How to Publish Your Memoir

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Publishing, The Memoir Writing Process

After you have toiled and tinkered and revised for ages, and you feel you finally have a strong manuscript, you begin to wonder how on earth to get your book into print…

Here is the URL for a piece I wrote to help you know what to do when you get to this point.  It was published on the website, WOMEN WRITERS, WOMEN(‘S) BOOKS.   Just paste the URL into Google and you’ll get there.  I hope it’s helpful, and good luck!

http://booksbywomen.org/how-can-i-get-my-memoir-published-by-sara-mansfield-taber/

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Writing is a Humilation Banquet

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Publishing, Writing

Please find here my piece recently published on She Writes, a wonderful website  for women writers.

NOTE: If you go to the post on that site you’ll find wonderful, funny, entertaining comments from readers in response to this humor piece.  Also, my dear friend, the brilliant writer, Catherine Mayo, wrote a response giving her own wise and funny and helpful perspectives on the humiliations that come with publication.  Here is her website, Madam Mayo, which is packed with goodies for writers: http://madammayo.blogspot.mx/2013/05/so-hows-book-doing-and-how-many-books.html

Here is the piece itself:

Writing is a humiliation banquet.  It is time that everyone who reads books or counts a writer a friend be acquainted with the menu of this exclusive club:

 THE WRITER’S CLUB

Plat du Jour

 DRINKS

Rot-Gut Wine

The pitying looks, false cheer, and stumbling superlatives, handed to you by fellow students at writers workshops, and your own friends or family, upon the first tentative sharing of your work, who let you know, though they wear little smiles on their faces, that they consider your writing very poor indeed.  Welcome to this oh-so-shi-shi club.

APPETIZERS

Clams on Toast

 The platitudes offered you by agents who turn down your work with responses such as “Memoirs by women aren’t selling this year.”

Wilted Celery Sticks          

 The rejection notices from publishers who write that your book, while impressive, is “not quite right for us.”

SOUP

 Thin Gruel   

 The fact that, though, by some miracle, your book is now published, it receives no reviews.

ENTREE

Chopped Liver        

The time you are presenting your work on a panel of four writers, and the good-looking young man who just told stories, and read not a word of his writing, is rewarded with long lines of buyers, while you have none—and just to add a bit of sauce, you have to buy your own book in order to trade books with the other panelists at the end of the event.

SIDES

Parsnips                               

The kindly looks of writer friends who have looked up your sales on Amazon—something you studiously avoid—and let you know, in so many words, that their sales have surpassed yours.

Poached Tongue                

The kindly looks of writer friends who let drop the number of new twitter followers they get every seven seconds.

Stewed Prunes

The confit you must swallow when you show up at a bookstore for a reading and there is no audience, or there is one psychotic man pulling flies from the air and a ten year-old, and you have to decide whether to put your chin up, smile, and read, or find a hole to vomit into.

Grits              

The sweet, ingratiating smiles from well-meaning people, at whom you must smile graciously when they tell you they are so eager to read the book you worked on for ten years at less than slave wages, and will get it from the library.

Bitter Cabbage                   

The other well-meaning people who, thinking they are helping you and not knowing, perhaps, that you have to buy your own book, tell you they want to give your book to someone who will love it, and could just you send them one to give to the friend for a gift?

DESSERT

Killer Sundae                      

The kindly meant but misguided question put to you by your very best friends, and everyone else, after your book comes out: “How is the book doing?”  The friends have no idea how this scrapes the writer’s oozing, ever-raw wounds.  “How is the book doing?”  Now what does that “doing” mean?  People mean well, they are not really thinking, but I’m pretty sure that sentence means, if I am not mistaken (and writers eating this daily humiliation fare can most certainly be deranged), “How much money are you making?”  Or: “Just how worthwhile an author are you?”  The same goes for “What was the print run?”   This is the question, the cherry on top that some people who really badly want to know how much you have made, push on to ask.  Who else do we greet by asking how much money they are making?

Here is the truth, the secret answer to that eager question, “How is the book doing?”  Let me herewith dispense with the common illusion held by those outside the club: that writers make money.  These are the facts: Advances for books are minuscule for most writers: from $0 to $25,000.  Bottom line: not enough to live on even for one year.  Seven out of ten books do not make even these tiny advances back, so seven out of ten writers receive no royalties at all.  As for royalties, a writer typically receives ten percent  of the cover price for the first 250,000 copies sold.  This means, for a book listed for $25, the writer will receive, if the advance has been earned back, $2.50 per book.

And as for sales ambitions, everyone assumes—in this America where we believe we can achieve anything we put our minds to and where anyone not a millionaire just isn’t working hard enough or is a self-promotion wimp—that every author any good would be making sales in the six figures.  Publisher’s Weekly reported in January, 2012 that the average U.S. nonfiction book now sells fewer than 250 copies per year, and fewer than 3000 over its lifetime.  And moreover, as the wonderful, best-selling author Anne Lamott has said—to paraphrase her—no matter how much praise you receive or how high your royalties are, it is never enough to feel worthy in this measure-people-by-money land we live in.  Whenever you look up your sales, it is humiliating because, as she would probably put it: if you’re any good, you should make as much as God would if she’d written a book.  Keep in mind that Virginia Woolf hoped fervently that one of her books might sell 500 copies.  I won’t go into why the books that do sell, sell, but it is not always their literary quality.

LIQUEURS

Stiff Brandy             

The last, fast gulp of the dawn-to-dusk humiliation, of spending your time in an activity that everyone in America views as self-indulgent unless you are making the income of Stephen King.  Let me tell you, writers are afflicted beings—afflicted with the need to make arrangements of words.  They have to do it, like others have to eat donuts, but they sacrifice financial security and suffer daily, second-by-second humiliation to put forth their scribbling to the world.

“Writing is like prostitution,” a wise friend and wonderful writer commented to me recently.  As a writer, you strip down, put out your best wares for all to see, and stand there at the corner, being brave, sucking in your belly, hoping to get a sale.  And each moment of each day on that corner, even when you know you’re looking your best and you’ve produced something of real quality, you are subject to mortifying humiliation.

So when you see your writer friend next time, know she is dining on celery sticks, gruel and stewed prunes.  Buy her a real meal.

 

 

The Memoir-Writing Process: A most rewarding journey

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The Memoir Writing Process

Often, while in the possession of the demon called the memoir, there is a sense of a brain burning too bright, like Van Gogh’s.  There have been moments—brief but flashy–when I thought it might drive me mad.  Re-living the hard stuff can bring you close to the brink.

And then there is the downer of coming up against real life: like when the insightful adolescent in your head comes up against the boring, stupid adolescent-you of the diaries you dig out; like when you make contacts with old friends  who seem too strange to touch, or too disappointing, or even frightening.  Interactions with a couple of old friends have changed the actual content of my memoir.  One contact fired it up.  The other, with a friend of whom I was once fond, was so bitter, I eliminated the person from the book.

And finally, there is the disappointment of finding out that when you are in the mood to re-contact people, or when you are in the wistful, nostalgic mood, your old friends are not.  They went through all that, and purged, long ago, or aren’t yet ready to touch the fire.  No one is back there where you are, when you are.  This brings you to think: How alone we all are.  And yet how vivid everyone is, and how clamorous and crowded the life while writing.

All in all, despite it all, memoir-writing: a most rewarding obsession.

The Memoir-Writing Process: Prone to fits of idiocy

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The Memoir Writing Process

Write a memoir at your hazard.  It is a precarious activity.  One that makes you prone to embarrassing yourself.  All the awkwardness, the idiocy of youth come flooding back, and, believe me, you suddenly really are fourteen.  You do stupid things, you act weird, because it’s like you’re half your forty-nine year-old self and half- your fourteen year-old self and you lurch around in your harlequin garb, unable to stand.  One moment you’re tongue-tied at the edge of the dance floor, the next you’re pitching to the torrents, pulses, surges, and swayings of first love.  In the course of the writing, when operating under the influence of my mixed selves, I have put three feet in my mouth (the urge to self-humiliation was so great, I needed a spare), acted mentally ill, become a lovesick puppy, and delivered lectures, mature as Athena, all at once.

The Memoir-Writing Process: Hazardous

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The Memoir Writing Process

Sometimes as I wrote, I was in a fugue, as when I was drugged at sixteen, an episode of the memoir.  And all along, the process led me toward the precipices of foolish acts, unaccountable acts.  For instance, immersion in old years left leaves me prone to fits of sweet love, when I wanted to fling my arms around all the people of the past, throw caution to the winds, and kiss them passionately.

…This brings me to the hazards associated with writing the memoir. Warnings for the novice, for any about to set their walking sticks on the memoirist’s trail.

Many have noted how the writing robs the writer of his memories.  Nabokov laments, as he refers to the writing implements of his childhood, “Alas, these pencils, too, have been distributed among the characters in my books to keep fictitious children busy; they are not quite my own now…Few things are left, many have been squandered…”

In Proust we find the thought that it is not the author who creates the story, but the story that creates the author. Beware who you create.  She’ll stay with you, take you over, define you forever after.  I think it prudent—and I have done this myself—to purposely leave out, preserve, some memories, episodes, and favorite people, so that not all your memories are stolen from you, trapped in the cage of sentences.

Another hazard of writing a memoir:  the people of your past seem, alternately like a pack of zombies ready to attack and submerge you, and a throng of dream people showering you with love.  Either shakes your little pram.

The Memoir-Writing Process: The neglect of friends

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The Memoir Writing Process

While in obsession’s thicket—it is true—I neglected my friends.  I couldn’t talk to them while I was in this haze, this morass of yearning, this bubble, while I tried to negotiate this watery ground, palpitate this tumor of the past.

The Memoir-Writing Process: Frenzy, fever, insomnia

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The Memoir Writing Process

Writing my memoir, I let myself go—both ways—into my head.  I surrendered to the force.  Without me, my mind brushed on the next dab of paint, as if by instinct knowing how to make it all fit by association.  Many days, I worked in a fever, a frenzy, as if the bombing started the next morning at dawn.  Memories and thoughts awakened me at night.  In the darkness, I shuffled around in the bed clothes, hitting my knuckles as I tried to wrest index card and pencil from the bedside table in the dark, waking up my tired husband—and then was blurry and short with the kids in the morning.  But there was the petite, incomparable thrill of note cards spilled around my bed at dawn: little jewels I gathered in the morning, a harvest from the blackness of night.

The Memoir-Writing Process: Possession

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The Memoir Writing Process

Rarely, while writing my memoir—this is another iteration of obsession—I was as calm as God, solemnly inscribing words as if on tablets.  But usually, writing my memoir was like being possessed.  At certain points when I was working on it, I was in an alternative universe.  During such periods, my husband poked me and said, “You’re not with us.  You’re in a parallel world.”  It was truer than he knew.  I was off with my lover in the thatched hut.  These times, I was just barely able to listen to my children.  It was like they were calling from somewhere far off in a fog.  (It was really me that was in a fog.)  And I couldn’t hear them until I got the day’s burden of memories unloaded from the ship whose cargo hold was bottomless, infinitely re-filling.  A ship that seemed to re-fill to the brim the minute I scooped out the day’s box of k-rations, or slab of death-by-chocolate cake.

Nabokov describes writing as “a private mist.”

When I was irrevocably committed to finish my poem or die, there came the most trancelike state of all.  With hardly a twinge of surprise, I found myself, of all places, on a leathern couch in the cold, musty, little-used room that had been my grandfather’s study.  On that couch, I lay prone, in a kind of reptilian freeze, one arm dangling, so that my knuckles loosely touched the floral figures of the carpet.  When I next came out of that trance, the greenish flora was still there, my arm still dangling, but now I was prostrate on the edge of a rickety wharf, and the water lilies I touched were real…So little did ordinary measures of existence mean in that state that I would not have been surprised to come out of its tunnel right into the park of Versailles, or Tiergarten, or Sequoia National Forest.

The Memoir-Writing Process 3 : Obsession

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The Memoir Writing Process

I say, memoir-writing, at its most basic, is obsession.  Involuntary obsession is a requirement for the endeavor. (I have my mother’s genes to thank for an obsessive brain that won’t stop writing the book even when I—the more sensible one of me—wants to.)  Writing a memoir is like having a lover waiting, hiding in a hut out in the nearby forest.  Even if you can’t stay, you want to steal in and touch his cheek, even if it can only be for a second.

 

The Memoir-Writing Process 2: Perseveration

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The Memoir Writing Process

Like all writing, memoir-writing, is perseveration: the same story over and over.  Who was it who said we live the first thirty years and then write about it for the next fifty?