Book of revelations: How to make your celebrity tell-all memoir a hit

Celebrity autobiographies and their headline-making revelations are the hottest genre in publishing right now.

Candice Warner’s autobiography has a long run ahead to catch up to best sellers.

Candice Warner is forging ahead with her one-woman marketing campaign to flog copies of her autobiography Running Strong, in which she writes at length about the infamous Clovelly Hotel “toilet tryst”.

But even that won’t be enough to topple Prince Harry’s tell-all book Spare, which has seen publishers clamouring to get similar works into the market.

Not that anyone expects Warner to be able to take the crown. After all, she was rumoured to have been paid a comparatively minuscule advance of $80,000 for her book, compared to Prince Harry’s $20 million.

While there is no exact industry criteria or standard for what constitutes a bestseller in Australia, if a publisher manages to sell 30,000 copies, they are usually pretty happy.

Published back in January, according to Nielsen BookScan data Spare has sold more than 125,000 copies, placing it confidently in first position of all autobiographies sold in Australia for the year to date. Globally, sales of Spare, including audiobooks and ebooks, notched up 3.2 million copies in its first week.

Prince Harry has been criticised for revealing details of how the royal family operates behind closed doors.Credit: AP

By comparison, currently in second spot with 20,000 copies is I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. Sam Neill’s autobiography, released last month, is in third, having clocked up 14,000 sales ahead of Eddie Jaku’s Happiest Man On Earth, sitting on 13,000.

However, when it comes to all-time sales of autobiographies, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love is the standard-bearer, having racked up 564,000 sales in Australia. Mao’s Last Dancer by Li Cunxin is second with 426,000 while Jaku holds the third spot with 330,000 and in fourth is Anh Do’s Happiest Refugee, having notched up 315,000.

Clearly, Warner has a very long run ahead of her.

And it will be interesting to see what sales her husband and Australian cricket star David Warner’s yet-to-be published autobiography will do.

David Warner’s upcoming autobiography could yet meet the standard set by the book released by wife Candice.Credit: Getty

In recent months we’ve seen a multitude of Australian celebs release their autobiographies. Lisa Wilkinson, Lisa Curry, Ash Barty, Anthony Calea, Larry Emdur and even Courtney Act have been busy putting pen to paper to document their life stories.

They are going after the same dollars being spent on books by the likes of Barbra Streisand, who after 60-plus years in the spotlight is finally writing an autobiography, rather unimaginatively titled My Name Is Barbra.

It’s due out in November and, for the first time, she gives a first-hand account of her life and career, in which she has won Oscars, Golden Globes and Tonys. It’s been a long time coming. She was first approached to do a book back in the 1980s by no less than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis when she was an editor at publishing house Doubleday.

Streisand has certainly got a story to tell, but she follows in the footsteps of far less storied stars in the memoir stakes, like last month’s offering from Paris Hilton, Paris: The Memoir.

Paris Hilton released a memoir last month.Credit: AP

Among the “revelations” dished up is the earth-shattering news that Paris first heard her trademark phrase “that’s hot” from sister Nicky Hilton. Oh, and she felt hurt by Pink’s Stupid Girl music video.

Head of policy at the Australian Publishers Association, Dr Stuart Glover, says the celebrity autobiography has been a growing trend for years, though thanks to the advent of social media and the wider acceptance of first-person narratives, such works have now come into their own.

“It’s quite clear that publishers are more interested in celebrity bios, the media that attends to the literary world is interested in them, and to a significant extent, readers are also interested,” he says.

“Somewhat paradoxically, they are not necessarily the biggest sellers. By reputation, the biggest advances of all go to authors of the ‘spectacular’ celebrity biographies. Like Steve Waugh’s memoir, and those books have done incredibly well. There are smart people at the top of publishing companies, and they have done their sums on what they will sell in hardback, soft back, audiobooks and ebooks.

It has taken 60 years but Barbra Streisand is writing an account of her life.Credit: ninevms

“Celebrity memoirs are books we can all talk about in a way that is easier to do than say for a novel. We already have a view on David and Candice Warner in a way that we may not have about a novel.

“So from a publisher’s point of view you can have a lot more confidence in publishing a book by someone who is already visible and comprehendible than someone who is unknown.”

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