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.
