More From Deep in the Heart of Memoirs: Story Circle Network’s Conference

Post #25 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Business – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler

Picture this: More than 150 women from across the US gather in Austin for Story Circle Network’s bi-annual Stories from the Heart Conference to listen, learn, and share their stories and ways to tell their stories.

On Saturday morning, February 6, more than 40 of those women bring their questions and ideas to the Getting Published panel, moderated by Helen Ginger. Panelists were: Susan J. Tweit, Linda Wisniewski, Laurie Wagner Buyer, Kendra Bonnett and me. Below is the first 15 minutes of the panel.

Helen Ginger opened the panel with a question to me about the popularity of the memoir genre. Is it a passing fad? Is it already fading? I brought some statistics that I shared with the audience and thought I’d share them with you as well. You’ll hear the rounded numbers in the audio below, but I wanted to give you the actual figures:

EBSCO Academic Search is the online database that indexes more than 10,000 publications annually. A search in that resources showed the mention of memoir(s):

1990 – 1994 2431
1995 – 1999 3538
2000 – 2004 4534
2005 – 2009 7524

Next, Amazon is a wonderful surrogate to answer the question about the popularity of memoir. Using the keyword memoir and searching by year of publication, we find:

1995 1,136
…..
2000 2,274
..
2002 3,209
..
2004 4,758
..
2006 5,297
..
2008 8,737
..
2009 17,051

And, as of February 6, 2010, Amazon already lists 5339 books published in 2010 that have memoir as a keyword.

Clearly, the popularity of the memoir genre is still on the rise. You’ll hear all the panelists talk about the important of memoir as a genre as they answer questions from the audience.

We invite your questions about this genre in the Comments section below.

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Memoir Getting Published Panel
memoir genre
memoir genre statistics
book marketing
memoir

Tagged as: book business, getting publishing, memoir publishing