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Therefore, the book I want to persuade you to write is not a book you’re going to sell. You would be so much better off if you would conduct open-heart surgery on yourself right now, removing every vestige of yearning for fame and fortune and implanting instead the single right ambition: to write a good book, with no reward other than that. You’ll try to write the wrong book, and you won’t get far.īook writing is a hard enough you don’t need a huge, fundamental mistake before you even begin. It will confuse your motivation, point you in wrong directions, influence every sentence you write, and drastically reduce your chances of finishing. My book will be so special, it’ll be the one that breaks through the marketability barrier.”īut you’re kidding yourself, and I’m not going to encourage you to keep dreaming because the serious point here is that living with this illusion is not harmless. Right now, you may be nodding in reluctant agreement, but a little voice inside you is protesting, “Okay, I’ll play this game and pretend to accept that I’m unmarketable. But we have to let go of this fantasy it will only get in the way. The consequences of unmarketability are so obvious, they are not even worthy of Economics 101, yet we who write are fragile dreamers and deniers of reality, always clinging to hopes of rainbows and pots of gold and a taste of public adulation. As a shopper in a bookstore, you would not shell out $17.95 for a copy of Leo Femish’s My Fifty Years in Dry Cleaning. If you were a publisher, you would probably not be willing to invest company money underwriting the publication of Mildred Seplavy: I Did It My Way. I think we have to concede that this makes sense. Nor is it a character defect of publishers to insist on an affirmative answer to “Can this book sell?” Some publishers, such as university presses or small specialty houses, have different viewpoints and might be less profit-minded, but there is always a financial context. So we would be rejected by publishers for the most clear-cut and fatal of reasons: Our autobiographies are not marketable.īeing unmarketable is an economic reality but not a character defect. Your story, while possibly very good, is not compelling enough to differentiate it from other stories-if it were that compelling, you would probably have attracted a certain amount of notice, even fame, and you’d have a chance.īut for most of us, that hasn’t happened and will not happen.
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You have no “author platform” (meaning unique qualities that might attract attention or add appeal to your book). So your concern that you’ll never be signed to a publishing deal because you’re not famous is at least 99 percent accurate, probably higher. While it happens on rare occasions that an unknown writer produces a successful novel or thriller and reaps a highly publicized bonanza, an autobiography by an unknown and inexperienced writer has virtually no appeal to publishers. But the reality is that your story is not suited for the prime time of national publication. These seductive fantasies flicker in the minds of all writers. Local Man’s Autobiography Is Best-Seller: I don’t want you to pour a lot of time, energy, emotion, and good intentions into writing anything except the book that’s right for you, because trying to write the wrong book for the wrong reasons will lead you precisely to the outcome that would-be writers correctly dread: fast, frustrating, painful and embarrassing defeat. Like most things that are really worth doing, writing an autobiography is a formidable challenge, and the odds are against you if you dash in wide-eyed and unprepared. But they’re also right to consider the doubts I’ve mentioned because these doubts are not insignificant. They recognize that it’s something they want to do or need to do, something they would find enjoyable and enriching, something with long-lasting value. Like you, they feel a pull to write their life story. They are taking classes, joining autobiography clubs, reading how-to books, or working on their own in classic writer solitude. But I also know that unfamous people have been writing their autobiographies quietly and successfully for decades, for centuries, and they are doing it now in unprecedented numbers.