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Have you ever wanted to write a book? Better yet, have you written a book? Either way, if the urge to see your work in print overtakes you, what’s a wannabe author to do? There are a couple of options. The first is to approach the massive publishing houses with the help of the literary agent you may not have. The second is to self-publish. There are pros and cons to both.

Today I want to talk about my experience with self publishing.

I never thought I would want to publish my novel. I wrote it because I wanted to see if I could. It was the most fun I’ve ever had. When I was done (it took over three years) I had a big stack of pages buried in my computer. I was surprised at how badly I wanted to hold the book I had written, but I wasn’t really interested in approaching the publishing houses.

I wound up using Amazon’s service Createspace to publish my book. Publishing with Createspace was a good choice for me. It was easy, fast, and the price was right (it’s hard to beat print on demand!). The process of uploading your manuscript is so easy that I would like to spend the rest of this article talking about the one thing every would-be self-publisher should keep in mind: editing.

If you self-publish, you are most likely your own editor. This means you have to clean up your own mistakes. Fix your own grammatical errors. Being your own objective extra pair of eyes can be difficult. After spending so long with your manuscript, you may find yourself more than a little attached to it. I certainly was. But I spent three drafts re-writing my book, largely so I could spot the errors.

After you upload your files, your book will be published as is. If you have errors in the text, those errors will be in the finished product. It is worth taking a little extra time to make sure that you are happy with the book you are about to submit.

If you take the time, you will have a product and an achievement that nobody can ever take away from you. It’s the best feeling in the world.

The memoir is very popular these days. Here are memoir writing tips to help you with this popular genre that is as old as story telling itself. We use stories to leave a legacy and to teach others. The memoir helps leave traditions from one generation to the next. People want their lives to have meaning and the memoir is one way to do this.

We do not want to be separated from our past. With this new technology this is possible with all the fast moving information that becomes obsolete it seems as quickly as it was made available. We somehow write about the future though when we write about the past and the present. They all come together in our words.

The act of writing the act of giving voice to our experiences, thoughts and feelings, changes how we are in the moment and how we move forward. When the past is securely nailed to the page, we can use it as an anchor while we adventure into the rest of our lives into even the unfathomable twenty first century.

Use the heart and mind to recover what you need for your memoirs. Memoirs after all are memories. A true memoir however needs to reach beyond your own personal experience. Some people find it helpful to ask family members and close friends to help jog their memories.

It will likely place our experience in the perspective of the times, places and people of the original moments. Doing research looking for information outside of our memories can also inspire refreshed memories and fuller ones.

Get together with your friends and relatives you shared your life with and bring back those times. You will get a new outlook and a deeper insight to your life and this will make your memoirs deeper and more meaningful. And of course the memoir writing tips always include the idea of having fun writing them.

Find more memoir writing tips with this memoir writing help.