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Earn money for writing memoirs

Many memoirs are written for personal satisfaction, often appearing as books of less than a hundred pages that are distributed to a small number of family and friends. Often no more than twenty-five books are printed. There is no intention that the book will become an international bestseller. You can get paid to write this kind of memoir.

find clients

Let people know that you are available to write memoirs. Create a website and a blog; print and distribute business cards; print and distribute pens with your name, phone number and web addresses; create your professional profile on Google, Yahoo! and LinkedIn; join a local or state writers club and participate in its activities; Be available to speak with organizations and professional groups.

Consider writing your first free memoir for a family member or friend, then use the book as an example of your work.

what to charge

You should charge a rate that best represents your skills and experience. Determine what hourly wage you are willing to work for. This could be $50, $100 or more. I’ve seen memoir writers charge $300 an hour. Convert your hourly rate to the total cost you will quote to a client. It’s not uncommon for memoir writers to charge $5,000, $10,000, or $50,000 for a project.

Offer your client a written contract detailing what you will do and what the client will do. See a sample contract at http://lifewriters.ca/

interview and write

Set up a series of interviews with your client. These can be sixty to ninety minutes each, once a week for several weeks, in person or over the phone. Use a digital voice recorder. After you’ve transcribed each interview (I’d rather pay someone to transcribe it so I can focus on writing), edit, rewrite, and arrange the manuscript so that the events appear in a logical sequence and the finished manuscript sounds like the author. You are the writer. Your client is the author and copyright owner of the manuscript and the finished product. Editing and writing will take approximately ten times longer than interviews.

Present the manuscript to your client for review when one or more chapters are complete. Submit the final manuscript on a CD instead of printed pages. You may want to charge extra for printed pages. Your manuscript must have a content page, page numbers, and chapter titles.

produce a book

You can include in the original agreement the cost of preparing the manuscript for making it into a book, or you can make a separate book preparation agreement. I use ten percent of the interview and writing fee as an initial guideline for the preparation of the book.

Producing a book involves finding a short-run printer, often called a printer on demand; exchange emails and phone calls with the printer; determine the cover and the appearance of the interior pages; proofreading; and printing and delivery of finished books. Your client pays for each of these and pays you to facilitate their completion.

Here we wish you the best of success with many satisfied customers.