It’s time to publish your own book! Yeah!
You have finished writing your memoir or are nearing its completion. Now you begin to think about publication. Going the route of finding an agent and waiting years for your book to be accepted does not appeal to you. You decide to publish your own book—a realistic option in this day and age.
To help you, let me offer you ten tips to make the process by which you self-publish easier.
1) To reach a larger audience than family and friends, a book must look like a “real book.”
Today, a professional cover and binding will be required. It is possible to have a book designed that will look like it came from a big New York publishing house. Gone are the days when an independently-published book had “home made” all over it—that is, it is possible to pass for a New York publisher if you yourself are a designer with computer skills or if you engage the services of self-publish. Don’t skimp on the book design when you publish your own book. Your audience will judge your book by its cover! (more…)
Organize Your Memoir with Life Phases
Life phases are one way in which you can organize your memoir. Life phases are the emotional and psychological cycles or phases that have marked your life.
Every life proceeds in irregular and unpredictable phases. We can go along with our lives for a long time without much change, thinking that we have arrived at a resolution of the great “who am I?” question, and then unpredictably and perhaps quickly find ourselves dealing with totally different emotional and psychological challenges. Often, it is only in looking back on our lives that we are aware of these life phases.
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What’s the Right Publication Option For You?
You have finished writing your memoir or are nearing its completion. You feel satisfied with the text. It has been edited by a professional and you have made changes, You are ready for the next step. You are ready to be published. But what is the right publication option for you?
Congratulations!
Now, your task is to decide how to best send it out into the world—that’s what publishing a book comes down to it: making your memoir public after all these months of having writing it be a personal project.
The are basically three options.
What is the importance of point of view in a memoir? In the previous post on point of view, I shared my challenge of trying to write material in a ghostwritten memoir that I knew to be true but which the subject was not forthcoming with. This is not “Truth” material. It is more the sort of reflection that a more intuitive, self-reflecting person might make to cast light on her/his life. The memoir in question is We Were Not Spoiled, a memoir I co-wrote with my mother Lucille Verreault Ledoux. (more…)
This is the first of several articles on point of view in a memoir.
My mother’s memoir, We Were not Spoiled, was a work of love that took me many years to bring to closure as I had other work to do to support myself that filled my days. Finally, she got to be quite a bit older, and beginning to feel urgency as many people do when in my position, I put the push on finishing her story.
I’ll be sharing with you in the next few blog entries my experience of writing someone else’s memoir. My mother was, after all, another person with her own agenda and experience. As the co-writer, my task was to listen to her and to write as close to her point of view as possible. How does one remain faithful to another’s point of view in a memoir? (more…)
Is writing a chronology of a life ever enough?
Dates and facts are necessary to life writing in the same way route numbers are necessary to maps. It’s not only that dates and facts provide interesting information but that they keep your readers on the right path as they make their way through your life story. So…
Writing a chronology is already a great contribution to your family story, but you can do so much more than just include the dates and facts. (more…)
Redundant word usage is rampant!
As a writer, I am chagrined when words get misused and one particular miscreant is redundant word usage.
Here are examples:
1. “As I re-listened to these interviews again…”
2. “That just my personal opinion!”
3. “Repeat again…”
4. “As a child, I was raised by parents who…”
5. “a personal friend”
These are phrases and sentences that I read or heard today (in the space of one hour!) (more…)
4 Tips for Saving Money With a Ghostwriter
Working with a ghostwriter can be exhilarating—and expensive, but never as expensive as losing your story because you did not write it. Here are some components that will go a long way in saving money with a ghostwriter. (more…)
Ten Tips on How to Publish Your Own Book
You have finished writing your memoir or are nearing its completion. Now you begin to think about publication. Going the route of finding an agent and waiting years for your book to be accepted, does not appeal to you. You decide to publish your own book—a realistic option in this day and age> As you […]
Organize Your Memoir: Life Phases
Life phases are one way in which you can organize your memoir. Life phases are the emotional and psychological cycles or phases that have marked your life. They are a great tool to give depth and cohesion to your memoir. (more…)
3 Suggestions For Choosing the Right Publication Option For You
You have finished writing your memoir or are nearing its completion. You feel satisfied with the text… (more…)
Point of View in a Memoir, Part 2
In the previous post on point of view, I shared my challenge of trying to write point of view in a ghostwritten memoir that I knew to be true but which the subject was not forthcoming with. This is not “Truth” material. It is more the sort of reflection that a more intuitive, self-reflecting person […]
Point of View in a Memoir, Part 1
Point of View In a Memoir Is Important. I recently completed my mother’s memoir, We Were not Spoiled. It was a work of love that took me many years to bring to closure as I had other work to do to support myself that filled my days. Finally, she got to be quite a bit […]
Avoid Writing a Chronology: 4 Tips
Is writing a chronology of a life enough? Dates and facts are necessary to life writing in the same way route numbers are necessary to maps. It’s not only that dates and facts provide interesting information but that they keep your readers on the right path as they make their way through your life story. […]
Passive Vs Active Voice
Generally speaking, the passive voice of the verb (the subject has the action done to it) is weaker than the active voice (the subject does the action) in involving the reader in your story. That is crucial because as a memoir writer you are not sharing ideas but recreating life experiences to share. (more…)
Redundant word usage
Redundant word usage is rampant! As a writer, I am chagrined when words get misused and one particular miscreant is redundant word usage. (more…)