Turning one into a book someone will read is a craft: research, interviews, and the judgement to know which of a thousand true things belong on the page.
A person accumulates a great deal over a life, and almost none of it is written down anywhere. Your experience of getting through something is genuinely useful to someone currently in the middle of it, but only if it exists in a form they can read.
That is what a biography is for. Whether the story is what you achieved or what you survived, the work is the same: gather the material properly, establish what is true, and then use narrative rather than chronology to make a stranger care. The house has published biography since the nineteenth century, and the hard part has never been the facts.
These differ in who the book is for, which changes almost everything about how it is written. If you are not sure which yours is, that is a normal first question.
- 01
Public figure biography
For someone whose name is already known, the real incidents behind the public record, the milestones, and the difficulties that the public version leaves out.
- 02
Executive biography
Recognition within an industry rather than beyond it. How a business was built, what went wrong on the way, and what a founder or director would tell someone starting now.
- 03
Personal biography
For anyone whose life would help someone else get through theirs, illness, service, upheaval, ordinary endurance. Written in the first person, from your own account.
- 04
Portrait biography
A book about someone else: a parent, a mentor, someone you lost. Built from diaries, recordings, letters and the memories of the people who knew them.
- 05
Intellectual biography
A life of work rather than of events, for scientists, doctors and researchers. The ideas, the recognition, and the path that produced both.
Four commitments, and the third one is the one that separates biography from marketing.
- 01
Writers who work in the form
Biography is a distinct craft. Capturing the essence of a life and shaping it into something a reader will follow is not the same skill as writing fiction or business prose.
- 02
Built from your material
Each life is its own. The work begins by gathering what you have (calls, emails, documents, photographs) and the book is built from that rather than from a template with your details dropped in.
- 03
Checked before it is printed
Facts are researched, events verified, and sources cross-referenced. A biography that gets a date or a name wrong undermines every true thing next to it, and in a book about a real person that matters legally as well as editorially.
- 04
Handled confidentially
Personal stories are sensitive, and some of what you tell a biographer will be things you have told very few people. Nothing about the project leaves the house, and the NDA comes before the material does.
Eight steps, and you approve every chapter as it is written rather than reading the whole thing at the end.
Order details
The first conversation: whose life, for whom, and what you want the book to do. That last question shapes more of the work than anything else.
Research and outline
Your material is gathered and fact-checked, and an outline built chapter by chapter, the structure that decides what the book is about as opposed to what it contains.
Chapter approval
The first chapter is written and comes to you for approval, and then so does every chapter after it. You never see the book for the first time when it is finished.
Editing and proofreading
The completed manuscript edited and proofread by people who did not write it, for clarity and for accuracy both.
Formatting
The interior typeset properly: consistent headings, paragraph breaks and line spacing, so a three-hundred-page book is comfortable to read.
Design
The cover designed for the book, which for biography means conveying a person rather than a genre.
Publishing
The book produced and listed, in print and digital, so the people it was written for can actually get hold of it.
Marketing
Promotion across the platforms where its readers are, if you want it. Optional, and quoted separately.
A few of the people the house has worked with, in their own words.
I had eleven years of notes and no book. What I got back read like me on a good day, my turns of phrase, my arguments, and none of the padding I would have added myself. The first chapter arrived and I stopped worrying.
Marianne ElleryIndependent author The structural edit was not comfortable reading. It told me the second half started in the wrong place, which I had suspected for a year and nobody had said out loud. Moving three chapters fixed a problem I had been trying to solve with better sentences.
Devon AlukoIndependent author What sold me was being told I did not need half of what I had asked for. I came in wanting the full package and left with a cover, a proofread and an honest explanation of why the rest would not have helped yet.
Priya RaghunathanIndependent author Three cover directions, all of them plausible, none of them the thing I had described. The one I picked worked at the size that actually matters, I could recognise it in a list of forty other books, which is more than I can say for my first attempt.
Tobias HearnIndependent author I own the book outright and that was written down before I paid anything. After two years of being quoted percentages by people who would not put them in writing, that was the whole reason I stayed.
Cecile MarchandIndependent author The audiobook took longer than I expected and they told me why each time rather than going quiet. The narrator they cast got my grandmother's accent right, which I had assumed would be the thing I had to let go of.
Nathan BoakyeIndependent author
What people ask before putting a life into someone else's hands.
Perspective. A biography is an account of someone's life written by another person, which allows for an external and more objective view. An autobiography is self-written. A ghostwritten memoir sits between the two: written by a professional, but in your voice and from your position. All three are legitimate, and which you want is worth deciding early because it changes the whole approach.
By doing the parts that are hard to do alone: structured interviews, research into the events and the period, and the narrative craft that turns a set of true episodes into something with shape. Most people trying to write a life story stall not for lack of material but for lack of a structure to put it in.
Yes, and it is common work. The book is built from what survives (documents, letters, diaries, recordings, photographs) together with the accounts of people who knew them. Where the record is genuinely incomplete the book will say so rather than invent a bridge, which is the difference between a biography and a story about someone.
Backgrounds in literature, journalism or related fields, and practical experience in research, interviewing and narrative. What matters most in this form is the interviewing: the book is only as good as what the subject was willing to say, and getting that out of someone is a learned skill.
Scope and focus. A biography is a comprehensive account of a life, including the wider context it happened in. Life-story writing concentrates on personal experience, emotion and reflection, and is usually more intimate and less concerned with the record. Neither is better; they suit different intentions and different readers.
You do, completely. The author holds 100% of the rights to their work, in every format, for its whole life. The house is paid for the work it does, not with a share of the book. That is the arrangement the house reopened in 2008 to offer, and it does not change with the tier, the price or the point at which you come to us.
Yes. Your name is on the cover and in the record. Everyone who works on the book (writer, editor, designer) works on your book, and none of them is credited on it unless you ask for them to be.
Yes. Your story is yours, and nothing about the project leaves the house. We will sign your NDA before you send anything, or supply ours if you would rather use one.
No. Six disciplines are available and you take the ones you need. Authors arrive here at every stage (with an idea, a half-draft, or a finished manuscript that only needs a cover and a shelf) and the work starts where you actually are.
It depends on the work: length, how much research is involved, how much of the book already exists, and which disciplines you need. There is no list price for a book, and any firm who gives you one before reading your material is quoting something other than your book. Tell us where you are and we will price the actual job.
Move the marker. You do not need to know what to call it: you only need to know where you are.
Tell us where your manuscript is, where you want it to go, and we'll show you what's possible.