Dear newsletter subscriber,
The agency’s big news this month was the launch of Thistle Publishing, a digital and p.o.d. publishing imprint, which uses Amazon publishing programme White Glove to release e-books and print-on-demand copies of mainly backlist titles where the e-book rights are not controlled by a publisher. David Haviland will be overseeing Thistle, with the first title, Conclave by Mary Hollingsworth, an account of the 1559 papal election, already released to capitalise on its newsworthiness. The White Glove programme pays 70% on receipts to authors, if the e-books are priced between £1.49 and £7.81, and the agency will only take its usual 15% commission. The agency will also be paying publicists to support some of the titles and designing the books’ covers.
Thistle is simply an additional agency service, designed to complement our core focus of securing major deals with international trade publishers. Thistle will be an effective option for certain books that don’t fit the conventional model; books where publishers don’t see the market, but we do; out-of-print titles that have enduring appeal; or situations where mainstream publishers can’t publish quickly enough. The agency will still be acting as agents - but we are giving a brand and authority, through Thistle, to these particular books, and giving authors the opportunity to earn additional revenue while we showcase the books for film, domestic and foreign rights.
Titles lined up for February release include Rasputin: The Untold Story by Joseph Fuhrmann, a biography of the Russian mystic; The Soldier: : A History of Courage, Sacrifice and Brotherhood by Darren Moore, about the changing role of the military; and A Polar Bear Ate My Head, : Confessions of a reluctant lad’s mag editor by Paul Merrill, a memoir of setting up a lads’ magazine in the UK and Australia.
On Publishersmarketplace Andrew Lownie continues his run as the top UK non-fiction dealmaker with 27 deals in this category in the last 12 months | 22 in the last 6 months | 95 overall | 10 six-figure+ deals. The agent in second place has 15 deals in the last twelve months.
Recent Sales
Pan Macmillan have bought the autobiography of ‘The Only Way is Essex’ star Kirk Norcross, Essex Boy
Constable have commissioned Mei Trow’s book on World War Two slang Swearing Like A Trooper for publication later this year.
US rights in Jonathan Conlin’s Tales of Two Cities: Paris and London, 1750-1914, to be published by Atlantic in June, have been bought by Counterpoint.
Turkish and Finnish rights to Nicholas Best’s Five Days That Shocked The World: An Oral History of Europe at the End of World War Two
Chinese rights to Sean McMeekin’s July 1914: Countdown to War
Hungarian rights to Clare Mulley’s The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville
Korean rights in Christian Wolmar’s railway history Blood, Iron and Gold
Danish rights in Charlotte Zeepvat’s The Camera and the Tsars: A Romanov Family Album
Recent Successes
The memoirs of former customs officer and SOCA agent Cam Addicott, The Interceptor, co-authored by Kris Hollington, has been given a green-light for an 8-episode first season on BBC 1.
David Day’s Antarctica: A Biography was Times Book of the Week.
Cathy Glass’s fostering memoir Another Forgotten Child remained in the paperback non-fiction chart for a nineteenth week. Her memoir Cut is no 8 on the New York Times e book best seller list this week whilst Damaged: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Broken Child went to no 23 . Casey Watson’s fostering memoir The Boy No one Loved: A heartbreaking true story of Abuse, Abandonment and Betrayal reached no 30 in the same list .
David Haviland is featured on the cover of February’s Writers’ Forum magazine.
You Can’t Hide ghosted by agency author Ruth Kelly, serialised for two weeks in the Mail on Sunday, was no 8 in the Sunday Times earlier in the month.
Neil McKenna’s Fanny & Stella continues to garner excellent reviews across a wide range of media from Gay City News in New York to The Daily Telegraph:
Ian Millthorpe and Lynne Barrett-Lee’s Mum's Way, a widower’s account of raising eight children is serialised in the Mail on Sunday this weekend.
Daniel Tammet had an astonishing three books in Amazon France’s top ten bestsellers. In fact, if it weren’t for the Fifty Shades phenomenon, he would have taken positions 1, 2 and 4.
Andrew Lownie
Current Submissions
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 Cows, coffee and cling-film.
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.
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
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.
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 Art Hunter : Searching for the World’s Missing Masterpieces, the memoirs of the director of the Art Loss Register.
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.
Elizabeth Norton’s biography of the mother of Anne Boleyn Elizabeth Boleyn.
Sonia Oatley's poignant memoir of her murdered daughter Bye, Mam, I love you.
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.
Gary Smith’s Duped by Data a collection of dozens of examples of tortuous reasoning,
Duncan Wade’s Ghosts of the Rhine about the American mistreatment of German POWs in 1945.
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
Dominic Adler’s hard-boiled thriller The Ninth Circle, featuring reluctant assassin Cal Winter and his enigmatic employers The Firm.
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. Currently fourth favourite for the prestigious IMPAC Literary Award.
Casey Kelleher’s gritty sink estate crime novel, in the tradition of Martina Cole, Heartless.
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.
Andrew Lownie’s Some Tips on Approaching an Agent is the latest posting in Articles
Best wishes, Andrew Lownie and David Haviland
