Hi aspiring writers writing coach Stefanie Newell and this is The Life Of
A Writer channel. Today's video How To Write A Memoir and Get It Published. So
in today's video I'm going to be sharing five tips that will help you to get your
memoir picked up by a traditional publisher. If you want to learn how to
connect with readers and sell more books make sure to subscribe and get new
content to your inbox every Tuesday. So while this video is geared towards
authors or new authors that are looking to traditionally publish make no mistake
that the tips that I'll be providing in this video will be beneficial to all
memoir writers. So let's get right into it!
Tip number one, be clear on your target audience and we talked about this
briefly in a previous video. I'm going to link that video in the description box
below but the reason why it's important to be clear on your target audience is
because you want to write a book that your target audience wants. You don't
want to just share all of these different details and this is not what
the genre or the demographic of people that you're writing for are in need of.
That's really importan! Again if you're trying to capture the attention of a
traditional publisher being clear on your target audience is not an option
you want to make sure that you know exactly who your target audience is. So
of course you're gonna go through the basics of you know there's this age
range, there's this gender but you need to know way more than that about your
target audience. So how do we learn about our target audience? That's often a
question that's asked. You have to immerse yourself in the genre that you
write in. So if you write memoirs go on Amazon look at other memoirs look for it
in memoirs that are similar to the type of book that you're writing. I often
recommend to my clients that they go and look and read the reviews of books that
are similar to the book that they're trying to write because there are so
many clues as to who is a part of your target audience down in those reviews.
You will learn so much about the people, what their interests are, what their
likes are... Again the more you can learn about your target audience the more you
can write with them specifically in mind. Consider other commercially
successful memoirs! And we kind of talked about this previously, but the reason why
this is so important is because there's so much information that can be found in
other books that are already out on the market and doing well. So what I want you
to do is to consider three to five books that are similar to the book that you
are writing or the memoir that you're writing. So you want to go on Amazon look
for books that are similar as far as themes are concerned as far as target
audience concerned and you want to actually read those books if you can. If
you don't have time to read those books you know you can go and do the look
inside feature on Amazon and read you know just a few pages to get an idea. But
really and truly you want to read as many of those memoirs as possible. The
reason why that's important is because number one like we said they are
commercially successful. These are books that people are actively going out and
purchasing because there's something in it that people want to know about and if
they've been traditionally published already the likelihood that you've
written something that's similar to this book tells you that you may have a
chance at having a book that's also commercially successful. So again some of
the things that you're looking for in these books you want to look at their
writing voice, you want to look at how they introduce themselves to their
readers, you want to look at how transparent they were, did they connect
with you as the reader? And all of those things will help you when you begin
writing your own manuscript. Tip number three be honest and don't embellish your
stories. So I don't know how many of you guys remember an author by the name of
James Frey he wrote a book called A Million Little Pieces. He was really kind
of brought to the forefront by Oprah Winfrey and then it later turned out
that a lot of his memoir was embellished. And the reason why you don't want to
embellish your story is because you want to have credibility. If you are looking
to have a career in writing, even if you're not looking to have a career in
writing, you don't want to ruin your credibility by embellishing a story. You
are not obligated to share your life story, but if you do decide to share your
life story you want to be as honest and as transparent as possible and you want
to be credible.So that's really going to be important tip. Tip number four find a
literary agent that handles memoirs. So this is going to be important
because again in order to be traditionally published you have to have
a literary agent. They're kind of the gatekeeper between you and the
traditional publishing company so you don't want to just query any agent.
That's not what you want to do. As you did in a previous step you were looking
at some commercially successful books... look at those books and see if those
authors are sharing who their literary agents are. If they are, see if those
literary agents are accepting queries and that will give you a starting point.
I'll also put down in the description box a website that you can use to find
literary agents but again you're not just querying any agent. You want to make
sure that you're querying agents that are looking for memoir writers. Down in
the comment section share with me the traditional publishing companies that
you would love to be signed to. Tip number five is to write an engaging
story this is so important so whether you want to be traditionally published
or self-published it really doesn't matter an engaging story is important.
Most of you who are watching my videos are going to be first-time writers who
don't have an audience so an engaging story is important because you are
trying to get readers to connect with you and they don't know anything
previously about you. So an engaging story, by having a strong introduction, a
strong middle and a strong close will draw the reader in and keep them
interested. As always all of my social media links will be in the description
box below if you're looking to hire me as your writing coach you will find that
information there as well and I look forward to talking with you in my next
video.