The Personal to the Universal, and Other Priorities in Contemporary Memoir

Have you browsed the narrative nonfiction shelves lately and thought, “Oh man, I don’t have it in me to read another grief memoir”?

Here are a few thoughts on the memoir market as it stands, a few things you might prioritize inside and out of your own work. A note before we get started: This blog post should be seen as a primer. It contains observations I’ve made in the recent past, while working with memoirists who have attained agent interest, that I feel will help improve memoirists chances of trade publication, but it is certainly not the be all, end all of advice.

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Stop Being Your Own Bottleneck: How to Break Free of Perfectionism and Send Out Your Work

We’ve all been there. We ask ourselves, and our writing mentors, “How do I know when the work is done?” We agonize over all this and hate ourselves for it. We know that we need to find a way to accept that “pretty good and done” is better than “perfect and never done,” but we just can’t seem to snap ourselves out of our perfectionist tendencies.

This post helps to break the cycle.

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6 Tips for Finding and Using "Comp" Titles

If you've been querying agents for more than five minutes, you've likely heard of comps.

"Comp" or comparative titles are exactly that: books—and in some cases TV shows and movies!—that your book's plot, characters, and/or theme can draw a direct line of comparison to.

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