Many memoirs are written for personal satisfaction and often appear 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 for the book to become an international bestseller. You can get paid to write these kinds of memoirs.

find customers

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 on them; 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 memoir for free for a family member or friend, then use the book as a sample 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 a client. It’s not uncommon for memoir writers to charge $5,000, $10,000, or $50,000 for a project.

Give 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 prefer to pay someone to transcribe it so I can concentrate on writing), edit, rewrite, and arrange the manuscript so that 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 holder of the manuscript and the finished product. Editing and writing will take approximately ten times as long as 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 the printed pages. Your manuscript should have a content page, page numbers, and chapter headings.

produce a book

You can include the cost of preparing the manuscript for conversion into a book in the original agreement, or you can make a separate book preparation agreement. I use ten percent of the interview and writing fees as an initial guide 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 appearance of the inside 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.