Celebrating the ‘we’ in reaching a Memoir Milestone

Today we have reached a very exciting milestone. It was exactly a year ago to the day I met my then ‘potential client’ to discuss his book. He wanted to publish a memoir about ‘how he became a psychic/spirit medium’ so we discussed the possibility of me being his ‘ghostwriter’. (I’ve already made all the jokes possible about a medium having a ghostwriter …lol)

I say ‘we‘ because as you will discover reading through this blog – writing a book takes so much more than just one person to make a project like this happen. In fact, right from the very beginning, it was a mutual friend and former President of Gold Coast Writer’s Association Angelika Heurich who put us in touch. Thank you for that kind recommendation, Angelika. This was the first step in helping ‘client A’ towards his publishing aspirations.

So there we were – a year ago today – we met at the beautiful Bamboo Buddha to discuss what he had by way of notes and how far we needed to go to bring that project to a submission-ready manuscript – so it seems timely indeed that we should be hitting the ‘send’ button today.

Since that sunny day, it has taken hours of phone interviews to scratch below the surface of more than a decade of life, to find the emotion of the little moments. It’s taken a few more hours to transcribe those hours of interviews to pick through and find the diamonds in the dig. Structures, outlines, arcs, timelines, scene constructs, memoir mapping, themes, messages, quotes, research … and that was all before the drafting began.

Then there was the writing itself. As most writers know, this is the easy part. Slowly but surely we turned his head full of notes and a few thousand words into a 60,000-page body of work.

I do a lot of editing for clients, however, I knew I was just too close to edit this manuscript. So I wanted to personally thank Marian Gobraiel at wordsbymariangobraiel for stepping in to the breach with her professional editing services. It’s great to find an editor who really gets to grips with the brief very quickly – just makes life so much easier. Thank you Marian!

My ‘client A’ (as he will be called until after publication) also worked with a great design team taking care of photography and post-processing. Doing your own photography is a great way to keep control of your brand, look and feel especially in the early days when you are building your author platform.

The marketing has already begun. Yup I said that bad word. For those of you not familiar with my Blog – ‘You want me to what my book?”, check it out. It’s often a nasty shock for writers to realise they have to market their book too – luckily the Butterfly Bureau at McRae Comms can help you with that. It’s their thing.

We all have a book inside of us – but getting it out, onto paper and then out into the world is as much about perseverance and ‘process’ as it is about creativity. It is also about having a great team of professionals and supporters and family around you, willing you on to cross the finish line. For my part, there is something very satisfying about helping people become writers, and writers become authors. I truly love what I do.

Today all of that is done. We are now ready for submission! Yay for ‘client A’!