Earn money for writing memoirs
Many memoirs are written for personal satisfaction and often appear as books of less than 100 pages distributed to a small number of family and friends. Often, no more than 25 books are printed. There is no intention of the book becoming an international bestseller. You can be paid to write this type of memoir.
Find Clients
Let people know that you are available to write memoirs. Create a website and blog; print and distribute business cards; print and distribute pens with your name, phone number, and web addresses; create your professional profile on Google, Yahoo!, and LinkedIn; join and participate in a state or local writers club; be available to speak with professional groups and organizations.
Consider writing your first free memoir for a family member or friend, then use the book as an example of your work.
What to charge
You should charge a fee that best represents your skills and experience. Determine what hourly wage you are willing to work for. This could be $ 50, $ 100, or more. I have seen memoir writers charge $ 300 an hour. Convert your hourly rate into the total cost that you will quote to a customer. It is not uncommon for memoir writers to charge $ 5,000, $ 10,000, or $ 50,000 for a project.
Offer your client a written contract that explains what you will do and what the client will do. View a sample contract at http://lifewriters.ca/
Interviews and writing
Set up a series of interviews with your client. These can be sixty to ninety minutes each, once a week for several weeks, in person or over the phone. Use a digital voice recorder. After each interview has been transcribed (I prefer to pay someone to transcribe so I can concentrate on writing) edit, rewrite, and arrange the manuscript so that the events appear in a logical sequence and the finished manuscript sounds like the author. You are the writer. Your client is the author and copyright owner of the manuscript and the finished product. Editing and writing will take approximately ten times longer than interviews.
Present the manuscript to your client for review when one or more chapters are completed. Present the final manuscript on a CD instead of printed pages. You may want to charge more for printed pages. Your manuscript should have a content page, page numbers, and chapter titles.
Produce a book
You can include the cost of preparing the manuscript to become a book in the original agreement, or you can make a separate book preparation agreement. I use ten percent of the interview and writing fees as a starting guide for preparing the book.
Producing a book involves finding a short-run printer, often called a printer on demand; exchange emails and phone calls with the printer; determine the cover and the appearance of the inner pages; proofreading; and printing and delivery of the finished books. Your client pays for each of these and pays you to facilitate their completion.
We wish you the best of success with many satisfied customers.