Articles on writing and publishing a memoir: where to start, structure, what to include, the legal and family risks, and why your life story is worth getting down.
Authority Through AuthorshipRandy Peyser has helped first time authors land deals with New York publishers for 25 years. In this conversation she breaks down what publishers actually buy: the proposal, the platform, and the moves that make or break a first book.
Contracts and AgreementsMemoir, business book, or exposé, if your manuscript touches your time at a former employer, you have to reckon with NDAs, non-disparagement clauses, trade secrets, and defamation. Here is what your old NDA actually restricts, what non-disparagement really prevents, what…
Authority PublishingFounders who sold their company are sitting on the most underused authority book in the market. The acquisition memoir does commercial work no other format can. Here is what to include, what your deal documents legally prevent you from saying,…
Business BooksGhostwriting has been mainstream for two thousand years. Caesar had help. Every president writes their memoirs with a ghostwriter. Most major business books on your shelf were ghostwritten or heavily edited. So the ethical question is not whether someone helped,…
Hiring a GhostwriterIs my life interesting enough for a memoir is the most common question I hear, and the framing is almost always wrong. Memoirs do not win on dramatic biography; they win on a specific voice telling a specific story honestly.…
Hiring a GhostwriterMemoir, autobiography, and biography get tossed around as synonyms, but they are different books with different structures, reader expectations, and markets, and the wrong label produces one that disappoints everyone who opens it. Here is how to tell which one…
AudiobookThe writer's fee is the biggest line item in a ghostwritten book, but far from the only one. A real budget folds in editing, design, publishing, and the optional-but-valuable extras, proposal, marketing, audio. Authors who plan only for the fee…
Business BooksHiring a memoir ghostwriter is not the same as hiring a business-book one, and most articles miss the difference. Memoir needs emotional safety in the interviews, a personal rather than professional voice register, and a writer who has actually done…
DefamationWriting about family is the most legally and personally fraught part of a memoir, and the worry stalls more projects than anything else. The legal exposure is real but narrower than most authors fear, and the relational side has techniques…
GhostwritingIf you are technical and weighing a memoir, your biggest fear is that a ghostwriter will not understand your world and will flatten your career into something unrecognizable. That fear is correct, most will. The fix is one who actually…
Authority Through AuthorshipFaith leaders face a question other professionals do not: is making money from a book at odds with the mission, and is using a ghostwriter honest? This is a short parable about Pastor Davis, who avoided the book he was…
Authority Through AuthorshipProperty developers sell million- and ten-million-dollar deals to a handful of counterparties, across a cycle that can run six months to three years, most of it the other side quietly deciding whether you are the developer they want. The book…
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