Writing & Selling Your Memoir

A memoir isn't one long diary entry. Rather, it's a well-crafted story about a crucial, often exceptionally difficult time, in someone's life. Writing & Selling Your Memoir gives you the knowledge and skills you need to turn your most important personal stories into compelling and meaningful reading experiences for others.

In this insightful guide, literary agent Paula Balzer draws on her experience working with New York Times best-selling memoirists and carefully explores the genre, providing you with step-by-step instruction on how to:

• Identify strong opening and closing points
• Find and develop a strong central hook that your readers will relate to
• Structure your memoir for maximum readability
• Use dialogue and pacing to enhance intimacy
• Approach honesty and truthfulness, but also know when it's okay to embellish the facts for entertainment value or to protect the identities of your "characters"
• Build a successful author platform, get an agent's attention, and get published

Chock full of tips, techniques, detailed exercises, examples from best-selling memoirs, and sidebars from well-known memoir authors, Writing & Selling Your Memoir teaches you how to approach the genre with love, respect, and know-how without sentimentalizing it.

Bonus! Get a helpful Publishing House Imprint List! This handy list breaks down which imprints belong to which publishing houses and can help you in your submission planning. Plus, get access to an exclusive interview with memoirist Laura Munson, author of This Isn't the Story You Think It Is. This item is provided as a downloadable PDF format in your purchase confirmation email.

Read an Excerpt!