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Have they got books for you

09.11.07 Liz Bury

Will Tony Blair earn out his generous (rumoured) £4.6m advance? Random House will certainly hope that the former prime minister's international appeal translates into fulsome sales. But the public's taste for political memoirs can be remarkably fickle: how well are Blair's book and others from his era, including Prezza: Pulling No Punches, coming in May, and Cherie Blair: The Autobiography, due in October, likely to sell?

"History proves that ex-prime minister's tend do well compared to lesser mortals," Alan Samson, publisher of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, says. "Margaret Thatcher, John Major—they both did well. Foreign publishers all queue up; you get a few hundred thousand for translation rights."

Stuart Proffitt, publishing director, Penguin Press, who was closely involved in publishing both Thatcher's and, at the beginning, Major's books—before he left HarperCollins following a row over Chris Patten's memoirs—agrees that there is a degree to which sales of former PMs' autobiographies are "copper-bottomed", but that sales will also reflect the quality of the book.

"John [Major] wrote a very candid and winning book, a convincing personal portrait of his frame of mind and what he did," Proffitt says. "And Mrs Thatcher's strength of conviction during her time in office came across in a very compelling way. They both sold very well indeed." Thatcher's The Downing Street Years was published by HarperCollins in 1993, but Nielsen BookScan figures don't go back that far. John Major: The Autobiography (1999) also from HarperCollins, sold 90,000 through BookScan's General Retail Market; the more comprehensive Total Consumer Market only began in January 2001.

About Blair's book, Proffitt says: "Like all memoirs there will no doubt be an element of self-justification. The book's success will depend on the degree to which he is prepared to be truly candid in different areas, and how coherent and convincing he is in writing retrospectively about his time in office. Iraq will obviously be the most closely examined, and that is a subject on which he will have to be particularly persuasive."

Former Conservative prime minister Edward Heath is the "exception" to the rule about ex-leaders, Samson says, because his book was published nearly 30 years after leaving office. "Yes, broadly, the sooner it comes the more it will sell," Proffitt says. "Unless it comes at some unfortunate moment in the political cycle. I imagine Random House will wait until the election is over in spring 2009, and [Blair's] book will come in the autumn so it doesn't interfere with the electoral process."

Clinton bar high

Susan Sandon, managing director of Random House division CHA, which will publish Blair, says his book was "one we were very, very keen to do. Tony Blair's qualities of leadership are very much ongoing." With friends and colleagues still in office, and such an active political role, won't Blair feel restricted as to what he can write? "The fact that he's got an ongoing political profile can only be of benefit. I can't see it would be a disadvantage. He has said that he will be frank but not disloyal."

Random House set the bar high with Bill Clinton's My Life in 2004, which has sold 385,000 copies -worldwide, and this year reignited the market for political memoirs in the UK with Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years, which RH says has sold 130,000 copies in all markets. "Marks & Spencer is trialling it as part of its range," Sandon says. "Returns are practically zero. It will be interesting to see where we end up at Christmas. People looked at Blunkett [The Blunkett Tapes] and said it wouldn't work—we've proved them wrong."

Joe Browes, Waterstone's politics and education buyer, is "convinced that at least half the reason the Campbell book did so well is because there was no serial deal. He is a master media svengali, so you'd expect him to get it right." Samson, too, says: "You do start to wonder if it helps to get stories in a newspaper and then have the other papers all trashing the book."

Will Blair's book be serialised? "We will have to look at the circumstances when we come to publish," Sandon says. "With Campbell, we'd have been mad not to consider the effect of a serial on the marketplace."

Opinion divided

Beyond the obvious pull of an ex-PM, views differ as to what makes sales of a political memoir take off or not. Browes says that "if it's someone the public has strong feelings about—negative or positive", then that tends to drive sales. "Alastair Campbell or Alan Clark, for example. A lot of people who weren't Tory voters or wouldn't choose to have Clark as a friend bought his books."

Browes picks out The Oona King Diaries: House Music (Bloomsbury), published in September, as an example of an MP who is too "nice" to drive sales. "She's a bit middling and her book hasn't troubled the bestseller lists. With Campbell, there are a lot of amusing scenes and snidey asides. He makes mundane stuff interesting."

After politics, publishing

Proffitt believes that a significant part of the appeal of political memoirs is in their being "a first draft of his-tory, from people who have been at the very centre of events that made that history". To guarantee success they must be "enjoyable, important and convicing", he says. "If Blair's book scores on those points, people will be more likely to buy it."

But Samson wonders if the public's appetite for books where politicians set out their political record is fading. "Too many politicians want a monument to their time in office," he says. "But there is diminishing curiosity about parliamentary politics, especially as parliament's power erodes. Some books are hidebound by parliamentary minutiae. Think about Blair's indifference—hostility even—to Prime Minister's Question Time. There is nowadays more curiosity about international politics."

Samson has recently worked with former British ambassador to the US Christopher Meyer, on his controversial D C Confidential. "The world has changed. We're dealing with global figures," Samson says. "There's an indifference to parliamentary politics."

The immediacy of a diary is often more fruitful than a retrospective, Samson notes; he even goes as far as to say that politicians may learn from celebrity memoirs. "Celebrity confessionals, human fallibility is what the market wants. Politicians haven't caught up yet."

Waterstone's Browes isn't entirely convinced that the chain's "quite serious market" of customers who "come in looking for these books" is ready for celebrity-style political memoirs, however. "It varies from politician to politician. If you're Edwina Currie, you might feel that you will sell more copies with a personal revelation rather than the political minutiae. And Campbell has never shied away from talking about his personal problems. But we won't see a sudden wave of Chantelle-type books. David Cameron: Living the Dream—I can't see it, somehow."

Even so, expectations are high for John Prescott's autobiography, for which publisher Headline has matched the politician with celebrity ghostwriter Hunter Davies (Being Gazza and Wayne Rooney: My Story). "With Prezza, if it's a ‘Carry On'-style romp about all the people he's worked with, it could work," Browes says. "He might insist on taking it very seriously and being self-aggrandising. But if he's working with Hunter it could be a rip-roaring read. He's certainly had a life."

With Cherie Blair, the jury is out as to which way sales may swing. "It depends what aspects she decides to concentrate on," Browes says. "It depends what she feels she's able to reveal. If she plays her cards too close to her chest, it might not sell. There are a lot of people with a lot of emnity towards her—but that could work in her favour." Based on Browes' logic, Cherie Blair's book is a potential chart-topper: last Saturday night in the Kentish town of Edenbridge, the Bonfire Society burned a "celebrity guy" in the image of Cherie, clutching a copy of her book, as part of its Guy Fawkes celebrations.

The forthcoming wave of post-Blair books will be the first political memoirs documenting a party's sustained period in office to be subjected to the unblinking scrutiny of BookScan's TCM: many post-Thatcher books came before sales monitoring began in earnest. While Random House is poised to benefit the most, especially as it now controls publication of Blair's book and has a forward programme for Campbell—"People forget that The Blair Years is only extracts from his diaries. There are 1.5 million words in all," Sandon says—the book sales game will be a new kind of popularity contest.

Flagship Feature Liz Bury Random House Tony Blair

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