Biographers and the marketplace

I went biographer spotting last night. The annual summer bash of the Biographer's Club was meeting in the gardens of St Mary's Vicarage in Kensington, but I didn't have the address. Some ladies and gents in fine summer attire were clearly researching the buildings, while others wafted along with some purpose and clear sense of direction. They looked like a group of biographers to me, so I joined the flow and found my way.
It was a jovial early evening ... lots of folk to meet, bites to eat, drinks to sip while a guitarist and saxophonist (an American friend always creases with laughter when she hears this English term 'saxophonist') serenaded us from the terrace.
Meeting with my nonfiction agent on Friday I learned that biographers are an endangered species. Publishers aren't buying straight biographies (unless about celebrities) any more, literary biography being an especially stifled market. They bemoan the lack of editors apparently. Miss your deadline by a day and your contract is likely to be cancelled, or the terms renegotiated. Jane Mays of the Daily Mail, remembering the string of fine reviews for my Suffer & Survive, said how well I'd done to have such a long book accepted. Publishers now run shy of anything over 80,000 words. (In fact that was my own contractual limit, I won the right to go over by 20,000, and on submission the editor asked me for still more.)
I emerged into the sunlight of the vicarage garden from a day researching my next nonfiction project in the British Library. I find I'm noting my sources more assiduously than when I last started out, and am still comfortable making notes by pencil rather than taking in my laptop. It's a relief to win time away from the screen.
Biographers clam up when asked about their next project, as though others will steal it. It's reasonable I suppose, though highly unlikely. I was happy to be forthcoming last night - it's market research among peers, and I was buoyed by the positive response to me idea. I will wait a bit before airing it here though.
Biographers I spoke with do seem to be varying their approaches ... Jennifer Potter
writes biographies of plants, her new project being a cultural history of roses. Carola Hicks writes the biographies of paintings, her last book being about the Bayeux Tapestry. Katharine McMahon writes fictional biographies, most recently The Rose of Sebastopol. Katharine's website has an interesting page on researching the novel. I look forward to reading it as part of my own background research for my new project - and that's as much as I'm giving away for now!