6 Tips on Overcoming Obstacles to Publishing Your Memoir

Fatal Flaws and Other Fixable Things

Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash

Occasionally I take a break from writing to play a computer game in which you have to guide a mouse to its mousehole, avoiding blind alleys and blank walls along the way.

In publishing a memoir, writers face their own blind alleys and blank walls. Following are five of the most formidable (and familiar) and strategies for overcoming them.

Obstacle #1 Your query or proposal is consistently rejected

I sold my memoir after 179 submissions, and I’m sure I will break that record in the future.

Solution: Repeat to yourself, “Giving up is not an option.”

You can revise, ask for another opinion, or continue to send out. But you cannot give up.

During the years I submitted my memoir, I remember many empty, defeated-feeling days. If I’d listened to the universe on those days, I’d swear it was telling me to give up, like wicked Mrs. Danvers whispering to Max de Winter’s young wife in Rebecca: “Go ahead. Jump. He never loved you, so why go on…” Or, as I heard it, “Go ahead, give up. No one likes your book, so why keep trying?”

Tell that evil Mrs. Danvers to go jump in a lake (or, in her case, the ocean) and continue to send out your manuscript.