Wordcraft -- An editor's take on memoir

“Memoir, to me, when it comes to historical fiction, is one of the best sources of material,” Steven Anderson Law, editor of Missouri-based Goldminds Publishing, told his audience at last weekend’s Houston Writers’ Guild conference.

That doesn’t mean memoir is always sellable. “Memoirs are tough business,” he warned. “Publishers are going to want to know who you are.”

However, not being a nationally-known name doesn’t make memoirs unpublishable. For instance, Missouri author Ellen Gray Massey had “just turned ninety when she said she wanted to publish her memoirs.”

When he considered that Ms. Massey had a significant following in the Missouri Ozarks for her Foxfire-type folklore writing, he told her to send them in. The result: Footprints in the Ozarks: A Memoir, now available on Kindle.

The technique for writing a compelling memoir, he said, is to “make it strong and powerful with a message in there for somebody else. We read memoirs for an uplifting message.” And above all, especially for memoirs from unknown or little-known authors, the quality of the writing is crucial to interesting a publisher.

A writer can have good ideas, “but I’m not going to truly know until I see your writing.”

What about length, audience members asked.

“If you’re a new writer and (publishers) are going to take a chance on you, the more pages, the more it costs.” Although cost is not as great a problem for electronic publishing, the writer must still keep in mind the strong competition between media for the attention of potential readers.

“To me, smaller is better. If you write more than 100,000 words as a first-time writer, you’re going to intimidate publishers.” (If fact, for first-time authors, he recommends keeping the word count between 75,000 to 80,000.)

But what if the names are changed? Or if the story is partly fiction and partly memoir? Or it’s about a person who doesn’t know he or she is a character in your memoir?

“Writers need to do a lot of soul searching,” Law said. “Why are you writing the book? I can tell from the tone, if somebody’s angry. . . You’re not trying to get back at someone, just trying to explain how it impacts somebody’s life.”

For more information about Goldminds, see www.goldmindspub.com/ or the July 27, 2011, post at this site’s archives, “Texas tales at A Real Bookstore.”

Wordcraft -- Texas tales at A Real Bookstore

A Real Bookstore

113 Prairie Rd.

Fairview

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It’s been nearly a year since the closing of North Texas’ largest independent bookstore, Legacy Books in Plano. Since then its successor, A Real Bookstore, has opened in Fairview. The differences between the two are indicative of the economy’s changes.

Legacy’s three-story location in an upscale Plano site has been replaced by a more modest one-story building between Macy’s and J.C. Penney’s in the Village at Fairview. A Real Bookstore’s owner Teri Tanner believes the new location will have more appeal in its neighborhood. And she is determined not to repeat a key mistake of one of her former employers, Borders. A Real Bookstore sells online, at www.arealbookstore.com/ , keeping more of its sales dollars in North Texas.

The store also offers a home for regional artists and writers, something not always available from a national chain. That’s why I was there last Saturday -- to get a signed copy of Texas Tales Illustrated, written by award-winning Western writer Mike Kearby and illustrated by Mack White of Austin. The first volume of Tales is the opener for a series of Texas history volumes in graphic novel form. Written to follow the state’s seventh-grade history curriculum, the book features true stories of young Texans of the 1830’s.

I also got Kearby’s newest book of fiction, A Hundred Miles to Water, for which he received the Will Rogers Medallion Award for Best Adult Fiction at the Fort Worth stockyards Sunday. The book is based on the pioneer ranching family of James Olive, whose members lived violently and often died the same way. And on the exploits of African-American cowboy and gunslinger Jim Kelly. “To most along the trail,” Kearby writes, “(Kelly) was known as the Ebony Gun.”

A Hundred Miles to Water is published by Goldminds Publishing LLC. The publishing house plans to take its line to national distributors, according to regional sales manager Kelly Netherton, who accompanied Kearby and Mack at the signing.

Independent sellers such as A Real Bookstore, Ms. Netherton said, are key components of Goldminds’ plan to sell Western novels in hardback, a genre larger publishers issue only in paperback. But as the publisher expands, it, like A Real Bookstore, is taking a long view, emphasizing quality over quantity and building its own online business at www.goldmindspub.com/ Goldminds accepts submissions from authors, but authors should check its site for guidelines.

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While we’re talking Westerns, I’ll also mention the annual short story contest from Moonlight Mesa Associates. The deadline is September 1. This year the stories must feature elements of suspense, mystery or thrillers. There is a fee for submissions, but I won some money last year, so I’ll try again for 2011. See www.moonlightmesaassociates.com for details.