Some truths for life story and memoir writers to hold in their hearts:
Your story has value. If it didn’t, you’d be able to let it go easily. It wouldn’t call to you from inside your dreams. It wouldn’t follow you on your walks. Its fragments wouldn’t bully their way onto scraps of paper around your house, or into the notes app on your phone, or into the quiet conversations in your head.
No one else can tell your story like you can. Literally no one else.
Self-publishing carried a stigma back in 2008 when the traditional New York publishing house W. W. Norton published my first book, Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table. What a difference sixteen years, and a whole lot of technology, made in the publishing world. In the current market, anyone with a story to tell and access to a computer and a bank account can publish a book and find an audience. Authors like me come to self-publishing for many reasons. In her (self-published) workbook, The Publishing Workbook for Independent Authors: Your Step-By-Step Guide to Professional Book Design, Production, and Distribution, self-publishing guru Carla King lists six possible reasons for self-publishing, and all of them resonate with me.
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An interview with the memoirist Deborah Lott about her book, Don’t Go Crazy Without Me: A Tragicomic Memoir.
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