How to Blog Your Memoir in 10 Simple Steps

If your memoir has the three elements discussed in my last post—a time period significant to you and relevant to readers, a marketable story and benefits to your readers, then you are ready to begin to blog your memoir. This means you will write it post by post on your blog. Blogging a book is the quickest and easiest way to write a book and promote it at the same time, thus building the platform, or fan base, you need to make it successful—to ensure it sells to readers and possibly to a publisher as well.

To blog your memoir, you take some of the same steps you would if you were going to write a memoir the traditional way. However, your writing must be chunked down into post-sized bits. Here are 10 steps to take to blog your memoir:

1. Create a timeline of the events that occurred during the time period you want to write about.
2. Decide which events are the most important–the ones you will include in the memoir.
3. Determine the less important events that support the more important ones and which, therefore, should also be included.
4. Make a list of two or three themes that run through your book, and then describe them.
5. Map out your themes. For each vignette you plan to include in the book, determine how one or more of the themes plays into that event.
6. Make a list of the characters in your book. Determine how they play into your themes and into your main character’s development. Also note in how many events or vignettes they show up.
7. On your timeline, mark the main climactic moments. Where is the plot rising and falling?
8. Based on your work in step #7, delineate the starting and stopping points for blog posts. (Keep in mind, you will be writing in short pieces, preferably 500 words at most; consider if you need to lengthen posts to fit whole scenes or to make better transitions.)
9. Begin writing your memoir in a word processing document, post by post, day by day.
10. Each time you write an “installment,” post it to your blog.

A Simple Way To Blog Your Memoir

As part of your content plan, create a bit of “extra” content that will only appear in the finished book, not on the blog. This could be a prologue or an epilogue, a few vignettes that you feel can be left out initially, maybe even a whole chapter that isn’t crucial to understanding the story. This provides an enticement to your fans–your blog readers–to later purchase the digital or print version of the finished memoir.

And that’s it! A simple and quick way to blog your memoir–and to promote it at the same time. As you publish your daily or weekly (2-7 times per week is best) posts, you will gain a following of loyal blogged book readers who later will purchase your published memoir.

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Our Guest Blogger ~ Nina Amir, Inspiration-to-Creation Coach, inspires people to combine their purpose and passion so they Achieve More Inspired Results. She motivates both writers and non-writers to create publishable and published products, careers as authors and to achieve their goals and fulfill their purpose. She blogged her book, How to Blog a Book, Write, Publish and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time (Writer’s Digest Books), in five months. Find out more about her and her blogs at www.ninaamir.com www.copywrightcommunications.com, or www.purespiritcreations.com.