Abundance in Memoir Writing Stimulates Cooperation at Women’s Memoirs

Post #16 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Business – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler

There’s good news and bad news for memoir writers these days. First the good news, memoirs have probably never been more popular with the reading public than they are today. In fact, this is the age of abundance for nonfiction generally and memoir specifically. Let me cite a few statistics I found on the Internet:

• In a discussion of nonfiction writing, Emerson College professors wrote: “According to Nielsen BookScan in late January [2006], nonfiction outsells fiction by about 100 million books a year.”
• Back in 2001, when author and ghostwriter Kerri Lane wrote about the opportunities in nonfiction for Foremost Press, she claimed, “Non-fiction also outsells fiction by almost two to one.”
• But it gets better. In a recent review of Ben Yagoda’s new book, Memoir: A History, Catherine Ramsdell cites Yagoda himself, who reported that nonfiction now outsells fiction four to one. She also quotes from Yagoda: “…total sales in the categories of Personal Memoirs, Childhood Memoirs, and Parental Memoirs increased more than 400 percent between 2004 and 2008.”

Buried in Abundance

So if you haven’t yet started writing that memoir, this is your wake-up call. And yet, in the wake of such good news and encouraging numbers, there is a downside. I hesitate to call it bad news; it’s more of a heads-up. To quote Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes, “Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory.” Susan Albert, Story Circle Network founder and author of the China Bayles mystery series (among others), serves as our canary in the publishing world. Last week Susan left a comment here on Women’s Memoirs; she wrote: “When my memoir, TOGETHER, ALONE: A MEMOIR OF MARRIAGE AND PLACE came out in September, I expected the usual round of reviews from the publications that always review my mystery fiction: PW, Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus. (I’ve never published a mystery that hasn’t been reviewed by all of these.) But the memoir was simply not noticed….”

Library Journal provided Susan’s publisher with the explanation: “We’re swamped w/memoirs. We’re doing a roundup of 39, and Susan’s book will be mentioned in that article. Sorry we can’t give it more attention.”

So there it is. We’re smack in the middle of the Golden Age of Memoirs and faced with the challenge of getting our books discovered, reviewed and, ultimately, read. This is one reason why Matilda and I will be writing a Book Business column here at least once a week. We believe there are many things you can do to get noticed. As you might expect, much of our attention will be on Internet tools and resources and social networking strategies and tactics, but not exclusively.

Let’s Work Together

Matilda and I also have been talking among ourselves for some time now about how much we’ve enjoyed our Author Conversations interview series…and what else we can we do to expand our outreach into the great community of memoir writers and readers. The answer is really quite simple, we do everything we can to encourage cooperation and collaboration among memoirists. Story Circle Network is another organization that does everything possible to expand the community and market for memoir, life writing and personal storytelling. Their attitude is one of the reasons we enjoy working with SCN so much.

Women’s Memoirs is just one more resource for you…a place to get reviewed, to hear what other authors are saying, to submit a memoir vignette (KitchenScraps), to follow the world of publishing and book marketing, to pick up an idea in the form of brief writing prompt, and much more.

If you’re interested in guest blogging, let us know. Bettyann Schmidt is already a regular guest blogger for our ScrapMoir series, Promptly Portland writes many of our writing prompts, and all our authors being interviewed first submit a guest post. We also have several outside reviewers now, and can certainly accommodate more. After all, we’ll be posting 52 reviews this year.

Help Us Build the Women’s Memoirs Blogroll

Finally, we now want to add a Blogroll (more traditional, nonblog Websites also eligible) for everything memoir that writers and readers could want. We invite you to use the Comment section below to nominate a site you like…and yes, it most certainly can be your own. In your Comment, please include the site name, URL and a brief (1-2 sentence) description.

Then tell us what you think and if there’s anything else you’d like to see in Women’s Memoirs that we haven’t thought to offer. The year 2010 is the year Women’s Memoirs helps to turn Abundance into an expansive Community. Our collective cooperation and collaboration doesn’t take away from anyone’s individual success. Quite the opposite; it brings more to everyone. Interest in memoir is not a zero-sum game. Together we’ll actually further expand interest in this marvelous genre.

Now get to writing…but first nominate your site or someone else’s, and let us know what else you’d like to see on Women’s Memoirs.

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book marketing
memoir blogroll
memoir
nonfiction

Tagged as: Blogroll, Book Marketing, book reviews, collaboration, community, memoir publishing