How to market your memoir
Marketing a memoir is quite different from marketing fiction or even most nonfiction books.
With a memoir, you will need a platform built around you or the topic that you write your memoir about. It’s all about you. Your reader must fall in love with you. Not the character in a novel or a unique business idea in your self-help book, but lovable, likeable, plain old you.
It is imperative that you are accessible to your reader. Since the power of a memoir is that you are giving an inside look at the inner workings of your life, you must put yourself in the public eye enough that they will want to know more.
Blogging is easily the memoir writer’s best platform tool. With a blog, you build the bridge between your daily writing and your life story. As your posts reveal what is happening with you today you automatically encourage interest about your journey. The closer you can tie your book and your blog together, the more easily will you make book sales.
A blog is something that you can start from the first day of writing your memoir and can continue long after publication. In many ways, the blog is an ongoing memoir of daily happenings, thoughts, and events.
Once your blog is up and running it is quite easy to use your blog as a jump off point to connect to other social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Each post can automatically be sent out on the various social media platforms you select. Images can be pinned to your boards with an intriguing comment to draw Pinterest fans to check out your full post.
So, a blog is definitely a good start but it probably won’t be enough of a traffic builder in the beginning. One selling point of memoirs is that they often can tie in very well with a local market. People naturally are more interested in what is going on in their own neighborhood than something happening hundreds or thousands of miles away. Capitalize on this in your book by including bits of local color in your book when it fits to do so. Include the real names of places and events and you may get those same venues to display and sell your book when it is published.
42 types of memoir writing
A good beginning exercise for writing your memoir is to read the memoirs of others.
Bestselling memoirs might be the place to start for excellence in writing and understanding the different processes. You may be surprised at how differently they can be written and still grab and hold your attention.
Look at some of the less popular memoirs to give you an idea of what doesn’t work. What makes the difference between selling ten copies and ten thousand? It is just as powerful to find out what you don’t like in a memoir as to what you do.
If you have an ebook reader you can often download a chapter or sample of different memoirs to make the search short and affordable.
Finally, check out the memoirs in the area that your story will most likely fit. By reading memoirs in your own genre you can check out if is a popular niche. Going to Amazon and checking the popularity rank will give you a general idea if there is big enough of an audience for good book sales.
The following is a partial list compiled from Goodreads. Not only will it help you to target your own niche, a casual look at the many different areas of memoir writing will show you what popular market memoir writing is today.
1. Memoirs by women
2. Memoirs by men
3. Humorous memoirs
4. Strange and twisted memoirs
5. A day in the life: Work memoirs
6. Drum memoir
7. Food related memoirs
8. Travel memoirs
9. Foreign country memoirs
10. Local and state memoirs
11. Spiritual memoirs
12. Family and relationship memoirs
13. Sporting memoirs
14. Oxbridge memoirs
15. Domestic violence and abuse memoirs
16. Female celebrity
17. Graphic novel memoirs
18. War memoirs
19. Business memoirs
20. Lesbian memoirs
21. Gay memoirs
22. Farming memoirs
23. Old West memoirs
24. People in Peril
25. Kids in crisis
26. Dance memoirs
27. Christian memoirs
28. Yoga memoirs
29. Parenting memoirs
30. Lovers memoirs
31. Adventure Travel memoirs
32. Immigrant memoirs
33. Heartbreaking memoirs
34. A year memoir
35. Fat girl memoirs
36. Mental illness memoirs
37. African American Memoirs
38. Coming of Age memoirs
39. Slavery memoirs
40. Health memoirs
41. OCD memoirs
42. houses memoirs
Rewriting your book after the first draft
Once you have a first draft of your book, it’s time to rewrite it.
Plan to rewrite at least four times before submitting your book to an editor.
The first rewrite will be the deepest and cruelest but also the most necessary one. This is called a structural rewrite. Look at the big picture of the book and ask some serious questions:
What scenes are to stay and which ones are to be deleted?
Are the characters staying true to form throughout the story?
Are they believable, likable, and lovable?
Do the good people have any weaknesses and do the downright nasty, bad folks have any redeemable features?
Does the book flow well? Does it get bogged down in description or in dialogue?
Does the tension build too fast? Too slow?
Are the characters described in one massive word dump or are they gradually introduced through scenes, actions, conversations, and body language?
Step away from your book as the author and try to look at it from the viewpoint of an editor, publisher, and reader.
An editor is looking to see if the book makes sense, if the sentences flow, if the action grabs and the dialogue matches the character.
The publisher is looking to see if the story is new, fresh, or exciting. Does it fit the audience that’s targeted?
Readers, of course, want to love your book! They want to dive in and get wet, come up gasping for air and dive down for another look. They want to be so caught up in your book that everything outside of your story slips away and is forgotten.
In order for this to happen, you need to cut away the chunks that are questionable, debatable, and downright stupid. You need to smooth out the rough spots, fill in the holes, and pump up the weak spots.
Once this structural rewrite is done you can move into the nitpicky sentence-by-sentence rewrite for your third draft.
If you’re looking to make progress in publishing a book, download our free report, The Author’s Guide to Choosing a Publishing Service.
Do you need an editor?
The biggest trap that most self-published authors fall into is believing there book is good enough if they write it once, have a few friends check it over and send it out.
The truth is that writers do not see their own mistakes.
It’s like looking in a mirror and thinking that the one-dimensional reflection is how we really look to other people.
Besides seeing ourselves in only one dimension we unconsciously put on a good face before that bit of glass. A pleasant expression. A smile. Do we see the frown, snarl, or grimace we make when someone cuts in front of us?
As a writer, you know what you want to say. That knowledge can get in the way of sharing what we want to say completely.
Remember the old kid’s game of Pass the Secret? You tell the person next to you a sentence about something. She repeats it to the next person. By the time it has progressed five or six times the sentence is completely unrecognizable from the original.
Surprisingly, the same thing happens in writing. Because you yourself know something you assume that the reader knows this as well. He doesn’t.
Recently a someone told me about a recipe she was given from a friend. The friend had carefully written out all the ingredients for the dish. It turns out though that she forgot one important ingredient: salt. Now, this friend had made the recipe a hundred times and she knew exactly how to make the dish, but when she wrote it out she forgot one of the most basic ingredients.
Writers do this a lot. Because so much time is spent thinking and living inside the character’s head we forget that we have not told our reader essential things that are important about our hero or villain.
Editing is more than simply catching spelling and grammar mistakes. If you want your book to be a success, take the time and expense to have it professionally edited.
At Wheatmark, we believe in helping authors with every step of the writing and publishing process. Whether your book is is in the beginning or final stages to tell us about your project, tell us about it.
How to create a basic plot for your novel
Writing a plot for your story is like planning a road trip.
You start at point A and you map out how to get to point B.
A plot is not the story. It is the highway that must be traveled to get to the end. The story is how the character goes down that highway to get to the destination.
When writing your plot you must first decide what the ending is going to be. Then you work backwards, charting each point to reach the end. Every step should build to the final climax but have conflict that must be worked through to move the story along.
To make your plot more interesting than “got in car, drove to store, got bread,” you build in points of conflict that must be overcome. In a novel, there is usually one major plot line of conflict and a series of subplots.
The main conflicts basically fall into four types.
- Man versus man: Someone is determined to kill the driver once he gets in the car.
- Man versus nature: Earthquake, avalanche, flood that must be overcome.
- Man versus self: Man is afraid of driving after being in a previous accident.
- Man versus man’s work: Man doesn’t take care of car and it breaks down or runs out of gas.
Before you start writing, chart the points along a timeline if the action will take place in a linear story. The points must be detailed enough in your mind that you don’t write yourself into a dead end. So each subplot must have a conflict idea and way it is overcome.
Each subplot should add to the story, adding just enough action and conflict to keep the reader involved and moving along but still working towards that final destination.
At Wheatmark, we believe in helping authors with every step of the writing and publishing process. Whether your book is is in the beginning or final stages to tell us about your project, tell us about it.
The super, simple secret to getting more exposure for your book
The super, simple secret to getting more exposure for your book…
Ready?
Here it is in a nutshell:
Comment on blogs in your niche.
You see, the way to build a new audience for your book is to go where that audience is already congregating and enter into the conversation.
Ask yourself these two simple questions.
- Who do you want to know you?
- Who do you want to follow you?
Now look around for blogs with those types of avid followers. Start commenting on their blog posts. When possible, try to comment as soon as the post goes live so that your comments are at the top of the list to get greater exposure.
Make sure your comment adds some spark and sparkle to the conversation. Don’t steal the light of the blogger with your own amazing story but rather highlight what they have said and offer positive feedback with sincerity.
Here are 3 powerful reasons to leave comments on other blogs:
- Many blogs let you share your website URL. That means that you add a new incoming link to your site, which is important for your Google ranking. Sites with no incoming links have little credibility. Incoming links from major sites register higher than small sites and leaving a comment is an easy way to get that link.
- When you comment on an article that’s on a popular site, your comment exposes you to that audience. If readers like the article and like your comment … they may very well click on your link to find out more about you.
- While only one link will register for ranking, commenting multiple times will get the attention of the blog host. After 3 or 4 times your name will start to register. Keep doing it and make sure your comments offer something of value to the conversation. In time not only will the blog host come to know you but their readers will as well.
If you’re an author and feel stuck in your book marketing, get a jump start by learning about the best and latest book marketing strategies in the Authors Academy.
Which came first: The audience or the book?
Last time I revealed what to me was the most significant lesson learned during my last thirteen years running Wheatmark: that publishing success requires actively building an audience. A natural question many authors have about this is: Should I start building an audience for my book before or after I write it?
Ideally you’d write your book and build your audience simultaneously, so that your audience-building activities could inform the content of your book, and you could use your writing as a resource for your audience-building activities. But the deeper answer is: It doesn’t matter, because you’re going to have to do both to achieve publishing success, and you have to start somewhere! Let me illustrate this with two very different publishing success stories:
1. Start with an audience, then write a book: Just over a year ago, when Mark Baker published The Game Changer: A Simple System for Improving Your Bowling Scores, he was a renowned bowling coach with top-tier clientele, including several of the best bowlers on the PBA Tour. He had lots of fans and followers both online and offline. He’d been involved in bowling for over thirty years: as a competitive bowler earning four PBA titles along with numerous other awards and accolades, as a sales manager for Cal Bowling Supply, and as the developer of Camp Bakes, one of the premier bowling camps in the world. In short, Mark had an audience. As a direct result, The Game Changer sold over 2,000 copies in its first month after publication and 6,000 in its first year.
2. Write a book, then build an audience: Over twenty years ago, when Angelyn Miller first published The Enabler, she was not a recognized expert on codependency and enabling—the subjects of her book—nor had she published any books before. She wasn’t a degreed practicing psychologist with a large clientele, either. In short, Angelyn had no audience. Her first publisher, Hunter House, invested substantially in getting The Enabler placed in brick-and-mortar bookstores (in the age before Amazon mattered) and listed in the right catalogs. Angelyn pursued and obtained a master’s degree in counseling psychology. She appeared as a guest on several radio shows and at a conference. The Enabler was recommended in several nationally syndicated self-help newspaper columns. Angelyn has built a substantial audience since the first publication of her book, and it shows. The Enabler has sold tens of thousands of copies, including over 30,000 since its republication with Wheatmark in 2001. When Angelyn publishes her second book, her audience will be there, ready and eager to buy it.
So don’t beat yourself up if you’ve spent all your time writing a book and haven’t built an audience for it yet. Pat yourself on the back for the major achievement that having written a book is, roll up your sleeves, and get to the work of building your audience.
Which came first the chicken or the egg? It doesn’t really matter if you’re making a chicken omelet.
Sam Henrie: Why I Started Wheatmark
In the late 1990s I left my position as Director of Logistics at the mid-sized tech company I had worked at for nine years. I left with two great gifts: enough money to take some time off and the entrepreneurial bug. During my nine-year tenure I watched the tech firm grow from a local business with a handful of employees and under $1 million in annual revenues to a global enterprise with nearly a thousand employees and over $100 million in annual revenues. The experience had me hooked: I knew I would to start my own company. Doing what, I did not yet know.
At the time I was investigating the book publishing business; I wanted to understand why some of my relatives (I come from a family of writers) were having trouble getting their books published—books that were exceptional, and ones I was convinced had good chances in the market place. My research led me to a New Yorker article detailing how mightily the major book publishers were struggling to make a profit. Inventory costs were killing them—for historical reasons publishers, not bookstores, are responsible for the cost of unsold inventory. As a result publishers were becoming skittish, publishing ever fewer titles and taking ever fewer chances on new authors, not willing to risk the cost of bookstore returns and unsold inventory. That’s when I had a light bulb moment. Online bookstores didn’t need to carry any inventory to give readers all the information they needed to make their buying decisions, and print-on-demand (a new book manufacturing technology) allowed books to be printed to order. Combine these two innovations and presto you had no-inventory book publishing. The publishers’ problems were solved! In fact, without the need to invest in inventory, and given online bookstores’ access to a huge global market, authors could inexpensively self-publish and bypass the publishers altogether. My literary relatives’ problems were also solved!
Then the second light bulb clicked on: I could start a company that would provide authors with all of the services they needed to self-publish using the combined power of online bookstores and print-on-demand. I’d be scratching my entrepreneurial itch and helping some of the most interesting people on the planet—authors—to succeed. I setup a desk in my living room, got to work, and Wheatmark was born. Thirteen years, thousands of published titles, and two office relocations later, Wheatmark is still helping authors find success, though now not just by publishing their books, but also by helping them with the all-important work of finding and building their audiences.
More about that later….
An Amazing Resource: Picmonkey
A robust image and photo editor that can do everything can be overwhelming, especially when you’re staring at a blank canvass trying to figure out what kind of banner image would go well with your Facebook author page.
On the other hand, applications that focus on a single aspect of design, like PicMonkey, can inspire you and save you a lot of time in such situations.
PicMonkey is a free online photo editing service that lets you create stunning photo collages on the fly. Visit Picmonkey and start creating your collage, which then you can share on Facebook, Pinterest, or print it on any marketing piece.
As an example, we quickly put together these two collages using PicMonkey: one from our book covers, the other from stock photography.
Book marketing tip: A cheap and easy way to schedule your Pinterest pins
Pinterest is an amazing tool for authors but only if used regularly. Unfortunately, pinning can be a major time waster and may gobble up the precious minutes you should be … writing!
One way to get around this is to schedule your pins a week at a time.
There are programs available that will allow you to schedule your pins. The bad news is that the ones I could find are all subscription based, starting at $10.00 a month and going up to $100 for noncommercial users. While that might be affordable for some, it may not be for authors on a limited budget.
The bottom line behind scheduling is planning. Remember the old adage: for every hour you spend in planning you save three in work time. If you take an hour a week to plan your pins, you can then pop in the pins every evening in just three minutes.
The best time for pinning is in the evening hours after 8:00 p.m. EST. So that’s your first tip. Plan your pinning time to fit into that period.
Here are the guerilla steps to becoming an amazing pinner!
1. Create a list of pins, keywords, and #hashwords to use with pins.
2. Make a list of the different kinds of pins that you want to pin.
3. Create a spreadsheet or simple Word document.
4. Find the pins (your own) or repins and copy the link for each one. Put in your spreadsheet. Fill in the keyword and description for each pin.
Schedule a time every day between 8 pm – 1 am and pin one to five pins during this time. If you have done all the work ahead of time—collecting pins, keywords and composing description—it will take you no more than three minutes to pin.
While this is not as fun as having a program that does it automatically for you it gets the job done. If you set up a system, you will get the same results as paying for a subscription-based program.
Remember, even with a subscription program you still have to put in the time to find pins, keywords, and write descriptions. So, though you don’t have the convenience of having them sent out automatically, by making the process easy you are more likely to pin on a daily basis and get the same results as a paid subscription.
To learn about real book marketing strategies and to get a jump start on your marketing, check out the Authors Academy.