On Writing and Selling Memoir

Because that’s what I do.  Unless you write Eat, Pray, Love , writing memoir is unlikely to make you a living.  Also, traditional marketing isn’t going to get you there – there meaning many sales and interviews on NPR or whatever your media choice is.

What sells memoir is word of mouth.  I now quote

“… Fiction, poetry, and memoirs are word-of-mouth driven.  They sell because friends recommend them to each other. …  Publicity can help you get the word-of-mouth going for these kinds of books, but it’s mostly a means to an end.   

The best way to generate word-of-mouth: write a damn fine book”  (The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Marketing)

How to write a “damn fine book?”  Learn your craft.  Read, read, read (the best in your genre) then write.  Do that again and again.

Join a good writers group.  Good writers groups discuss characters, flow, hooks and sense of place. They tell you what is working and not working.

They do NOT spend ten minutes discussing whether or not you should have used a colon vs a semi-colon   That is why you have the Chicago Book of Style.

Learn your craft. Invoke all the senses.  Give your story the writing it deserves.

Treat it like a job, a vocation.  Set aside an inviolate time to write/read, the same time every day.  Inviolate.  If you miss work, you’re fired.  That kind of inviolate.

That’s what I’ve learned so far.  Now to live it.

First create the schedule. The nothing will interfere schedule.   That “same time every day” was what had stopped me before.  Between exercise classes, church commitments,  and service clubs, I didn’t have the same time available every day.  Then I realized I could treat it like a part time job with a varied schedule.  As if I worked at Lowe’s.  Tuesdays I open.  Wednesdays I close.  Still a set schedule just not the same time every day.  I’m doing this.

I posted my work schedule on the door where both Parker and I can see it.

“I’ll tell people, doctors making appointments, auto service people, I can’t do it then.  I have to work.  This is it.  This comes first.”

“This is when I’m not to talk to you?”

“Right.”

Step 1.  Check