You Should Really Write a Book: How to Write, Sell, and Market Your Memoir - Softcover

Brooks, Regina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312609345 ISBN 13: 9780312609344

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2012

Synopsis

Even if you don't happen to be a celebrity, this book will teach you methods for striking publishing gold―conceptualizing, selling, and marketing a memoir―while dealing with the complicated emotions that arise during the creation of your work.

If you've ever been told that "You should really write a book" and you've decided to give it a try, this book is for you. It hones in on the three key measures necessary for aspiring authors to conceptualize, sell, and market their memoirs. Written especially for those who don't happen to be celebrities You Should Really Write a Book reveals why and how so many relatively unknown memoirists are making a name for themselves.

With references to more than four hundred books and six memoir categories, this is essential reading for anyone wanting to write a commercially viable memoir in today's vastly changing publishing industry. The days are long gone when editors and agents were willing to take on a manuscript simply because it was based on a "good" idea or even because it was well written. With eyes focused on the bottom line, they now look for skilled and creative authors with an established audience, too.

Brooks and Richardson use the latest social networking, marketing, and promotional trends and explain how to conceptualize and strategize campaigns that cause buzz, dramatically fueling word-of-mouth and attracting attention in the publishing world and beyond. Full of current examples and in-depth analysis, this guide explains what sells and why, teaches writers to think like publishers, and offers guidance on dealing with complicated emotions―essential tools for maximizing memoir success.

About this title

About the Author

Regina Brooks is a literary agent and member of the AAR, and an author, editor, publisher, and member of the guest faculty for MFA programs around the country. Well known on the writer's conference circuit she is also a faculty member of the Harvard Writers Course. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Brenda Lane Richardson, MSW, is the author of ten books, a recipient of the PEN-Oakland Literary Award, a journalist, and a New York University–trained social worker. She lives in Berkley, California, where she uses memoir writing as a therapeutic tool.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Learning from Memoir’s History

As you envision fans around the world reading and discussing your work, a sign that you’ve made it to the top in today’s highly competitive world of publishing, it might be tempting to skip this chapter about the history of the memoir. In focusing on your future, you might wonder why you should read about the past, especially as far back as A.D. 400. It might seem that someone putting a quill to parchment more than 1,600 years ago has nothing to do with selling a memoir that you’re writing now. We beg to differ.
Reading about how memoirs were sold in the past has a great deal to do with the commercial viability of your manuscript today. There’s actually truth to the maxim that you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. It’s important to look back at the early history of personal writing because events way back then set the stage for what’s going to be required for your memoir to succeed today. So we want to take you back, all the way back.

Saint Augustine: One of the First Memoirists
During the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Augustine of Hippo, a Catholic bishop and theologian from Algeria, raised more than a few eyebrows when he wrote that his early life had been ruled by lust. In a series of books aptly entitled Confessions, he detailed his moral transgressions, including petty theft as a youngster, and later, having sex outside of marriage—lots of it and often, including with a mistress, with whom he had a child.

All of that came to an end, Augustine explained, when, while meditating in a garden, he heard the voice of a child urging him to read. Opening the Bible, Augustine’s heart was opened to God. Today, Augustine—who was later named a saint—is considered one of the most important figures in the ancient Western church, and is credited with practically inventing the genre of autobiography. Initially, the term “memoir” was not widely used in publishing. Autobiographies were the antecedents to memoirs.

Confessions, written long before the invention of the printing press and at a time of widespread illiteracy, was recognized early on as being of such great spiritual and intellectual importance that scribes produced hand-written copies, which is one reason it is still around today to be read and discussed by leading scholars.

With a mea culpa to the saint, we plan to measure Confessions with the same yardstick that you will find throughout Part II, to help explain how and why some memoirs sell. Of course in the fifth century, the word “sell” when referring to books had a different meaning. There were no Amazon.com rankings, bestsellers lists, or Nielsen BookScan reports that detail how many copies of each book are selling in individual markets such as Los Angeles or Rhode Island. Sales activity back in the days of Confessions refers to what transpired to convince people that this was a work they wanted to read and discuss. In other words, we’re interested in what generated the buzz that elevated this Algerian bishop’s book above others.

What made Confessions a hit back then is connected to the same elements significant for selling a book today. We will describe these elements by prefacing the information with a dollar sign ($) to help alert you to what to look for in your own work if you’re hoping editors will acquire your manuscript. Most bestselling memoirs have at least two out of three of the following elements: (1) $trong writing, (2) $trong hook, and (3) $trong platform. Beginning with the first element, let’s examine Saint Augustine’s narrative, using a rubric of 1–10 points per category.

$Writing Chops
Saint Augustine’s early training was in rhetoric, at the time a major field of study. Trained in communication, he knew how to write and speak persuasively. In Confessions you feel St. Augustine’s moments of sadness, his longings, and sense of loss and joy. Saint Augustine’s work is still read widely and discussed by theologians, clerics, and lay people. Many continue to marvel that his story reflects their own interior lives, and that it was written with a touch of humor. This is the man who famously prayed, “Give me chastity and continence—but not yet.” In other words, the man could write. His score on this count is 10 out of 10.

$Narrative Hook
The best way to understand a narrative hook is to consider how hooks are used as tools in everyday life. We use hooks to keep things in easy reach: an oven mat, keys, or a towel. Similarly, a narrative hook implies accessibility. Picture an acquisitions editor meeting with your literary agent. What would you want your agent to say right off the bat? What would make your story sound accessible in a few words? Hopefully it would be something that intrigues the editor and is considered memorable. It should come to mind easily and telegraph your story’s appeal. Like a news report, a hook should be of interest to a great number of people.

A good narrative hook can be one sentence or a phrase that grabs a reader’s interest, and explains the plot succinctly. Imagine that the hook to Confessions might have been, “From sinner to saint...” Crass, admittedly, but our guess is that even back in ancient societies there were folks like Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino (we sure hope so). As Stendhal pointed out in Memoirs of an Egotist, published posthumously in 1892, “Great success is not possible without a certain degree of shamelessness....”

Although good timing isn’t always necessary when trying to hook a reader, it can be helpful. But don’t wait for the right time; make the time right. To understand the importance of timing, imagine using a real hook and trying to grab someone. It would make your job easier if someone was moving past just as you reached out.

GOING VIRTUAL
Given that by 2012 the newspaper industry was half as big as it had been seven years earlier, you might be tempted to believe that newspapers are history, but au contraire. While an estimated one-third of U.S. newsrooms have disappeared, other companies are continuing to cover their markets—in print and/or online—with fewer reporters while continuing to look for content (written by various writers, and that could mean you). Community newspapers and those with national footprints seem to be holding ground. And there are also more online news organizations, as well as newspaper editions using bloggers to keep the public informed on local stories. So in your effort to build a platform, don’t ignore old media in favor of new. It can be beneficial to incorporate both in your plans. To that end, keep an eye on newspaper Web sites, because that’s precisely what editors at understaffed organizations are doing: trolling the sites of established media, and searching for content and story ideas. Getting stories, essays, letters, reviews, or your blog into a newspaper can help you build an audience, especially if the publication will include your online contact information at the end of the piece.

Author Susan Gregory Thomas used newspapers to great effect in the marketing of her memoir In Spite of Everything (Random House: 2011). Three weeks before the book’s publication, she was one of several people interviewed in a New York Times feature, “How Divorce Lost Its Cachet.” The story and Gregory Thomas’s book examined trends that suggest a reluctance to divorce among college-educated Generation Xers, in response to growing up in the shadow of the high rate of marital failures of their baby boomer parents. The feature story also ran on the paper’s popular Web site, which has more than 34.5 million unique monthly visitors. Three days before the release of Thomas’s memoir, one of her essays, “The Divorce Generation,” ran in the paper with the largest U.S. weekly circulation, The Wall Street Journal. A week later, her book ranked an impressive 1,345 at Amazon. This ranking does not reflect sales on the site or in other retail outlets, but indicates the frequency by which a title is searched on Amazon.

Susan Gregory Thomas has written for a number of publications and surely has contacts in the media. Following are some suggestions for those hoping to replicate her success:
Read local and national newspapers, print and/or online to keep up with stories, that might intersect with your work, providing the opening you need for writing a feature, or to interest an editor in developing a story around your topic.

Identify which staffers cover topics that intersect with your interests. As you develop an expertise, write to these journalists and their editors, submitting stories or essays on your chosen subject, including interviews with experts.
The idea is to interest a journalist in a topic that might be the subject of an essay or feature, written by a staffer or perhaps by you (this might lead eventually to a review of your book, once it is published).

Contacting a journalist is more effective with traditional mail. Journalists receive little snail mail. Busy with deadlines, they are unlikely to open mail with computer-generated labels and metered postage. Send a typed letter, no longer than two-thirds of a page, in a hand-addressed envelope with a postage stamp.
Identify bloggers who cover your topic and offer to guest blog.
Attempting to get into The New York Times is always worth a try, especially when the Sunday print edition has 1.35 million readers, and when so many publishing professionals relax over this paper.

Pay particular attention to feature pages and Op-Ed sections of several major newspapers. You can find a listing by Googling “U.S. newspaper circ...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0312609345
• ISBN 13: 9780312609344
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304