I only recently realized that biographers often know their subjects throughout their lives. I can’t think of the particular example I heard (although the Queen and folks like that probably have them) but my question stands for any biographer, really.
So how would it work? If I was the Queen’s biographer, I’d spend my life following her around (or otherwise tracking her career); this would be a significant imposition upon my own life and career and it wouldn’t pay off in book sales until some time after her death, which wouldn’t do me much good in the mean time.
Does the Queen’s estate pay for it? Does a publishing house pay for it (paying my salary up front and recouping the costs in eventual book sales)? If so, who decides which publishing house?
I guess that most people who write and publish biographies of celebrities are involved with this person for other professional reasons as well. In the case of the British royal family, for instance, many biographers are employed or freelancing journalists who do regular coverage on the royals anyway. That doesn’t measn’t mean follow the subject of the biography wherever he or she goes is what they do all day long; it just means that they keep the person’s activities in view.
Many biographers are also university professors who teach and research on matters with which which the particular person deals. I don’t think it is very common to pay one’s own biographer (it would show that you are not as important as you think you are); the “authoritzed” or “official” biography label which is sometimes used to advertise biographies simply means that the book is endorsed by the person with whom it deals, not necessarily that it was paid for by the same.
Most biographies are not written by people who spend all their time following the biographee (that’s not a word, but it ought to be) around and documenting their life. McCullouch didn’t follow John Adams around – he was long dead.
Very little of note happens most days, and a biographer who is contemporaneously gathering information need not be beside his subject even when something does happen. Getting the subject’s reaction within a few days or weeks would surely be sufficient. The fact that a biography may read as if the biographer was constantly at the subject’s side is a simple deceit.
Class case in point: the classic biography, Boswell’s Life of Johnson. No real deceit, but Boswell’s artistry is so great that you’d think that he was constantly with Johnson, when actually there were many years when he spent most of his time at home in Scotland.
Publishers pay for biographies exactly like they pay for every other book written: based on how many copies they think it will sell. Only a tiny few of the most celebrated (or celebrity) biographies make back the time they put into the research and writing. That’s why most biographers, like most other writers, have to have a day job.