Authors' Thread (New! Improved! Now With 10% More Questions!)

I very much agree with In Exile that a book proposal should be held as tightly as possible. Thus, I'm going to go ahead and take Ickey's proposal down in service of secrecy, and ask that he PM it to me for review. Others interested in reading it with an eye toward helping out can PM Ickey likewise.

 

Anybody ever written a memoir? I'm trying to do one along the lines of a David Sedaris -- just a bunch of random stuff from my life. I've got a bunch of (I think) funny stories to tell.

Any tips or advice on writing a memoir?

 

Although I have not written a memoir I have worked with other writers on their memoirs. A few points:

1) Make it all true, or cop to the fictionalizations straight up. In this post-James Frey, Nasdij era, you don't want to get caught.

2) No one will fact check you but you. You will probably get some subtle or not so subtle pressure from your editor to enhance embellish etc. Be prepared for that. Dirty little secret: Most memoirs, particularly the big sellers, are less true than "A Million Little Pieces." Memoir writers are the steroid users of publishing. At some point you'll have to address the question with yourself - "Do I care more about truth, or about the story, or about just selling books?"

3) As a genre, the memoir is starting to fade a bit as a big seller - there's a real glut. Unless your experience is wholly unique and full of visceral drama (the guy who got his arm pinned while rock climbing and cut it off, the girl who had an affair with her father), wholly universal (Marley and Me), you're some kind of celeb (Barabara Walters), or you went through the gauntlet and came out the other side (see David Carr's book), it will be a tough, tough sell. Sedaris can do what he does because he got in the door with it early, and now readers are interested in Sedaris and his whole "my life is amusing whimsy" schtick, so he can just keep skipping along. But if he were pitching that today I doubt that he would get a book contract.

As in any book project, you must focus and find what is unique and original both in your story and how you write about it. "A bunch of random stuff" from your life won't cut it - the story of how your "father locked you in the basement and fed you hamster food while administering electro-shock but you still graduated at the top of your class went to Harvard married a Korean fashion model and survived the tsunami by willing yourself invisible" will.

 

I'm preparing to send out my book proposal which includes about 130 typed pages. Should I get an agent first? Is there anything I need to do to "copyright" the material? And if I send it to publishers, is there any tip for locating them other than the obvious (The Writers Guide books, looking for similar titles, etc.)

Thanks in advance.

 

Yes, yes, yes, yes, get an agent. For someone like you, the proposal should be seen as a sales pitch to an agent rather than a publisher and I STRONGLY recommend NOT sending your proposal straight to a publisher - that is almost certain to fail and frustrate you. Can you sell a book without one? Possible, but not very likely, and even then, either not for a lot of money or not in a deal that works to your advantage. Furthermore, most reputable agents will have some valuable feedback for your proposal - an might even recommend sellingpart of it a a magazine piece to show that there is an audience for it. At first blush, 130pp. seems way too long for a proposal. I've written books of upwards of 250,000 words and have never had a proposal half that length.

If you look on the website of most reputable publishers, they strongly recommend against just sending them something - some even say upfront that they won't accept un-agented proposals - and at many other places there's some kid who all he or she does is to decide which form letter of rejection. the proposal receives. I speak from experience - I have several hundred such letters from back in the day when I tried to sell books without an agent. The only possible exception is a book with very limited regional appeal, in which case only very local publishers might be interested, but yours does not seem to be that. Again, an agent will know these people, and even better, will know the people interested in stories such as yours.

Put you name on it with the copyright symbol, date, and "all rights reserved." That gives you basic protection. If you are uber-paranoid, register it at the copyright office (you can google to find out how to do this).

 

Would anybody here be willing to take a look at a couple of memoir chapters and give me some feedback? Not necessarily grammar points (although that would be nice), but more critical stuff like 'the intro is too long' or 'it's just not that funny to me' or whatever your thoughts are.

Thanks in advance.

 

Anyone here have experience finding an agent?

I did a search on The Writer's Market and found 9 pages of agents that work with my genre. Any way to limit those?

 

Try those in your geographic area (if any), ask any colleagues you know that have written books, look in the acknowledgements page of books you admire. Most agents have websites now - check those out for client lists, again, looking for writers/books you admire, particularly those similar, but not identical, to yours

Warning: Don't consider anyone who charges a reading fee upfront. You pitch the proposal to them the same way you pitch an article - a brief letter (or e-mail if they accept them) that describes your project succinctly and provides the reason why you are the person to write it and that you have already written a proposal.

If you haven't already, go to the bookstore and get a basic author's guide which will answer many questions along the way.

 

Just wanted to publicly thank Verbalknit for his help in reading a few chapters of my memoir. His notes and edits were very helpful.

If anybody else would be willing to look at two or three chapters, I would be grateful.

 

Anybody have any tips for going through and editing your own work? I feel like, grammatically, what I've written is OK. But from the standpoint of actually improving the quality of what's there, I'm finding it difficult to go back over what I've written and change it. It's just that I've read and re-read the stuff so many times, it's hard to find ways to improve it.

You think I should let it sit for some length of time, a month maybe, and come back to it? That way it's a little more fresh and I might be able to work from a clean(er) slate.

 

Wow, three consecutive posts on this thread by me. I'm not trying to post-pad, I swear.

Anyway, here's a useful site i found this afternoon while looking around at various sites regarding book writing and publishing:

http://www.writers.net/

From what I've seen of the site, it looks helpful.

 

If you have the luxury of letting your writing sit for a few weeks before returning to it, that is usually a good thing, and a luxury you may not have once under contract.