Memory and Emotional Trauma

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Memory and Emotional Trauma

Getting my memoir client, H, to talk about March, 1945 is not easy. She lived through the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. “Those three hours went very quickly,” she says, in our initial interviews. “We lost the whole house. It worked out fine, really. Nobody was really hurt or burned in our family.” It is…

Read More May 25, 2012

When Memory and History Collide

In writing biographies, I always unearth places where the client’s memory collides with written history, and in that intersection we discover more of the truth of what happened. Often, a person’s recollections of World War II add new details to what has been written in history books. That is why writing memoirs is my great…

Read More May 11, 2012

e-Book vs Paperback: Cost Comparison

The Excel spreadsheet made it all clear. My client’s husband had spent hours pulling together cost comparisons for publishing his wife’s nonfiction book. We already knew she would release an e-book version because that’s a no-brainer: once you have the book designed in a PDF, any good designer or publishing service can turn the PDF…

Read More May 8, 2012

What A Woman From the 1930s Has to Teach Us

This morning I am working on Helga’s biography. We tend to think that we have hard times, whatever times we are living in. But read what my client went through as a ten-year-old German girl living in Tokyo in 1935. In many ways she led a privileged life, but check out her journey to get…

Read More April 6, 2012

Disappearing Inventory

In trying to locate inventory from the first publisher of the singer-songwriter’s book, we learned today that they no longer have any copies in the warehouse.  Of the number printed and the number sold, we knew that 6,000 books should be left somewhere.  The author hoped that someone would call her to ask if she wanted…

Read More March 7, 2012

Re-Publishing An Author’s First Book

We are working with an author to republish her book. She has already regained copyrights from the big-name company that published her book a few years ago but never helped her promote it. Plus, an avalanche of mishaps prevented her from properly promoting it herself. As far as we can figure, there should be 6,000 books remaining…

Read More March 7, 2012