Dear newsletter subscriber,
The agency continues to be very busy. Andrew Lownie has sold a dozen books in the UK and US in almost as many weeks putting him on course for his target of fifty UK deals in 2013. He remains the top selling agent worldwide on Publishers marketplace with twenty nine deals in the last six months and is also first in international rights UK non-fiction with 23 deals over the last six months – seventeen ahead of the number two position.
Recent Sales
Kathleen O’Shea’s memoir Little Drifters, ghosted by Katy Weitz, has been bought by Harper Collins.
Inside the Banking Crisis by Hugh Pym, Chief Economics Correspondent for BBC News, the astonishing story of how Britain’s banking system nearly crashed, has been bought by Bloomsbury for publication next year.
Traitor's Storm, the latest in M.J. Trow’s historical crime series featuring Christopher Marlowe, to Severn House.
North American rights in Christopher Moran’s Company Confessions: The CIA, Secrecy and Memoir Writing to St Martin’s Press.
US rights in Peter Padfield’s Hess, Hitler and Churchill: The Real Turning Point of World War Two - A Secret History have been sold to University of New England Press.
Hebrew rights in Nicholas Best’s Five Days That Shocked The World: An Oral History of Europe at the End of World War Two to Keter Books in Israel.
Japanese rights in Marina Chapman’s The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of the Girl Raised by Monkeys to Komakusa Publishing.
Chinese rights in Francesca Gould and David Haviland’s Self-Harming Parrots and Exploading Toads and Why You Shouldn't Eat Your Boogers: ...and Other Useless or Gross Information About Your Body to Shanghai Joint Publishing Company.
Polish rights in Sean McMeekin’s History’s Greatest Heist. : The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks. to Jagiellonian University Press in Krakow.
German rights in Daniel Tammet’s Thinking in Numbers to Hanser.
Simon Berthon’s Warlords has been optioned by Fox
Sean Longden’s Blitz Kids has been optioned by Peachtree
Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: A Memoir of Asperger's and An Extraordinary Mind has been optioned by Weidemann & Berg.
Recent Successes
Nigel Holland’s The 50 List, ghosted by agency author Lynne Barrett-Lee, went to no 9 in the Sunday Times best seller list.
Marina Chapman’s The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of the Girl Raised by Monkeys , also ghosted by Lynne Barrett-Lee and serialised in the Mail on Sunday and then the Sun, went to number six in the overall Amazon bestseller chart, and number two in ‘Movers and Shakers’.
David Haviland’s myth-busting guide to history Why Was Queen Victoria Such A Prude?: …and other historical myths and follies published by Thistle Publishing has now been the number one book in all its categories for a month and a half on Amazon.
Ian Milthorpe and Lynne Barrett-Lee’s Mum's Way spent several weeks in the Bookseller non-fiction paperback top twenty.
Clare Mulley’s biography of the SOE agent Christine Granville The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville was no 1 this week in the WH Smiths best seller list and Susan Ottaway’s Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice: The True Story of WWII Special Agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne was no 3.
Kirk Norcross’s memoir Essex Boy , ghosted by Emma Donnan, was serialised in the Sun.
Casey Watson’s Mummy's Little Helper: The heartrending true story of a young girl secretly caring for her severely disabled mother went no 4 in the Sunday Timesbest seller list.
There were three agency authors in the top fifteen non-fiction paperback list last week:
Susan Ottaway’s Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice: The True Story of WWII Special Agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne at no 7
Casey Watson’s Mummy's Little Helper: The heartrending true story of a young girl secretly caring for her severely disabled mother at no 11
Kris Hollington’s Unthinkable: The Shocking Scandal of Britain's Trafficked Children at no 14
Andrew Lownie
Current Submissions
Carol Acton’s edition of On Duty: The Diary of a Wartime Nurse, Mary Morris’s account ofnursing during the London Blitz through to Normandy with the Army Nursing Corps in June 1944.
Richard Aldrich’s Behind the Black Door: : Secret Intelligence and 10 Downing Street looks at the relationship between British Prime Ministers and the Intelligence Services.
Bruce Allen’s A Line Drawn in Water the story of the 1565 Siege of Malta and epic fight between the Ottoman Empire and Knights of St John.
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 Get the Vet.
Henry von Blumenthal’s The Companion to British History the fourth edition of the largest single-volume encyclopaedia of British History ever written, and the only one compiled by a single author rather than a committee.
Dominic Carman’s Heads Up is a series of interviews arranged thematically with over thirty private school headmasters and headmistresses which gives a revealing insight into how they run their schools and the current state of the independent sector.
Adrian Clark’s filmic life of the gay art patron and collector and founder of the magazine Horizon and the ICA Peter Watson.
David Craig’s Would You Buy That? an exposure of the huge variety of tricks and traps that are used to sell to us,
Peter Daughtrey's discovery of the lost city of Atlantis and The Silver City. US rights sold.
Michael du Preez’s biography of the high-ranking British army surgeon whose career stretched from the Napoleonic era to the Crimea who was discovered on death to have been a woman Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time.
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.
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 .
Martin Hammond’s Ask a Silly Question: Messages from eBay's most troublesome customer, a collection of stupidly funny and completely genuine email exchanges between the quirky Fredrick Facedass and the online sellers of eBay.
The memoirs of singer Michelle Heaton Michelle Heaton: Survivor.
Catherine Hewitt’s biography Valtesse de la Bigne: A Courtesan’s Conquest of Paris , this year’s runner-up for the 2012 Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize.
The life-affirming memoirs of actress, stand-up comic, escort girl, business-women and mother Bonnie Hibbs Bonnie.
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.
One of the rarest documents in 20th century history: a Holocaust diary written in secret by a man who survived for six years in three of the Nazi regime’s most infamous concentration camps. Gustav Kleinmann : A concentration camp diary
House historian Ellen Leslie’s My House Used To Be A ….
David Long's Spy's London, a walking guide to the espionage capital of the world.
Sean Longden’s Deliver us from Evil:: The Liberation of the Concentration Camps, 1945 .
Debbie McDonald's The Mysterious Lives of Moura Budberg on the spy and lover of H G Wells and Maxim Gorky.
Sayed Mahmoody’s Lost Without My Daughter a rejoinder to his wife’s Not Without my Daughter. Dutch, Hungarian and German rights sold.
Chris Marinello's Art Hunter : Searching for the World’s Missing Masterpieces, the memoirs of the director of the Art Loss Register.
Silent Food: making sense of the modern diet the modern equivalent of Rachel Carson’s iconic book on environmental toxins Silent Spring. by Stephanie Matthews and Anthony Campbell.
Christopher Moran’s Company Confessions: The CIA, Secrecy and Memoir Writing. US rights sold.
The memoirs of female private investigator Gina Negus The Lady Detectives.
Elizabeth Norton’s biography of the mother of Anne Boleyn Elizabeth Boleyn.
Bijan Omrani’s Caesar's Footprints looking at Caesar’s legacy in Gaul and Britain.
Mark Peel’s The Duke of Hamilton a life of the premier duke of Scotland whom Rudolph Hess sought in 1941 and who was also a Scottish amateur boxing champion, the first man to fly over Everest, a Conservative MP and the co-founder of the Scottish aviation industry.
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
Monica Porter’s Single, sexy and sixty a memoir and self help guide for the over-fifties.
Foreign correspondent Ros Russell’s Burma's Spring relating Burma’s emergence from military dictatorship to freedom.
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.
Joff Sharpe’s business tips drawn from his service in the SAS Who Dares Wins in Business: Doing business the SAS way
Gary Smith’s Duped by Data a collection of dozens of examples of tortuous reasoning,
Mandy Smith’s Cabin Fever a raunchy and hilarious, account of what it’s like to be a stewardess in the modern world of air travel.
Yinka Thomas’s revolutionary new The Konjac Diet a weight loss and weight management plan that incorporates what has been described as ‘the perfect food’ – Konjac.
Natacha Tormey’s memoir The Family: a childhood born into a religious cult.
Lee Trimble’s biography of his father Fighting Bastard of the Ukraine: The Story of Captain Robert M. Trimble which tells the extraordinary World War Two story of an US pilot who covertly smuggled over a thousand people to freedom, including American POWs, foreign slave labourers and concentration camp inmates from his airbase in the Ukraine.
Kerry Tyrrell-Parkes’s memoir Don't Call Me Madam about her double life of wedding photographer by day and owner of the North’s most successful escort agency by night.
Duncan Wade’s Ghosts of the Rhine about the American mistreatment of German POWs in 1945.
The Independent’s Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker’s history of Russia through the prism of the Bolshoi theatre Bolshoi: A history of Russia from Catherine the Great to Putin.
Caroline Young’s The Cool Guide to Edinburgh, the first in a proposed series revealing the coolest places in the city for visitors who want to discover what other guidebooks just don’t seem to cover.
David Haviland
Non-Fiction Submissions
Matt Shoard’s Thin Wild Mercury: The Voice of Bob Dylan, a collection of essays by Dylan fans including Paul Morley, George Galloway MP, and AL Kennedy.
Fiction Submissions
Kidon, an epic wartime revenge drama by Robert Dickinson, which unfolds over the course of three major twentieth century conflicts.
Dominic Adler’s hard-boiled thriller The Ninth Circle, featuring reluctant assassin Cal Winter and his enigmatic employers The Firm.
The Art of Letting Go a thoughtful and surprising drama about art and artifice by award-winning debut novelist Chloe Banks.
Warwick Cairns’ action-packed historical romp The Fall, set during the English Civil War.
Paul Callan’s The Dulang Washer, a powerful historical novel set in the tin mines of 19th century Malaya. Longlisted for the prestigious IMPAC Literary Award.
Casey Kelleher’s gritty sink estate crime novel, in the tradition of Martina Cole, Rise and Fall
Louisa Treger’s literary novel The Lodger, which tells the story of the passionate affair between writer Dorothy Richardson and H. G. Wells.
Mungo Lyon and the Adventure of the Double Headed Eagle, an old-fashioned spy thriller by Stephen O’Rourke, in the style of John Buchan.
Dominic Selwood’s The Sword Of Moses, an epic crypto-thriller in the style of Dan Brown, involving the Knights Templar, Nazis, and the Ark of the Covenant.
Forthcoming Books
Actress Emily Lloyd’s memoirs Wish I Was There
Cathy Glass’s fostering memoir Please Don’t Take My Baby
Reg Twigg’s World War Two memoir Survivor on the River Kwai
The paperbacks of :
Clare Mulley’s The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville
Geoffrey Roberts’ Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov
MJ Trow’s Maxwell's Crossing
Andrew Lownie will be talking about the future of agenting at the London Book Fair on Tuesday 16th April. A brief resume of some of his thoughts can be found at The Future of Agenting
Best wishes, Andrew Lownie and David Haviland
