In part four of our books sales series, we want to address an obstacle we see many of our authors face as they begin to promote their published book, especially authors of memoirs or hybrid memoirs. These authors have important experiences to share, have done the work of thinking through them and deeply considering their meaning and relevance, and have written the book on the subject—but still don’t feel like an “expert.” Expert is a word we use a lot in discussing book promotion and marketing, but it can be loaded for many writers, triggering self-doubt and sometimes even stopping their progress. Today, we explore how you can get out and promote your book.
Before we get into today’s post, we wanted to ask—do you have a plan for actually finishing your memoir? If not, we know you aren’t making the progress you hoped for. That’s why we developed The Memoir Method Checklist. This free guide (and video training!) will take you through every single step you need from idea to published marketable book. Grab it now at https://pageandpodium.com/checklist
Promotion Requires Expertise
When you’ve written and published a non-fiction book, including memoir, it’s important to be willing to step into the promotion of the book in as many ways you feel comfortable doing, and that usually involves getting in front of audiences with smaller pieces if information—whether it is a social media post, speaking at a seminar or similar event, or writing shorter pieces to be published serially. However you do this, you will need to present as an expert—that is key to gaining both an audience’s interest and their trust. This can feel uncomfortable, especially if it’s your book and especially if your book is a memoir. However, you can step into this role of expert and embrace it when you are promoting your book.
What do we actually mean by expertise?
When we think of experts, we usually look to people who have advanced knowledge in their fields and often have formal credentials, like a higher education degree, like Amanda’s PhD or my MFA. What many people don’t realize is that they might have misconceptions about the process of obtaining these kinds of terminal degrees if they haven’t gone through the process themselves. One assumption is that the formal, top-down instruction continues throughout the post graduate program, when in actuality it is only continued through the first two years. One of the requirements and expectations of these programs is to come into the program with your own ideas and targets for study. The point of writing a doctoral dissertation is not to prove that you mastered all the information given to you by the established experts, but to add a subject into your field yourself that takes on new research, a new angle, or new analysis. Doctoral students then do not step into expertise when they are given their hoods, but rather well before that when they begin their dissertations. Gaining expertise is not crossing a finish line. Gaining expertise is a process of taking what you know and standing on it to make a new contribution to the field.
Writing a dissertation is a bit different than writing a book, and depending on the field an be quite different from writing a memoir, but in writing a book you are spending months to years thinking about this topic from every angle. You are thinking about it deeply, making connections, running into obstacles and nuances and complications along every step of the process, and pushed through challenges, and often some of them are unique to your book and what you are trying to say. (That’s why writing a book is hard.)
When you are writing a memoir, your experiences are what you have lived through that has driven you to share that story with others. In the Memoir Method, one of the essential first steps we take writers through it to ensure they have clarity on both their topic and their message and these are separate concepts. Your topic is the actual lived experiences of your life you are sharing, but your message is the lesson you learned that you want to share with your audience and say about your experiences. People can live through similar events and then have different things to say about them. Living through them is only one part of what makes you an expert—the other part is the hours and hours over many months thinking deeply through that message and considering how it’s reflected in each part of your story. That very work is the work of gaining expertise.
Message, not story, is how we connect to audiences
Many first time authors working on the memoirs may misunderstand what is the central value of the book. This misunderstanding shows up in many ways, and can make writers wonder if they’ve lived an “exciting” or “dramatic” enough life—choosing to highlight stories and experiences for their shock or drama value rather than how they connect to the key message of the book they want to share. However, it is message that is the heart of connection audiences feel when they find a book they love and pass on to their friends.
An example of how message and narrative can work together when supported by expertise in memoir is through Sarah Smarsh’s amazing memoir Heartland. In Heartland, Sarah shares her life story which is deeply rooted in middle America and financial hardship. The narrative reflects on how politics get projected onto the flyover states and onto the Bible belt. As a journalist, Smarsh won’t necessarily be considered by everyone as expert in Midwest working class culture—except that she most certainly is. She grew up deeply embedded in that environment and spent hundreds of hours combing back through her story to figure out what it meant. Not everyone, however, will acknowledge different forms of expertise—sometimes because they have a specific purpose for seeking that expertise that doesn’t match but also simply because there are biases or assumptions at play. Part of stepping into your expertise is that not everyone will want to acknowledge it—but that doesn’t mean you throw in the towel.
Also, spoiler alert—Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland will be the first book we examine for our Memoir Method book club. The book club will meet monthly and examine a powerful memoir through the lens of writers learning the fundamentals of the craft. Your first session is free, so if you want to get a taste of what the Memoir Method is all about, please join us.
Niche Expertise is still Expertise
Often we get caught up in the most visible, showy and hierarchical forms of expertise—degrees, certifications, or even simply money. However, there are many forms of expertise and acknowledging that doesn’t lessen those kinds of experts, but rather it widens and deepens the field, making different perspectives available that have different values for audiences. For instance, one writer we have worked with is in the field of elderly care. Her background is not medical or in social sciences, but in a lived experience of having to learn how to incorporate elderly care into a very busy modern life, including balancing raising kids, running a business. Her expertise is not the same as a doctor’s or nurses, and no one is saying that it is. However, that goes both ways. What she has learned and considered is different—and valuable—than the experience of a doctor or nurse giving elderly care as part of a profession. The expertise she shares is different, and valuable because it is different.
Throughout this series, we’ve talked about the trend in memoir marketing of niching down—finding the specific audiences who need your book as a key element of promotion strategy. This applies also to how you should think about your own experiences and expertise. You are not pretending to have qualifications you do not—no one should do that as part of a honest and effective promotional strategy. Instead, you are defining what your expertise is and who it will be valuable to. For our previous client, that meant realizing that there were many women who would face the same challenge, and would need more than a doctor’s and nurse’s perspective on how to balance that new commitment into their complex life.
The More you Know, the More you Know What You Don’t Know
Part of the curse of expertise is deeply connected to the nature of learning. The more you learn, the more you can start to see all there is to know, what individual skills can be gained, and how greatly complex so many subjects are. The “Dunning-Kruger Effect” has had a life in layman’s internet forums, often used snarkily to point out that people who are the most confident in their knowledge and skills are actually the least competent. However, that is only one part of this phenomenon, because the converse is true also. The more skilled a person is compared to the average, the more likely they are to downplay that skill and knowledge.
When we start to prepare to step into the roll of an expert, a feeling can arise that what we want to say—that essential and heartfelt message at the core of the project—is actually kind of dumb, and maybe just obvious. It is such a natural impulse and it is so pervasive in our culture to switch away and try to figure out the thing that you think everyone will resonate with. The thing that sounds smarter, the thing that’s grabbier or the thing that’s timelier. And all of those are the wrong impulse. Unfortunately, no matter how you try to adapt to a market of everyone, you will never ever satisfy the market of everyone, no matter how you try to adapt. And the result of trying to adapt is often the most milquetoast messages that anyone has ever put out there. These are not messages that are inspired, but simple. These are messages that are just obvious.
The you that is the expert needs to be the you that promotes the book. And that means you have got to hold on tight to what that big idea is, to what the meaning of your story is, to what your message is. So instead of that, when you have one of those days, when you feel like you can’t step into the “expert” role and worry that you never will, we encourage you to revisit the beginning of your project. What did you know at the beginning of the project? I bet it was so much less than you know now.
PS. Searching the internet for writing, publishing, and book marketing advice can be exhausting to say the least! If you’re ready for hands on, one-on-one support for your memoir, check out The Memoir Method. We’d love to welcome you into this nine-month group program specially designed for women writing their first memoirs. And don’t forget, if you’d like to chat with Amanda about the program (or any other services we offer), you can book a free consult any time!
