We don’t hide our hope that you’ll come to Write My Memoirs if you want an editor to help you professionalize your writing. Of course we want to work with you! But we’re truthful about it—not everyone needs to hire an editor. We designed this “decision tree” to help you determine whether your memoir would benefit from hiring a professional editor. If you do decide to work with an editor, we would love to step into that role for you.
Linda Strader was getting nothing but rejections when she pitched her memoir to agents and publishers. But a couple of rejection letters became her saving grace when she took their advice:
After a total rewrite based on that information, Strader’s memoir, Summers of Fire, is now on bookstore shelves, thanks to an acceptance from publisher Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company. At editingpen.net, Strader shares tips for making it happen:
If you do all of that, Strader concludes, “readers will relate.” And when readers can relate to your book, publishers will want to get your book out there.
Do you write a personal or professional blog? If so, you probably have a lot of really good material, already written and illustrated, that’s just sitting there. Adapt some of your best blog work to a book format, and now you have something to hand out and even sell. And it’s so easy.
Every Christmas, I exchange gifts with a longtime friend. This past Christmas I was trying to figure out a nice gift for her when I had a thought: what if I took one aspect of her personal blog and “stole” the text and photos to make her a little paperback book with her own name as the author? Would that work? Would it be cool?
I knew that her blog addressed many sides of her life—travels, family, home decor, food and quite a bit about her pets. When I went to her blog, I saw that both of her dogs had died earlier in the year. At each passing, she wrote a beautiful tribute and posted lots of images covering the dog’s entire life and all of the people who spent time with that dog. She also had posts about the dogs while they were alive. I did a copy-and-paste on each of those entries and downloaded all of the images. I organized the material, devoting a chapter to each dog sandwiched between end pages of quotes that my friend posted about her pets. It turned out to be mostly a picture book, with just enough text to provide some color and clarity. I didn’t write a word; every bit of text was lifted from the blog.
To publish the book, I used the normal format we offer our Write My Memoirs authors: a perfect-bound paperback. Since it was largely a picture book, I made the width greater than the height/length. I created a PDF for our regular Write My Memoirs printer, and everything went smoothly. I was very happy with the result and had the book in my hands in plenty of time to ship some copies off to my friend.
As you might guess, this little 40-page book was a huge hit. She tells me it was the best gift her family received and was passed around multiple times as everyone was opening gifts on Christmas night. We would love to do the same thing for you—turn your blog into a book or help you present this type of gift to a friend who writes a blog. You can gather the essentials, or just provide a link to the blog and we’ll be the “curator” for you. Email us at su*****@************rs.com, or go to our Publishing page and get started! Books bring joy!
What’s the best valentine you’ve ever received? Maybe your partner wrote you a heartfelt note about how much you are cherished, or a child drew hearts on a card to present to you. Perhaps someone wrote a song for you or created a little video of your relationship. You know what else makes a really nice valentine? A love memoir. It’s just taking the card, the video or the song up a notch to create a whole book.
Relationships are complex, but happy relationships have love at the core. Write about that love. You can start anywhere, but the obvious place to begin is to talk about how you met. Did you “meet cute”? Were you fixed up? Was it love at first sight? A memoir like 
this can chronicle some of the rougher times, too, but that will shift the focus. A valentine memoir probably should stick to the positive.
Gather photos of the two of you and really look at them. Can you see love in the eyes? Can you tell that you each feel safe with the other? Choose pics that show playfulness and intimacy, and place them throughout your love memoir. Watch the years go by in those photographs. If you have children together, you can include some pics of the kids—or pets you’ve nurtured together.
A love memoir doesn’t need to have a lot of pages, just enough for a printer to bind it. You can create it as either a paperback or a hard-cover book. A hard cover makes it more durable, and then the book can go large like a coffee table book or you still can keep it small. Imagine handing that to your favorite person in the world as something to treasure forever. Now that’s a thoughtful valentine!
Please consider our publishing services at Write My Memoirs when you’re ready to publish any book!
Thank you to today’s guest blogger Julie Ann Toomey, author of the memoir Failure to Thrive: My Journey to Mental Health. Julie Ann tells Write My Memoirs:
This book has been a long time coming. Even in high school I wanted to write a book about my life. I found myself writing down experiences in story form to use
later. I have always wanted to share what I went through so others might understand the struggles a person with mental illness deals with. The push finally came when a business mentor challenged me to do so. I’d been collecting stories for years—I figured it would be easy.
It wasn’t! Through tears, heartache and pain, there was realization, amazement and therapy. It was the hardest, most therapeutic thing I’ve ever done. I discovered so much about myself, but also about others in my life.
Failure to Thrive: My Journey to Mental Health is an emotional roller coaster you won’t want to put down. It’s raw. It’s honest. It’s hopeful. It’s also 100% true and accurate, as far as I could see the truth at the time. Mental illnesses cause the truth to become skewed in ways those not suffering have a hard time understanding. This book shows it. Truth is universal, but perception is everything. This shows the perception of the truth a mental illness forces you to have. Anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder are a real part of life. They need to be understood.
Read this book. Come to understand it. Use it to help others when they need it. Be the change this world needs.
I noticed an ad in the obituary section of my local Chicago Tribune that said something along the lines of: “Every life story deserves to be told. Send in yours about your loved one.” This notice made me sad. While it might make you smile to think of your spouse, child or grandchild honoring you after your death by taking out an ad in a newspaper to publish a few paragraphs about your life, it’s nothing compared to a whole book that you write about your life in your own voice! In your autobiography, written well before your death, you take control of how your life is remembered.
It’s not unusual for a book we publish at Write My Memoirs to contain observations that come as a complete surprise to the author’s friends and family. Often, people don’t talk much about their childhood, wartime military service, traumatic events or some other aspect of their lives. The process of writing a memoir brings out those buried memories and the feelings the person experienced at the time. Also, details regarding names, dates and places are known only to the author. If that information isn’t written down, it often is lost once the person is no longer alive to report it.
Writing a biography of someone else is a rewarding task, too, but even that is much easier while the person is still alive to answer questions. If you’re thinking of writing about your own life or someone else’s, there’s no time like the present!
Everything looks new at Write My Memoirs, because everything is new! We have a new look and many new features. If you’re already a member, your work is still safe where you left it. Just follow the sign-in instructions, and you will find your account. If you’re just joining now, welcome! We hope your experience is rewarding as you set out to write and perhaps publish your memoir. We will help you along the way! From now on, we will be updating the Write My Memoirs blog regularly. Meanwhile, feel free to poke around at previous posts, where we’ve discussed many aspects of writing an autobiography.
Each life is unique; each life story is valuable and, typically, quite entertaining. You can gather up everything you’ve been posting on social media and cobble together a pretty compelling narrative. So tell us: when are you planning to write your autobiography? At Write My Memoirs, we can help you get started, avoid writer’s block in the middle of the process and publish your work when you’ve completed your book. We want to help—leave us a comment!
Continuing with our look at William Zinsser’s essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” I want to share with you Zinsser’s thoughts about publishing a memoir. At Write My Memoirs, we encourage you to publish your work in some form—but that does not have to be traditional book form. Zinsser says:
“When my father finished writing his histories he had them typed, mimeographed, and bound in a plastic cover. He gave a copy, personally inscribed, to each of his three daughters, to their husbands, to me, to my wife, and to his 15 grandchildren, some of whom couldn’t yet read. I like the fact that they all got their own copy; it recognized each of them as an equal partner in the family saga. How many of those grandchildren spent any time with the histories I have no idea. But I’ll bet some of them did, and I like to think that those 15 copies are now squirreled away somewhere in their houses from Maine to California, waiting for the next generation.”
Zinsser adds that being a memoirist doesn’t necessarily mean you aspire to being a “published author.” The memoir writing itself, he says, is valuable:
“Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is that it allows you to come to terms with your life narrative. It also allows you to work through some of life’s hardest knocks—loss, grief, illness, addiction, disappointment, failure—and to find understanding and solace.” Very true!
For many people, writing a memoir is actually the easy part; the challenging part is publishing it in a form that looks like a real book. At Write My Memoirs, we help our members make that happen.
Formatting for publication can be especially difficult when you include old family photographs. You have to scan the photographs, upload them onto your page and lay out the page to accommodate the photograph. When you have color photos, you have to decide whether to publish them in color, which is more expensive, or convert them to black and white. If you’re not familiar with photo resizing and manipulation, fonts, page layout tricks and a few principles of design, you may have trouble with all of this. You also need patience! Visually, your book becomes a puzzle to assemble. Even if you group all of your photos together instead of using them to illustrate your work throughout, you still need to make them look good. A border around each photo can add polish, and captions can help the reader figure out who’s who.
At Write My Memoirs we make it easy on you. Through email and phone calls, we listen to exactly how you want your book to appear and do all of the formatting for you. All you have to do is upload the text and images into your account on our website or email it all to us. We hope you contact us when you’re ready to publish—and we’ll do the rest!
Last week’s post about the relationship between a memoir and a self-help guide inspired me to look further into the differences between the two. I found a listing of “do’s and don’ts” for each genre at nonfictionbookeditor.com, although keep in mind that the advice addresses authors who would like to publish their work for mass distribution, whereas here at Write My Memoirs you may want to publish just a few copies for friends and relatives.
The author of that blog contends that readers are looking for either a targeted self-help with instructions and a call to action on how to overcome one of life’s hurdles or reach the next rung of some ladder, or they want to read an entertaining and perhaps uplifting account of someone’s life that may have lessons regarding a common personal struggle but will be too personal to apply broadly.
Confusion between the two genres occurs when the book focuses mainly on how a single problem has been overcome by the author. That is effective as neither a memoir nor a self-help, according to the NonfictionBookEditor blog. If you’re writing a self-help, you should research it beyond what you’ve learned from your own experience, because everyone’s situation will be a little different from yours. If you’re writing a memoir, you should not narrow your focus so much that it’s an account only of your single personal struggle without the greater context of other aspects of your life. I think that’s good advice.
Then just set up a chapter and start writing your memoir. Don’t worry about rules. There are no rules to writing your memoir; there are only trends. These trends are based on techniques and features identified in current top-selling memoirs. At best, they’re the flavor of the month. If you’re capturing your life in print for your family, for your own gratification or to inspire readers, rather than aiming to set off Hollywood screenplay bidding wars, these trends don’t even apply to you. You’ll write the memoir that suits you best, and it will be timeless, not trend-driven.There are no rules, but there are four steps:
1. Theme/framework
2. Writing
3. Editing/polishing
4. Self-publishing
You’ve researched this, too, and you’ve been shocked at the price for getting help with any one of those steps, much less all four. That’s because most memoir sites promise to commercialize your work. They’ll follow a formula based on current memoir trends, because they want to convince you that they can turn your memoir into a best-seller. These sites overwhelm you with unnecessary information not to help you, the memoir author, but to address Search Engine Optimization (SEO) algorithms so they can sell more.
That’s not what we do at Write My Memoirs. Our small community of coaches, writers and editors are every bit as skilled as any you’ll find, and we charge appropriately for their expertise and the time they’ll spend helping you craft a compelling, enjoyable read. But you won’t pay an upcharge for other websites’ commercialization, the marketing that follows, and the pages of intimidating “advice.” You can sell your book if you like—we have ISBNs available for you—but our organic process of capturing your story takes a noncommercial path.
If you want help with any or all of the four steps above, choose from our services or save money by selecting one of our packages. If you’d like to talk about what’s right for you, schedule a call. One year from now, you can be holding your published memoir in your hand. And at that point, it will be a big deal!