Writing & Selling Your Memoir: How to Craft Your Life Story So That Somebody Else Will Actually Want to Read It

There's more to writing a memoir than just writing your life story.

A memoir isn't one long diary entry. Rather, it's a well-crafted story about a crucial, often exceptionally difficult, time in someone's life. Writing & Selling Your Memoir talks readers through the process of telling their most personal stories in a compelling, relatable, and readable manner. Unlike other books dedicated to the art and craft of writing memoir, it teaches readers how to approach the genre with love, respect, and know-how without sentimentalizing it.

Drawing on her experience working with New York Times best-selling memoirists, literary agent Paula Balzer carefully explores the genre and provides readers with step-by-step instruction on how to:

   • Identify strong opening and closing points
   • Find and develop a strong central hook that readers can relate to
   • Structure a memoir to maximize readability
   • Use dialogue and pacing to enhance intimacy
   • Approach honesty and truthfulness
   • Build a successful author platform around their memoir
   • Get an agent's attention
   • Get published


Full of tips, techniques, detailed exercises, and examples from best-selling memoirs as well as sidebars from well-known memoir authors, Writing & Selling Your Memoir teaches you how to approach an often tricky genre and tell your story without sentimentalizing it.

Paula Balzer is a literary agent for New York Times best-selling author Alexandra Robbins, Oscar-award winning writer Diablo Cody, and American Idol judge Randy Jackson amongst many more. In addition to her day job being a literary agent, she is the cofounder of Ad Hoc Mom (Ad Hoc Mom http://adhocmom.com) a popular, humorous blog centered around juggling being a parent while having a career. A recent transplant from Brooklyn, she lives in New Jersey with her family.