Dear newsletter subscriber,
As in previous Januarys, the agency has asked editors to outline the sort of books they are looking for in the coming year. Over fifty British and American fiction and non-fiction editors have kindly contributed to a feature which should be invaluable to all in the publishing community. The articles can be found at:
Recent Successes
Cathy Glass’s Another Forgotten Child remains in the paperback non-fiction lists – this week at no 14 having been no 5 during Christmas week. Her first memoir Damaged: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Broken Child is number 11 in this week’s New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, having been between no 1 and 5,making it seven consecutive weeks in the top twenty whilst A Baby's Cry was the 17th bestselling memoir of 2012, below Tulisa but above Justin Bieber.
Lawrence James has followed his editor Alan Samson from Little Brown to Weidenfeld for two separately contracted titles:
Churchill and the British Empire looks at how Winston Churchill’s view of Empire changed over the course of his political career and will be published in July.
Divide, Conquer and Rule: : The European Powers and Africa, 1840-1970 will examine the imperial experience of Africa between the early conquests of France in Algeria and Britain in South Africa to the independence movements of the mid-twentieth century and will be published in 2015.
Czech and Slovak rights in Shed Simove’s business and psychology book Success…Or Your Money Back! which features thirty secrets for success, and has garnered nineteen 5* reviews on Amazon, have been bought by Ottovo.
Other foreign rights sales have included:
Spanish rights in Nessa Carey’s popular science book The Epigenetics Revolution
Dutch rights in Duncan Falconer’s thriller Assassin
Dutch rights in Shed Simove’s spoof Fifty Shades of Gray
Portuguese rights in Marina Chapman’s memoir The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of the Girl Raised by Monkeys which has now been sold in over a dozen countries and as a two hour television special to National Geographic.
Malcolm Castle’s fire fightng memoir All Fired Up: Tales of a Country Fireman was serialised in the Express.
John Rae’s The Custard Boys won Best New Theatre Production – Downton Abbey won Best TV Show - at the2012 So So Gay Awards. The novel, originally filmed in the 1960s as Reach for Glory , is a story of sexual awakening, loyalty and betrayal which was compared upon publication to Lord of the Flies. It was adapted and directed by the Bafta-winning Glenn Chandler, creator of Taggart.
Current Submissions
Hugh Barker’s gift book Gigantic: A Curious History Of Man and Elephant, an anecdotal history with each section telling the tale of a particular elephant, from Hattie the “best elephant in the world” to Lyuba the baby mammoth, and from Topsy, the killer elephant who was electrocuted by Thomas Edison to Hannibal’s favourite fighting elephant.
Anna Barrington’s vet memoir Cows, coffee and cling-film.
Adrian Clark’s filmic life of the gay art patron and collector and founder of the magazine Horizon and the ICA Peter Watson.
Helen Croydon's F*ck the Fairytale: A contented singleton explores alternative romance.
Peter Daughtrey's discovery of the lost city of Atlantis and The Silver City. US rights sold.
Gavin Evans's Gender Bender: men, women and evolutionary psychologists which sets out to show that male and female emotional and intellectual capacities are moulded more by culture than biology and Black brain, white brain which draws from recent discoveries in palaeontology, archaeology and biological anthropology to argue that race is useful as no more than a short-hand descriptive term and that the genetic differences between people from all over the world are miniscule compared with other species.
Eleanor Fitzsimons’s life of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s first wife A Want of Honour: The Short Life and Tragic Death of Harriet Shelley
Joe Fuhrmann’s Rasputin: The Untold Story, just published in the US ,which Publishers Weekly described as “this vivid, briskly written biography (which) brings to life one of the most colorful and sinister figures in modern Russian history”.
The doyen of UFO writers Timothy Good’s Earth: An Alien Enterprise. US rights sold.
Chloe Govan’s two biographies Amy Winehouse: The Untold Story and Psychoanalysing Russell Brand.
Ian Graham's Impostors which tells the stories of the boldest and most notorious impostors of the past 500 years. US rights sold .
Roger Howard’s Operation Damocles, the forgotten story of the former Nazi scientists who were recruited by Egypt in the 1950s and ‘60s to develop a long-range missile capable of striking Israel. US rights sold.
John Jobling's U2: The Goal is $oul, the first unauthorised biography of U2 to document and analyse their 35-year career objectively, going beyond the myth to present a fascinating warts-and-all portrait of the Irish rock band. US and Portuguese rights already sold.
Music producer and song writer Bob Johnston's memoirs of working with amongst others Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Aretha Franklin, The Byrds, Louis Armstrong, Paul Revere & the Raiders, The Click Clacks, Charlie Daniels, and Arcade Fire Is It Rolling, Bob?
David Long's Spy's London, a walking guide to the espionage capital of the world.
Debbie McDonald's The Mysterious Lives of Moura Budberg on the spy and lover of H G Wells and Maxim Gorky.
Chris Marinello's Raider of the Lost Art: The Incredible True Story of One Man's Journey into the World of Stolen Art
Paul Merrill’s humorous gift books Muddle Your Way Through Fatherhood: How to fool people into thinking you’re a great dad and Muddle Your Way Through Being a Grandparent: How to fool people into thinking you’re a great Granny or Gramps
Tim Newark's Black Soldiers in White Armies: Race, Class and War, the first popular history book to tell the epic story of African origin soldiers in British and American armies in their words, taken from personal journals, diaries and interviews.
Sonia Oatley's poignant memoir of her murdered daughter Bye, Mam, I love you.
Stewardess Victoria Peters' humorous and sexy memoirs Fly Me!
Jamie Pike's The Ultimate Guide to Filming Locations in New York City an illustrated walking tour of New York film scenes.
Former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope lifts the lid on a UFO incident that he and colleagues in the MoD regarded as being more significant and compelling than the Roswell incident in Rendezvous at Rendlesham
In The New Burmese Ros Russell examine the lives of a dozen characters – including a blogger, a Buddhist monk, a refugee, a new MP, a maid in Bangkok, a punk- in a book of compelling life stories of the people who will shape Burma’s future .
Jo Sandelson, the first person to have a daily topical cartoon strip in The Times and who subsequently ran a weekly strip cartoon in The Observer , brings her drawing and satirical skills to Heir Raising, a book of humorous cartoons which takes a wry look at parenting styles through several recognisable 'types'.
Vikie Shanks’s Unravelled memoirs of how she was left to bring up seven children, all on the autism spectrum and two with cerebral palsy, after her husband committed suicide.
