{"id":6371,"date":"2017-01-26T01:00:55","date_gmt":"2017-01-26T08:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/?p=6371"},"modified":"2017-01-25T21:29:17","modified_gmt":"2017-01-26T04:29:17","slug":"short-essays-can-be-a-goldmine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/short-essays-can-be-a-goldmine\/","title":{"rendered":"Short essays can be a goldmine."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Today’s guest blog post is excerpted from Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris<\/a>. Writing about writing. Mostly.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Book length memoir is a hard sell, but short essays can be a goldmine.<\/em><\/p>\n

Memoir is the most popular genre at any writers\u2019 conference.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it\u2019s the hardest to write well\u2014and the least likely to be successful if you\u2019re an unknown newbie writer.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because book-length memoir isn\u2019t likely to become a bestseller unless people already know who you are.<\/p>\n

So how do you get people to know you? You could become a reality TV star, run for political office, or be related to somebody who marries into the British royal family of course, but not everybody has that option.<\/p>\n

You can also work to get yourself known through social media, which I recommend for all memoirists.<\/p>\n

Start a blog, podcast, or vlog on the subject or setting of your memoir and put some serious effort into promoting it through social media (also known as \u201cbuilding platform\u201d).<\/p>\n

It also helps to publish short memoir pieces and personal essays in traditional venues. If you\u2019ve been working on that memoir a while, you probably have the material mostly written in the form of a book length memoir.<\/p>\n

With a few tweaks, your excerpts can become publishable personal essays.<\/p>\n

And the good news is, those short pieces can pay very well. Look at the fantastic success of anthologies like the Chicken Soup<\/em> series. And if you get into an anthology along with some well-known authors, you\u2019ll establish a fanbase that would take years to garner with a solo book release.<\/p>\n

To read Anne’s entire blog post, including “Tips on Getting An Audience for Your Blog” and an essay by award-winning author and editor Paul Alan Fahey on how to expand a scene from your memoir (or directly from your life) into a flash memoir piece or personal essay, click on: Writing Memoir that Sells: Think Outside the Book<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s guest blog post is excerpted from Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris. Writing about writing. Mostly.\u00a0 Book length memoir is a hard sell, but short essays can be a goldmine. Memoir is the most popular genre at any writers\u2019 conference. Unfortunately, it\u2019s the hardest to write well\u2014and the least likely to be successful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[104],"tags":[1049,117,1050,1052,1051],"class_list":["post-6371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-bloggers","tag-anne-r-allen","tag-memoir","tag-paul-alan-fahey","tag-ruth-harris","tag-writing-memoir-that-sells"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43Dj8-1EL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6371"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6383,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6371\/revisions\/6383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}