing and publicity push. David and I decided we would spend time on cover design and pay for a two-day publicity campaign which could be topped up by the authors. The agency would also use its Twitter and Facebook accounts and the monthly newsletter to add further promotional support.

The aim would be to showcase and establish books for domestic and foreign publishers and film companies in the hope that media attention, reviews and sales might lead to fresh business. Many self-published books were being picked up by publishers and it seemed a strategy that could work even better for agency titles. The fact that Amazon and Thistle didn’t insist on a licence term meant that books could be sold on almost immediately if interest was shown. We also wanted to generate new revenue streams for authors and make all their books work for them whether it was exploiting out of print backlists or ‘plugging’ rights gaps.

The list launched at the beginning of the year. We've published 17 titles now, with another 20 completed and just awaiting publication, and 60 more books in the pipeline. We’ve already had a bestseller with David Haviland’s historical trivia book Why Was Queen Victoria Such a Prude?, which was top in all its categories on Amazon.

One of the advantages of the list is we can react to events quickly so, for example, our first book, Mary Hollingsworth’s account of a papal Conclave, was published the day after the Pope announced he was stepping down, and we were able to quickly turn around a biography of Amy Winehouse to tie-in with a serial in the Sun and the paperback publication of her father’s book. In June we have book on an undercover unit in Northern Ireland tied in to a Panorama programme and a Sunday newspaper serial.

Peter Daughtrey’s fascinating case for the lost city of Atlantis being on the Portuguese coast had a US publisher but not a UK one so we simply published it shortly after it came out in the US, whilst Darren Moore’s thematic study The Soldier had been published in the UK but not yet in the US.

Many books were critically well-received but now out of print and had never had e-book editions – and sometimes never even a paperback - such as Anthony Bruce’s book on the war in Palestine during the First World War: The Last Crusade, Mark Higgitt’s account of HMS Ardent during the Falklands War: Through Fire and Water, and David Stafford’s books of twentieth century history: Spies Beneath Berlin, Churchill & Secret Service, and Britain and European Resistance 1940-1945.

An area with great potential, not least because of translation and film opportunities, is fiction, and Thistle has already begun reissuing MJ Trow’s comic historical crime series based on Conan Doyle’s Inspector Lestrade, which was originally published by Constable. In June we will be bringing out thirteen novels by Guy Bellamy, most originally published by Penguin, whom Auberon Waugh described on first publication over thirty years ago as “a major new comic talent.” Another novelist of whom we have high hopes is Nicholas Best, whose Tennis and the Masai was described by the Sunday Times on first publication as “The funniest book I have read since David Lodge’s Small World.” Later in the year, Thistle will be reissuing some of Joyce Cary’s novels together with a new collection of his short stories – many hitherto unpublished.

Tom Pocock was a naval historian, whom I represented for almost twenty years until his death in 2007 and whose books should never have been allowed to go out of print; Thistle will be reissuing nineteen of them over the summer thereby providing focus and momentum. Similarly, we will be bundling titles under themes, such as a series on Prime Ministers to include James Chambers’s life of Palmerston and RJQ Adams’s books on Balfour and Bonar Law.

Many of the books have an obvious target market which can easily be reached, such as Rachel Woods’s guide for aspiring models, and a forthcoming diet title on the magic Konjac noodle, which is tied in to a promotion by a Konjac distributor. Others have an obvious peg so, for example, we are publishing Paul Merrill’s comic guide to fatherhood on Father’s Day.

Digital has allowed us to explore different formats and lengths and we will be experimenting with a range of Thistle Singles – journalistic, sometimes polemical essays of 10,000-30,000 words around particular events or themes. One of the first will be Katharine Quarmby’s quest to find her father, a visiting Iranian naval officer who was forced to give her up for adoption, and discover her heritage. The e-book will be published for Father’s Day and has been picked up by Amazon’s own publishing programme.

The future looks promising with three Thistle books being actively promoted by Amazon, and all selling well – Churchill & Secret Service is particularly strong, currently at #78 in the overall Kindle bestsellers chart. Though selling books to trade publishers remains difficult, the opportunities presented by digital and Amazon are very exciting for authors and agents.

You can find out more about Thistle Publishing here.

JJ Marsh – author, reader, Triskelite, journalist, Nuancer, reviewer and blogger. Likes: pugs, Werner Herzog and anchovies. Dislikes: meat, chocolate and institutionalised sexism.

Ask the Agent - Andrew Lownie answers a reader’s question

Q: I have been offered a two book deal with Harlequin's Carina Digital Imprint, should I still continue on my quest to find an agent?

thanks

Helen Phifer
Barrow-in-Furness

Contemporary Crime/Paranormal writer, proud member of the RNA new writer's scheme. Writing Murder, Chills and Thrills.

A: I think it is still worth finding an agent and you’ll certainly be a more attractive prospect now. A good agent : may improve terms and protect your interests over, for example, reversion clauses; will certainly be there to give editorial advice alongside the editor and other advice about publication; may be able to exploit other rights not sold to Harlequin . Remember an agent should be for life and not just for a particular book.