July 2026 archive

How to Build an Author Platform Before Your Memoir Is Published

Most memoir writers assume the real work is the writing itself. And there is plenty to do in that regard: remembering, drafting, shaping your life into a story! But many writers miss something that needs to happen at the same time as the writing—creating an audience for your book. This article focuses on that task, showing you how to build an author platform before your memoir is published.

A writer came to me a while back with a finished manuscript—eighteen months of early mornings before work and weekends of missed evenings with friends. She was proud of it, and she should have been. “What do I do next,” she asked.

Start Building Your Audience Early

Had she come to me early in her memoir-writing project, I’d have told her to begin building her audience right away: a blog about her book’s central theme, maybe, or creating a social media presence related her story. Of course, her manuscript was the priority, but an audience takes as long to build as a book does to write—and those are the people who are going to receive your book and give it a home in the world.

Your audience, then, is a group of people who know you’re writing your book and are waiting to read it. They’re people who follow you somewhere on social media, open your emails, and will preorder your book the day it’s available.

If you’re hoping to publish traditionally, agents and editors will look at your audience as evidence that readers will actually buy your book. In fact, a robust platform is often what gets a memoir taken seriously, especially for a first-time author. If you’re planning to self-publish, the effect of an audience is even more direct: It’s the difference between a book that sells a handful of copies to family and friends and one with a wider reach—because those readers are already waiting for your book to come out.

How to Build an Author Platform Before Your Memoir Is Published

1. Speak about your theme: Your memoir has a central theme—perhaps grief, reinvention, addiction, faith, or walking away. Talk about that theme publicly while you’re drafting your memoir.

2. Start a blog: You need a place where the people who will eventually care about your book can find you and see what you have to say. (Take a look at my post on blogging and memoir writing.)

3. Pick a platform: Instagram, Substack, a Facebook group—any one of these might be a good fit for you to share ideas about your memoir theme or topic. What matters most is that you show up to a platform with consistency.

4. Share ideas your topic, not your manuscript, itself: You don’t have to share pages from your memoir to build an audience. Write about your subject, what you’re learning, noticing, and wrestling with. Keep your book private until it’s ready for publication.

5. Find communities interested in your topic: If your memoir is about caregiving, find caregivers online—in forums, Facebook groups, or by following hashtags.

6. Collect emails, not just followers

To build an email list, offer a bonus for signing up: a few pages from your book’s opening, an essay on your theme, even a short checklist based on your subject—something like “5 Things No One Tells You About Coming Home From Deployment” for a memoir about military service.

Invite people to join your email list from the same place every time. For instance, include a single line at the end of your posts, like “Want the first chapter when it’s ready? Join the list.” People need to see the offer more than once before they act on it.

Use a simple tool to collect and hold your list. Mailchimp and ConvertKit are both great. Then, actually write to folks on your list! Even a few lines every month or two—what you’re working on, a small update, a short story—keeps the relationship alive so that when the book is ready, they remember why they’re interested.

7. Tell stories: An audience is built from sharing small, relatable moments—memories, images, insights. Share these regularly so people start to recognize your voice.

8. Show yourself before the book is done: Building an audience may mean sharing before you feel ready. But audience-building doesn’t have to wait until you feel confident. In fact, it might help you develop confidence and your platform at the same time.

9. Talk with your early readers: Answer comments. Ask questions. The relationship that becomes an audience is built in the back-and-forth. Likewise, follow like-minded others and comment on their posts. Engagement builds community—and community = audience.

10. Track what resonates: Which posts get a real response—comments, replies, shared stories of your readers’ own? Those responses tell you what your readers are hungry for.

How to Build an Author Platform Before Your Memoir Is Published—Starting Today

One small step to take today: Write a paragraph about the theme at the heart of your memoir. Then share it where someone who might be interested in the same theme can find it: write a Facebook post, create a Notes app screenshot and share on Instagram, or write an email to five people you already know who’d care that you’re talking about this subject.

It’s a small step, but it will create the foundation of interest (and courage) that you’ll build your audience upon.

Could you use some support as you build your author platform before your memoir is published? I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help.
Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.

Writing a memoir can be a deeply rewarding journey—but also a tricky one. This article offers guidance for shaping your story in a way that honors both your truth and your readers: “How to Write a Memoir.”   If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

How honest should a memoir be? The answer is more nuanced than you might think. Not because memoir writers are dishonest people—actually, my clients are more deeply honest than many folks I know. But memoir asks something specific of us: to tell our story in a way that invites a reader’s trust. And that trust comes from our readers believing we aren’t hiding from them—or from ourselves.

“Factual” and “Honest” Aren’t the Same Thing

Your memoir does need to be factual. The events in your book have to have actually happened, in the order and manner you say they did. Unlike fiction writers, memoirists can’t invent scenes to add drama or combine two arguments into one because it’s tidier. If it didn’t happen, it doesn’t belong in a memoir. It’s what separates memoir from fiction.

On the other hand, no one expects you to reconstruct dialogue word for word, or to remember exactly what the weather was like the day your father left. Memory doesn’t necessarily store detail in that way, and readers know it. You’re allowed to write, “He said something like …” and render the spirit of the conversation, even if you can’t quote it exactly.

So, factual means the events you share are real. Honest means you’re not shaping those real events to make yourself or anyone else look better or worse than they were. Where writers actually get into trouble isn’t with the fuzzy memory of a detail—it’s when they invent something that didn’t happen, or leave out a part of your story that would complicate how they want to come across to readers.

Writing About Other People

Once you start writing about your own life, other people show up in the pages. It’s unavoidable, and it brings up two very different kinds of worry.

One is a personal issue: Is writing about someone important to you likely to hurt them or jeopardize your relationship with them? Are you willing to face the consequences of that type of honesty? Unfortunately, there’s no formula to help you evaluate the risk. It’s not a legal question; it’s a “what am I willing to live with” question—and only you can answer it.

The other issue is legal. As you write your memoir, questions about privacy, identifiability, and legal risk arise. I’ve written about one aspect of this topic in my post titled “Should You Use Real Names When Writing a Memoir?,” which discusses what changing someone’s name actually does and doesn’t protect you from. But I always advise memoirists to research legalities before publishing.

Writing About Yourself

It’s not especially hard to write honestly about someone who hurt us. What can be hard is writing honestly about choices we’ve made that we’re not proud of. The small cruelty. The moments we weren’t brave. How we hurt other people.

Of course, we don’t have to disclose everything. Privacy is not the same as dishonesty, and we’re allowed to decide what stays out of our book entirely. But we are not perfect—and no one expects us to have been. So, as we write our story, we can ask ourselves gently, “Is this the version of me that I actually displayed at the time—or is it the version I’d feel better showing to someone else?”

A Small Exercise in Facts and Honesty

Pick a moment from your life that you haven’t written about yet. First, write it as plainly as you can, like you’re filing a report. Just tell what happened, in order, without emotion or interpretation.

Next, write about the situation again. This time, add the emotion, saying what you actually felt —including anything you might be tempted to soften, whether that’s your own behavior or someone else’s.

Read both versions back. The first is factual. The second is where honesty lives.

How Honest Should Your Memoir Be?

A memoir where the writer is willing to be seen clearly—flaws included—makes the reader feel they’ve been entrusted with something real. And that, more than any dramatic confession, is what keeps them rooting for you—and turning the page.

Ready to write your story? As you’re considering writing your memoir, you might find my article “How to Write a Memoir” useful. And If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books, Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.

Memoir Writing Prompts: What Your Stuff Remembers

If you’re looking for memoir writing prompts that are personal and specific to you and your life, you don’t need to look far. What you need is probably sitting on a book shelf or tucked in the back of a closet. The objects you live with every day are quietly holding your memories—you just need to ask them to speak.

After Joan Didion’s husband died, she couldn’t bring herself to give away his shoes. As she says in her memoir, Because somewhere in the back of her grief-stricken mind, she writes in her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, a part of her believed he might still come back—and he would need them.

Objects remember differently than photographs

Photos are wonderful memory triggers. If you’ve ever tried writing snapshot memoir, you know the magic of dropping into a moment captured by an image. But objects can have a different, maybe more immediate, impact.

Your grandmother’s mixing bowl, for instance, can conjure an entire experience:  Sunday mornings, flour on a dark countertop, the sound of your cousins’ laughter. Your father’s old toolbox can carry his whole philosophy of life: Fix what’s broken, make it last, do it yourself.

Objects carry sensory memory: weight, smell, texture, the specific way something felt in your hands. And that kind of memory goes deep.

For memoir writers, this is gold.

Your home is a memoir waiting to be written

Think about the objects around you that you’ve kept, the things that have followed you from apartment to apartment, relationship to relationship, decade to decade. What memories do they hold that you can mine?

Maybe you have a piece of jewelry you never wear but can’t part with. Or a book with someone else’s handwriting in the margins. Or a coffee mug from a place you used to love. These aren’t just things. They’re memoir writing prompts, hiding in plain sight.

You may not even know what an object means to you until you start writing about it. You think you’re writing about a mug, and then suddenly you’re writing about loneliness, or belonging, or a summer that changed everything.

A memoir writing prompt for you

Set a timer for ten minutes. Look around the room—or close your eyes and let an object come to mind. It might be something ordinary. It might be something you’ve stopped seeing because it’s so familiar.

Pick it up or picture it clearly. Now ask it some questions: Where did you come from? Who held you before me? What were you there for? What do you know about my life that I’ve never put into words?

Then write. Don’t edit, don’t overthink. Just follow the object wherever it leads. You may be surprised where you end up.

Ready to write your story?

If you’re feeling the pull toward memoir, toward getting your own story onto the page, I’d love to support you. Sometimes all it takes is the right question, and the right person to help you find your way.

As you’re considering writing your memoir, you might find my article “How to Write a Memoir” useful, as well as my books, Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.

First-time memoir writers know they have a story to tell, but they’re not necessarily sure where that story starts, where it ends, or what to include in the telling of it. Most “memoir writing tips for beginners” hand you a bullet list of principles—show, don’t tell; find your theme; write with honesty. These are all important points. But just reading those principles may not help you get your book off the ground.

So instead of another list of principles, the “memoir writing tips for beginners” here are actually given in the form of an exercise with six steps—sort of like a treasure hunt!

Do all the steps over a weekend, or take them one at a time over a few weeks. Either way, when you’ve finished the exercise, you won’t just understand memoir writing better. You’ll have the actual beginnings of your book.

Step One: Exploring What Your Story’s About 

Start by spending some time with this question: What is your memoir actually about? You might think you already know: It’s about what happened to me! Which is true. But your memoir also carries the meaning of what happened.

For instance, maybe your story is about your time as a professional swimmer: the competitions you attended or injuries you may have sustained. But if you dig deeper, you might discover your swimming career was about belonging—or about what happens when your whole identity is built around what your body can do.

Good news: This is only the first part of the exercise! You don’t need to know the answer yet. You just need a thread to start pulling.

Exercise: Finish this sentence ten different ways: My memoir is about…

Step Two: Make a Timeline

Once you have a possible thread—what happened and the possible meaning of it—break your life into five-year chunks: birth to five years old, five to ten, and so on. For each period, jot down the basics: where you lived, the people who mattered to you, what you were doing.

Then ask one more question of each chunk: Do I see any threads of my story here? 

Step Three: Pull the Thread

Go back over what you discovered on your timeline and pull out anything connected to your thread(s). You might end up with a list of moments, conversations, people, events, or turning points. For instance, the swimmer might notice entries that touch on the theme of  belonging: a coach who made the team feel like family; a roommate at a meet who became a lifelong friend; the isolation of training alone before dawn.

This is where the shape of your memoir usually starts to show itself. Not in any single event, but in what the events have in common. One moment is just a memory. A pattern of moments can become a book.

Step Four: Write the Scenes

Pick a few moments from your list and just write them. Not chronologically. Not for a first draft. Just dive into the moment and write. What happened? Who was there? What did you notice? And, getting back to meaning making, what do you understand now that you didn’t then?

Write as many scenes as you like. Don’t worry yet about how they connect.

Step Five: What Got Clearer?

Consider this your book’s discovery phase. After writing those scenes, notice whether anything became clearer while you were writing. Did your sense of focus—the meaning of the scene—shift, sharpen, or get more complicated? What did your scene-writing tell you that your time line didn’t?

Eventually, most memoirists realize they’re not writing exactly the book they originally thought they were. That’s exciting! Allow the process to show you more about the story you’re telling.

Step Six: Write a “Synopsis”

You’ve done a lot already. This step is about consolidating what you’ve accomplished so far—not about creating marketing copy! It might take a few tries, but try to write just one paragraph that describes the version of your story you’ve discovered so far.

Include how you changed because of what happened to you, and what you hope to convey to a reader (the meaning). This is a way to catch up with your own thinking, and it’s a step that can be repeated as your story shifts shape on its way to becoming its truest self.

The Best Memoir Writing Tips for Beginners Are Not Rules

Notice what you learned about writing a memoir by doing this: You didn’t just read a definition of theme—you found your own, by asking what your story means rather than simply what happened. You didn’t just read about how to choose which events matter—you homed in on moments from your life that you feel belong in your book. You didn’t just read the phrase “show, don’t tell”—you wrote fully fleshed, engaging scenes. You didn’t just read about memoirists understanding more of their story as they write—you watched your own theme shift, right there in Step Five.

What a writing guide would hand you as a rule, you arrived at as an experience—that will stick. That’s why what you’ve got now isn’t just a stronger grasp of memoir. It’s the actual start of yours.

A Final Thought on Writing Memoir 

This may be counterintuitive, but “starting” your memoir isn’t really about writing your first chapter. It’s about digging in to discover exactly what story you want to tell. The best “memoir writing tip for beginners” I can offer is this: Give yourself permission to gather all that you’ll need to tell the whole story—events, ideas, remembered moments—before you begin your first draft. Your memoir will be all the richer if you allow your story to reveal itself one scene, one memory, and one honest question at a time.

Writing a memoir can be a deeply rewarding journey—but also a tricky one. Use the memoir writing tips for beginners above to get you started. Then you might find my article “How to Write a Memoir”useful as well. 

If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might also take a look at my books:
Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.

Could you use some support as you write your memoir? I work with memoir writers at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or you have a complete draft, I can help.
Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.