Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

Creating a Cover for Your Memoir

We’ll help with some ideas for creating a cover when you publish your memoir.

As an online publisher, we’d like to help you, at every stage of the process, to produce a true autobiography. Your cover is an important component of your book, so let’s discuss that.

You can have a solid color with no image but just your title. It’s sleek and certainly the least labor-intensive way to go. But, come on, you can do better than that. At least come up with some sort of design. You must have a budding artist in your family who can create a graphic for you; email that to us, and we can turn it into your cover.

The obvious choice is to cover your book with a photograph of yourself. Then the question becomes: what age of myself do I want to present? You may like your look best at a certain age, which is a good enough reason to dig up a photo from that time. Who you are right now, even with gray hair and a few facial lines, is another appropriate option. You’re looking back on your life from this moment, so the author and the subject of the book are both accurately represented by a current picture. Another good idea is to put your family home or the home in which you grew up on the cover of your memoir. When you choose an earlier photo of yourself, a house or other object, you can run it in black and white to convey the image of a time gone by.

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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!