Write Your Way Real talk + resources for writers

You've got a story to tell sell

If you've listened to any publishing industry professionals (editors, agents), or followed book buying trends, then you won't be shocked to learn that memoirs are not as easy to sell as, let's say, Romance, Fantasy, its spawn Romantasy, or traditionally strong genres like Mystery/Thriller. Really, memoir is a difficult sell (to agents, publishers, and to some extent readers), except in certain instances.

In some ways, trends are always shifting. The spike in Romantasy and Fantasy is partially bolstered by BookTok / Bookstagram and the overdrive proliferation of "books-as-aesthetic". Ornate, intricate covers and sprayed edges, mixed with escape into worlds of contained and ordered chaos, transporting us for a time from our very real world's unconfined and unadulterated chaos.

Then again, Romance has pretty consistently been the bestselling genre, long before IG and TT.

And it's not just the visual (photo and video), but also the writing-heavy microblogging apps like X (Twitter), Threads, and BlueSky that overwhelm us in other ways. These apps produce a level of fatigue and ennui at the ephemeral, mundane stories we're all constantly throwing into the ether. In an era of effusive oversharing, we're paradoxically hungry for other people's lived experiences, and tired of everyone's demands on our attention. It might make you wonder if there's a place and readership out there for your memoir.

The thing underpinning all this social media, though, is the very human desire for connection. We want to connect with stories like ours for hope, inspiration, solidarity. We need to connect with stories unlike our own for those same reasons and more. And we yearn to connect historical and current events, ideas, advancements, paradigm shifts, breakthroughs, and other headline-grabbers or headline-makers, with real lives and tangible experiences.

So how do you give your memoir the best chance of success, when attention spans are small, people want both hyper escape and hyperrealism, depending on the moment or day, and your book isn't likely to get the sprayed edge and embossed cover treatment?

Let's first admit that it's rarely been a "great" time to sell a memoir (the 90s and 2000s were a tad better). Next, let's briefly look at some attributes that can get memoirs to the top of bestseller, literary prize, and reading lists.

• Celebrity. Famous people — especially from the worlds of media (film, TV, music) and politics — are usually shoe-ins not just for book deals, but for publishers to allocate more marketing money to their launches, and higher advances to their authors in the first place. They also sell better once they've hit the shelves. Readers are curious about celebrities and their lives, especially if the lives are tabloid-y or otherwise storied. They want the behind-the-scenes, the juicy tidbits, and a unvarnished truth of the person living it. They want to know how their favorite got there, what they did there, and what "there" is really like.
• Something totally different from what most of us encounter. Going even deeper into the human curiosity to read what we don't know about personally, readers gravitate toward memoirs about exceptional lives and trials. A unique upbringing, a journey few people undertake, a rare but acute personal tragedy, an unlikely triumph. We want to know about the kinds of lives we'll never live, sometimes thankfully so. This is why readers flock to war memoirs, travel/adventure memoirs, cult memoirs, idiosyncratic childhood memoirs, addiction/recovery memoirs, abuse/violence memoirs, and so on.
• A personal story that's consciously and expertly tied-in with the reality of a wider topic, issue, philosophy, or situation. This is Memoir+. It is personal, but also universal in a more tangible way than the broad and loose "human experience" umbrella of feelings and emotions. It's about what you did or went through, but it's also about something bigger than you. A detailed lived experience, reaching out and bringing in parts of the world relevant beyond that person, with purpose and a point. One person's life as a mirror and a door to a larger narrative.
  • A domestic abuse survival memoir that explores the role of patriarchal, high-control religion in upholding and encouraging abuse (A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings).
  • An immigrant's story that traces US immigration sentiments and laws throughout the nation's history (Once I was You by Maria Hinojosa), or the story of one undocumented man's life and struggles to "get legal," which shed light on the lesser-known immigration system cracks folks can easily fall through (Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas).
  • A memoir that traces an author's evolution, while also being a treatise on the power of personal narrative, and imparting creative writing professor wisdom (Body Work by Melissa Febos).
  • A Muslim lesbian's exploration of the Quran as a source of strength and grounding through her already complex and weighty experiences of immigrating (twice!), family, friendships, racism, and more (Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H.).

Some memoirs, of course, hit more than one of the above.

If you're now thinking some version of, "Well, shit, I'm not a celebrity, I didn't escape a cult, and my story isn't so unlike that of many others; is my memoir doomed to find only rejection instead of readers?" take a breath.

There's hope in memoir+

That "more" in "memoir, but more" is an invitation, an opening, an opportunity. You can follow the strongest threads in your story beyond yourself and create something amazing, like Robin Wall Kimmerer does with her own upbringing and family, Indigenous natural world wisdom (Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)), and Western scientific approaches to botany and plant ecology, in her eco-memoir Braiding Sweetgrass.

Memoir-plus isn't about subsuming yourself or your experience to the story of something more or bigger than yourself. It's seeing your story as part of the fabric of something else, and showing readers how it's all stitched together. Sometimes so they can stitch a better world, other times so they can darn what's already ripped or ripping. It's not about making the personal political, religious, historical, scientific, social, or systemic, but about recognizing and leaning into the places where those broader realities interact with your story. And then sharing that combined narrative. Telling a story about yourself and showing us something about the world through that story. It doesn't need to be grand or zeitgeist-y, but it should be relevant. Thought-provoking, maybe conversation-opening.

I've been seeing more online chatter about memoir+ from agents, with some agents specifically seeking those types of memoirs. That isn't to say that literary and other types of traditional memoirs aren't still making Manuscript Wish Lists (MSWLs), because they are. But this is about giving yourself and your memoir the best chance. If your story is strongest and best told as a traditional memoir, trust it. But if you're feeling frustrated that it's "not enough", consider what shifting to a memoir+ approach might open up.

Get resourced with Reedsy

Reedsy is a marketplace where you can find editors, designers, and other book industry professionals. It also has a searchable literary agent directory. While not as robust on that front as MSWL, the database seems well-updated and good for a quick and dirty idea of agents who are looking for memoirs to represent.

Keep writing,

Cornelia ✍🏼 ✨