Translating Trauma into Memoir

By Melissa Cronin

Most adults experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetime: the death of a loved one, divorce, abuse, etc. That said, memoirs are ubiquitous. I’d list some here, but I wouldn’t know where to start. Speaking of where to start, how does one even begin to translate trauma into memoir?

I started writing a memoir in 2009 about the 2003 Santa Monica Farmers’ Market accident in which an elderly man sped through the market killing ten people and injuring several others. With multiple fractures, a ruptured spleen, and a brain injury, I was one of the severely injured. I waited six years because that’s how long I needed to gain enough emotional distance from the trauma to write about it. Six months later, I had 350 pages of reportage. Essentially, I had dumped rather than written my recollections of the accident and its aftermath onto the page. Here’s how I originally described my memories of the farmers’ market:

I headed down the sidewalk … It was a hot, sunny afternoon. The beach was calling, but I wanted to check out the famous Third Street Promenade and the farmers’ market. Wow, that peach looks good. Bang! What happened?

When I wrote this, I didn’t see the stale prose inherent in the mere telling of a scene. How is my reader able to feel the heat and my confusion, hear the calling of the beach, and smell the peach if the vivid images are lacking? It wasn’t until I worked with a writing mentor, who convinced me to participate in a writing group, which led me to an MFA program, when I realized that we need to write personally yet universally to lure readers into our stories. As Sue Silverman discusses in her book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, I learned concepts like the “innocent voice,” where the writer shares the facts—this happened then that happened—just as I had done. Of course, we need facts, like time and place, to ground readers. But when we employ Sue’s “experienced voice”—metaphors/imagistic details, and reflections— we illuminate our interiority and, therefore, fully engage readers in our intimate experience. Here’s the same scene a couple of drafts later:

Plums, pears, melons, and cucumbers sat in perfect order … Like umbrellas, giant sunflowers protected shoppers from the sun—a huge lemon in the sky. Spanish and English voices collided. I leaned my ear toward the romantic Latino sounds: “Hola. Tres por un dolar. Pruebe una muestra.” People chattered, seagulls shrieked, and children whined. A mother gripped the handle of a stroller that held her infant son while clutching the arm of her pre-school age daughter. I glanced at my wristwatch; it was almost two o’clock, the time the farmers’ market was to close. People scurried past me in search of the best berries, apples, artisan cheeses, and tropical fruits.

Through the crowd of shoppers and maze of colors, I saw a pyramid of peaches. My mouth salivated. I edged closer to the peach vendor and touched a perfectly round one. I picked it up. Recently tilled earth wafted toward me—summertime. The downy flesh tickled my palm. I couldn’t wait to take the first bite—the crunch, the squirt, the sugar, the juices.

I heard a deafening pop. The sound of a gunshot. The peach was present. Then it was not.

Do you hear the voices in the crowd, see the mother looking out for her children; feel, smell, taste the peach? Writing metaphorically means writing universally.

What about the other element of the “experienced voice”—reflection? Consider the following scene just prior to the surgeon taking me to the operating room to remove my spleen: As a pediatric nurse for fifteen years, I had witnessed the needless suffering of infants and children: the barely twenty-three-week preemie whose heart rate would plummet to near zero when I changed her napkin size diaper, whose skin was as transparent as cellophane wrap, and who lived just twenty-four hours, enough time for Mom and Dad to say good-bye.

Though I told [the surgeon] not to do anything to save me, I didn’t consider what he must have been going through. As a nurse, I realize there are no guarantees, and I’m sure he did all he could to hide that thought behind his dimpled smile. Examining how you view an event then-versus-now, and how trauma affects others, expands the story beyond your cloistered world. Or, as another mentor said, “brings the story beyond your story.” As with metaphor, the trauma then shifts from a therapeutic purging, as in my original draft, into a memoir—a work of art. But, since I’m still working on mine, I can’t tell you how many drafts it takes to get there.

Melissa Cronin holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She’s written for the on-line magazine, Brevity, and Hunger Mountain: a VCFA Journal of the Arts as well as several Vermont newspapers. She is currently working on a memoir, Peach, about the 2003 Santa Monica Farmers’ Market, and blogs at Musings on Aging. A nurse and Irish fiddler, Melissa lives with her husband in South Burlington, Vermont.

Today, Paul is here to talk to us about Lost Cat, its inspiration, and what she learned by putting a GPS tracker on her cat. Lost Cat begins when Paul crashes her experimental plane (hang glider + go cart) and falls into a dark depression while being laid up on her couch with a smashed ankle. One of her two cats, Tibia (the other is Fibula) disappears for five weeks, then returns. Feeling betrayed, Paul, with the help of her partner, MacNaughton, decides to follow the cat to find out where it’s been getting its free meals.


MW: What inspired you to write Lost Cat?

CP: When I told people the story of stalking my cat with GPS and other devices, their eyes would light up. You know you have a good story when people’s eyes light up when you’re talking to them. The truth is I would tell the story about my whole life during that year, and people weren’t that interested until I got to the part about going so lulu that I stalked my cat.

MW: What did you learn by putting a GPS tracker on your cat?

CP: I thought I was trying to learn where my cat went. But what I really was trying to learn was why he left me for five weeks, and that is something technology can’t answer.

MW: You did eventually learn where he went, but did you ever learn why he left you?

CP: I think I have a good idea, but it doesn’t have the metric that a GPS or a camera does. I think when you’re really hurt by someone or something, like a cat, you want answers. You want to know “Why did you leave me?” The truth is that they don’t want to be with you anymore, but that doesn’t make sense to you because you love them and you want to be with them. We tried GPS and we tried video cameras, and they promised real answers, but in the end, they didn’t give any. What I realized was that I was not good company during those months that I was recuperating, and my cat was smart enough to leave and come back when I was a little bit more healed.

MW: How did you come to that conclusion?

CP: I think I came to that conclusion like anyone who is struggling with a relationship issue they don’t want to face. I was full of denial initially, telling myself that he was shy and couldn’t survive without me, that I gave meaning to his life. But as time passed and the drugs wore off (Paul was on pain medication for her smashed ankle), and I started to follow him, I came to grips with the cat he really was, and I started to accept that.

MW: What would you recommend for someone who has lost a cat?

CP: If your cat is lost, don’t give up hope. I’ve heard so many stories of cats returning after 3 months, 5 years, 7 years. The longest I’ve heard was 13 years. Often they return because they are microchipped and are found hundreds or thousands of miles away. The address can be read by a scanner by the vet or at an animal shelter. You may not be sure it’s your cat, but the microchip will tell you for sure.

MW: What was your process for collaborating on this project with your partner, Wendy?

CP: Initially, while I was recuperating, I was really scared that I would never write again. The longer I didn’t write, I more I thought I would never write. So Wendy suggested I start a blog. I didn’t tell anyone the blog title. It was basically a blog for one person, and that was Wendy. It was freeing because I didn’t have to write well. I just had to write. Halfway through my blog, suddenly I got this comment from a man in Iceland who was a professor, and that was a shock because I didn’t realize anyone else was reading it. And then it became a blog for two people.

MW: How did that blog become a book?

CP: Here’s the true story. I actually wrote a pretty thick proposal for a memoir, and it was going to be about injury and what it does to you, and the stalking my cat piece was the central motif, but it was padded with a lot of other things about relationships and Wendy and healing. Oliver Sacks wrote a great memoir like that about almost losing his leg. I sent that (book proposal) around and nobody wanted it in that form. It was too quirky, they said. They couldn’t get a handle on the market because it was serious, but it also had this thread of stalking my cat. When it finally made the rounds and dried up, I decided I am not going to drop this story. And I knew the story that really interested people was the cat story. So I said to Wendy, let’s do this. Let’s do a short, illustrated book. The real story lay in the chase, and it took me some incarnations to find that out. I’m sure this happens to a lot of writers.

MW: What were some of the challenges you faced in collaborating on this project with Wendy?

CP:
I. The first challenge was that I had never collaborated before, and I wanted there to be a strict wall between the writing and the illustrations, and Wendy agreed. I thought I would write the whole thing and then hand it to Wendy, and she would illustrate it. But I soon realized that I would need to riff off of Wendy and treat it more like a conversation because the truth is, it’s half her memoir because she lived it too. So I would write a chapter and hand it to her, and she would illustrate it and then hand it back to me, and in that way we played off of each other.

II. Collaborations are hard to begin with, but they’re even trickier when you’re in a relationship together. We knew the book was going to be 50/50 because otherwise things get tricky. And that worked really well. We respected each other’s work so much that we knew we didn’t really have to comment on each other’s work. If you do collaborate with someone that you’re sharing your life with, you have to respect their work because otherwise they’ll know, and it will never work.

III. Wendy and I also work differently. Wendy has a different concept of time than I do. When I say that I’m going to meet you at a certain time, like 2 o’clock, I’ll be there. When Wendy says she’s going to meet you at 2 o’clock, that kind of means 2–ish. So that was a challenge for us. When I told my agent we could get this book in three months, Wendy agreed, not really thinking that 3 months meant 3 months. In the end we got it done a day over deadline, which for me meant we missed our deadline, and for Wendy meant we came in early.

IV. If you work together, it becomes a metaphor for the relationship. You can’t get away from the relationship when you’re working together, so I would hand her the writing and expect her to love it so much that she would read it eagerly and get back to me right away. When she didn’t, I would get hurt and immediately deduce that she no longer loved me.

MW: What did you learn about your self and your relationship by chasing Tibby?

CP: You can’t ever really know the one you love, and that’s okay.

MW: Are you referring to Tibby or Wendy?

CP: Everything a writer says is double layered, so I mean it all. This book takes place as Wendy and I become closer in our relationship, so it’s also about Wendy and me. Wendy was certainly not thinking that she was going to have to take care of me as an invalid after only six months of knowing me, but she did. Relationships will surprise you, and you have to go with the flow, which is hard for me.

MW: Do you have any plans to collaborate on another project in the future?

CP: We definitely had a great time doing this and we’re totally open to it, but Wendy is so busy, that I don’t know if we’ll fit it in. Right now we just want to see how Lost Cat does, kind of be in the moment.

You can listen to a more extensive interview with Caroline and Wendy on Michael Krasny’s Forum on KQED, which aired this morning.

MW: Can you tell us a little about Growing Up Humming?

MS: Growing Up Humming is a fact-filled, true story photo book of a mother Anna’s hummingbird and her two chicks, as the chicks grow, mature, and leave the nest. It tells and shows the story of what happens when a mother hummingbird wants her chick to fly, but the chick isn’t ready. Between the lines, there’s a lot any parent or child will relate to, about caring for children and raising them to where they can take care of themselves and about children growing up to where they’re able to fend for themselves. As the story unfolds, it discusses hummingbird biology and behavior, including some things which have never been shown and discussed anywhere else, as far as I’m aware. It’s fully illustrated with large, clear photos of everything the story discusses, giving a front-row-seat view into the world of a hummingbird nest—like you’ve never seen before.

MW: What makes Growing Up Humming different from any other children’s book?

MS: A lot of children’s books are made in a way that doesn’t respect children much. They’re often designed for the lowest common denominator, made to appeal only through bright colors, cuteness, and the like. Often, the pictures and text are merely functional, rather than artful. Relatively few children’s books treat kids like the brilliant beings they are. I know that kids love to learn, and they absorb knowledge like sponges. My book is made to excite and inspire them, while entertainingly weaving substantial scientific concepts and perspective into a true life nature story.

By being both the writer and photographer, I was able to create a kind of book which usually can’t be done by writers who didn’t also do the photography. When an author writes about nature only from ideas in her or his head, and then finds photos to match the story, the result tends to be different than the substance of reality. Because I witnessed everything myself, I was able to make a point-for-point documentary story, rich in the kinds of authentic details and insights which can only come from firsthand experience. Combine that with knowledge as a naturalist, and the result is a children’s book like no other.

MW: While many authors are active on Facebook and Twitter, you spend most of your time on Google+. How long have you been on Google+, and how did you achieve such a leviathan following?

MS: I’ve been on Google+ for about a year and a half.

I doubt anyone can be certain what he did to get a large number of subscribers. Two people can seemingly do the same thing, but end up with very different results. Furthermore, each situation is unique enough that what one person did may have limited applicability to anyone else. That said, here’s how:

I was a well-regarded photographer and modestly well known for my photography long before Google+ came along. That notoriety started about 12 or 13 years ago. At the time, Photo.net was the biggest photography website on the Internet. Photo.net had a feature to rate photos 1-10 for aesthetics and 1-10 for originality. After that feature was around for a while, one day Photo.net premiered a couple more features—one which ranked every photographer on the site based on the ratings for all of their pictures, and another which enabled searching pictures based on their average ratings. When those rolled out, I had the highest rated picture out of millions on their website, and I was the second highest ranked photographer on the website, among almost 300,000 ranked photographers. These lead many millions to look at my pictures and helped me gain modest notoriety. I furthered that notoriety through posting other notable photos on various sites, and that’s surely one factor behind these large numbers.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of photographers who are much better known, who have fewer subscribers on G+ than I do. For example, Frans Lanting. So, notoriety isn’t the only factor; it needs to be parlayed.

While I occasionally have few weak periods of relative inactivity where I post less frequently, I usually post between 1-3 times per day. Additionally, I try to keep the quality of the posts high, making them share something of value to others, rather than just making all my posts about trying to sell folks something. I make many of my posts inspiring and informative. I give original creative content, and/or original opinions and information, not just a re-hash of what’s already old news. Here are a few examples.

Keep the quality of your posts high, and people will take notice. They’ll read through your previous posts, remember who you are, subscribe, and share for others to discover you.

Being accessible also makes a big difference. Don’t be aloof. If you rarely post anything, rarely reply to comments, rarely “circle” people, etc., then people will ignore you as an uninteresting non-entity, no matter how well known you are. When people leave comments, engage them in a discussion. When people catch your attention, circle them.

You will also gain lots of subscribers if you frequently leave insightful comments on other people’s posts—especially if you do this on posts with many replies coming in fast, posted by people with a large readership.

In short, you get out of it what you put into it.

Also, if you want to gain attention on social media sites, in the world of publishing, the photography industry, or anything else: be assertive. Assertiveness starts with confidence in the value of your work and your thinking. Be confident that what you have to offer is substantial and is of interest to anyone, even to renowned experts, the biggest successes in the world, and key influencers. Be ambitious in asserting yourself. To give you an example, I’m going to write to Jane Goodall and Richard Dawkins tomorrow, to get one of them to write a foreword for the next edition of Growing Up Humming. Will this be successful? Hard to say, but I’ll never know until I try. You can be sure the chances of such things are zilch if you don’t try. If you’re persistent, and if you have the substance to back it up, you’ll succeed through such assertiveness at least occasionally.

MW: How many hours do you spend on social media each week? What other social networks do you use besides Google+? Which do you find the most useful?

MS: It’s hard to quantify. I keep windows open in my browser for social media websites, then use social media mostly on breaks from other work at the computer. I’d guess about 5-8 hours per week, on average.

I have at least some bare bones presence on too many to keep track. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Flickr, and probably a dozen more that I’m forgetting. I neglect most of them, mainly responding when I get emails. That’s necessary for efficiency. There aren’t enough hours in the day to give them each a lot of quality time, so I focus more on the ones where I get the most bang for the buck.

Different sites are useful in different ways. Despite Facebook’s bad UI design, buggy code, and ignoble management style, it may be the only one for staying in touch with family and friends who don’t use other sites, therefore the best for that purpose. For several reasons—especially the way Facebook throttles the distribution of your posts to your readership, unless you pay exorbitant fees for promoted posts—Facebook is the least useful for an author’s purposes. Google+ is the fastest, easiest one for building a large readership of people who share your interests and who actively and intelligently engage. Other aspects of Google+, such as its integration and priority with Google Search, also make it the most useful. Twitter is decent for making contacts, driving traffic to your website, and keeping up to date with events relevant to your interests. Goodreads looks like it may be promising for book promotion, but I haven’t yet pursued it enough to make an informed comment.

On the subject of the usefulness of social media websites, let me add an important clarification. Many authors see social media as an avenue for book sales, and lots of publishers are pushing for authors to “build a social media platform” for marketing purposes. While there will always be a few freak anecdotal cases of wild success, most of these authors and publishers are greatly overestimating the marketing value of social media, and they’re likely to be sorely disappointed. Social media is an indirect, multi-step, tenuous, passive method of marketing books. It’s usually extremely inefficient; expect sales conversion rates to be in the low single digit range (in good cases). In other words, most authors should realistically expect to sell well under 5 copies per 100 “followers”, “fans”, contacts, etc on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.. That’s not to say you won’t sell any books this way, but it is to say that you can sell more books, faster and more easily, in other ways than through social media. Building a social media platform isn’t a marketing plan, even though it will likely sell some books for you. If an author is putting a big effort into building a big social media readership as the primary book marketing plan, that’s just setting herself up for failure and disappointment.

Social media is hugely useful to me. I’ve found friends, love, travel partners, business partners, and more through it. It’s great for learning techniques, getting expert advice, keeping up with news in your field, getting critiques, playing games, meeting people and socializing. However, in terms of generating book sales, it’s best viewed as an afterthought, not as a marketing strategy, nor even as a significant component of a marketing strategy.

MW: What then, is your marketing strategy for Growing Up Humming?

MS: I’m reluctant to discuss my marketing strategy—not because it’s some big secret, but because anyone who tries to emulate it will find it won’t have the same results. Each case is too individual for what I say to apply to anyone else. What may work for print books doesn’t necessarily apply for ebooks. Likewise with children’s books versus adult books, fiction versus nonfiction, photo books versus word books, first book versus fifth in a series, and so on. Furthermore, as David Vandagriff explains, “Nobody knows anything about the indie book business.” Truly.

However, since you asked:
I find that personally contacting people and making a sale is more efficient than social media. So, for example, I call up librarians to sell my book to libraries. I successfully sell my book to a fairly high percentage of librarians I call. Moreover, they usually buy several copies at a time.

So, to make up some approximate numbers: Suppose you average 10 minutes time per librarian you call and / or email; and suppose you succeed with one out of three librarians, and suppose the average is 8 books per sale. At those rates, you can sell about 16 books per hour spent selling books to librarians. And that’s a rather conservative estimate. Whereas through social media, if you sell books to three percent of your contacts, then selling 16 books requires the amount of time and effort it takes to build 533 contacts. For most authors, getting 533 “followers” takes a larger investment than an hour of phone calls and emails.

Likewise, it doesn’t take very long to arrange a book reading and signing event at some venue, and then go give a reading. You can sell dozens of books at each of such readings. I plan to do as many events as I can.

I’m also selling my book to bookstores, art galleries, museum gift shops, national and state park gift shops, arboretums, zoos, gardening shops, toy stores, and so on. I pursue any place where my book might be appropriate. My strategy is to build up thousands of outlets each carrying a half dozen or a dozen copies of my book, each one turning over and ordering more every few months.

Also, there are many hummingbird festivals and events around the country, such as the Hummingbird Days at the UCSC arboretum, I plan to sell my books at as many of those as possible.

Beyond these, I constantly come up with various wacky schemes and pursue them. Book bundles, group deals, online advertisements, book fairs, corporate sales, and so on. Most people try the social media route and little or nothing else. That’s rarely sufficient. Your initial marketing strategies rarely pan out. You have to be inventive, and you have to take an active role. You have to constantly try things and evolve the marketing.

MW: “Whereas through social media, if you sell books to three percent of your contacts …” Is that the ROI you’ve seen with social media? A three percent conversion rate? Are you going by total followers, or by your mailing list? Do you have a mailing list? How many people are on it?

First, let me be clear about separating the concept of return on investment from conversion rate. As I said earlier, I’ve found social media very valuable – just not for generating book sales. When I think of the return on investment I’ve made in social media, I think of the friendships, the important information learned, etc.

As for the conversion rate I’ve had on social media: No, my conversion rate is well below three percent. I was giving a hypothetical example for a typical author with few thousand well-earned “followers”. I’m somewhat of an outlier. I have a much larger group of enthusiasts because I’m modestly well known and well regarded within nature photography. As a broad generalization, as the numbers get much larger, they include a much bigger proportion of fluff of various types (such as spammers, as opposed to loyal enthusiasts). Moreover, in my case, the conversion rate suffered because the conversion was somewhat of a stretch – for example, converting admirers of my landscape photography into children’s book buyers. So, I meant those numbers as a hypothetical example of a good case, whereas I’m a bad case.

Anyway, a writer with a thousand or few “followers” on social media can probably expect those numbers of people to result in a few dozen sales, in all but the most exceptional cases. It’s way lower than authors and publishing houses seem to realize. If people are building a social media platform as their main marketing strategy, then they’ll probably be in for a painful surprise when they experience that the couple thousand “fans” they worked so hard for will earn them just a few dozen sales. This is what I mean when I say your social media platform is best not viewed as a marketing strategy, not even as a significant component of a marketing strategy.

To be clear, I was not referring to a mailing list, just to your numbers of contacts on Facebook, Twitter, etc. With a high quality mailing list – such as a list of people who signed up on their own initiative – the conversion rate should be quite good. Those are self-selected people who are explicitly and knowingly interested in hearing what you have to offer. Of course, if you bloat your list with false leads – such as having people sign up on your mailing list in order to enter a raffle to win a prize – then your conversion rate won’t be as good. But a well built mailing list is pure gold.

I’ve had a decent mailing list as a photographer for a while, but not as a writer. I didn’t try to use my photography related mailing list for my writing. That would not have been appropriate.

I’ve now had a couple hundred people who bought Growing Up Humming sign up for my writing mailing list, so I’m starting to build up a decent mailing list for my next books.

MW: You funded the publishing of your book through a Kickstarter campaign. What made you decide to crowdsource your book?

MS: I had my book finished but unpublished for several months, because I couldn’t afford to (self-)publish it at an uncompromisingly professional level of quality. I was looking for a way to fund the book, and my brother suggested that Kickstarter could work for me. He was right.

MW: What did you use the money for?

MS: First, keep in mind that on average, about 15% of funding doesn’t come through – backers don’t always pay what they commit to pay. Second, you’ll lose another 10% or so to Kickstarter’s commission fees and to credit card processing fees. Be sure to factor all that in, when figuring out how much you need to raise for your project.

The remaining money mostly went into a lot of the things you’d expect, such as graphic design work and and layout. There are also a lot of little things new authors might not anticipate, which in sum add up to substantial costs, such as copyright registration, ISBN codes, hiring someone to fix the formatting for each of various ebook formats, and PayPal fees.

And of course, a lot of the money went toward fulfilling the rewards promised for project backers.

MW: Did you ever consider using PubSlush instead of Kickstarter?

MS: No. I first heard of PubSlush about a month ago, so it wasn’t a consideration. I did consider Indiegogo.

MW: Do you think all wanna-be authors should try crowd sourcing their books?

MS: No. It was right for me, but it’s better suited for some cases than others.

Some people have the impression that they’ll set up a project and get it going in twenty minutes, and the money will come rolling in. The reality is somewhat different. It’s a non-trivial amount of work. You have to fill out lots of forms for signing up, for transferring money from Kickstarter to your bank account, for taxes, and so on. You also have to figure out how much funding you need, create a sensible tiered system of compelling rewards, write a script and then make a video, write up marketing material, get review blurb quotes, go out and promote your campaign to bring in backers, and so on.

For some people who can easily afford it, they might be better off just paying the publishing costs, themselves.

Additionally, some people who consider doing a crowd-sourced funding campaign have this notion that their project’s funding will come from a large set of philanthropists aimlessly poking around Kickstarter, who will randomly find their project and back it. While I don’t think those project backers are entirely mythical, they’re not likely to be of much help for most funding campaigns. For example, 98% of the people who funded my project were people I referred to my project page; 2% were all others. And that is within the context that my project was prominently displayed around the top of the front page of the most popular book projects, the whole time. So, expecting random crowd-sourced project backers to bring your project to life is relying on unrealistic miracles.

If you can’t adequately find potential backers, bring them in, and convince them, then crowd-sourcing is probably not for you.

It helps if backers have solid reasons to think you can make a good book. People who have published other good books have an advantage there. Or, in my case, having hundreds of pages of well-written online articles helped. If you’re an unknown entity with nothing to show, that could be a problem.

Photo books may have an advantage over novels, since I can show photos like this—or this—and people can quickly assess the quality of the work. Assessing the quality of a novel or such may take hours; novelists can’t just show what to expect instantly in a short blurb on their crowd-sourced funding campaign pages.

Furthermore, less speculative projects tend to fare a lot better than highly speculative ones. In other words, projects where you can say “I’ve already finished my book; I just need funding to publish it,” will usually be better received than projects where you say, “I have a great idea for a book; I need funding so I can write it.”

It also makes a big difference if your project is in some way remarkable, and if you can demonstrate that. Saying, “I’ve written a fantasy novel set in the middle ages, with elves, dwarves, and wizards; help me fund publishing it,” or, “I’ve written a paranormal romance with vampires; help me fund publishing it,” isn’t likely to get you anywhere. So has everyone else. How is your book extraordinary? An unknown wanna-be author will have a lot better chance if there is truly something special about her book, and she can compellingly convey what that is.

If you’re unknown and you can’t quickly make clear how your book is special in a way that excites readers, then crowd-sourced funding may not be for you.

As Tobias Buckell has noted, crowd-sourced funding success is likely if you can bring at least two of these three to your campaign, and unlikely if you can’t: “1) an intriguing product; 2) created by a entity that has proven it can deliver it; 3) created by an entity that has a following (or publicity reach).”

Lastly, crowd-sourcing is usually a more sensible option for those who want to self-publish than for those who want to traditionally publish. “Self-publishing versus traditionally publishing” is a big topic to get into. I strongly prefer self-publishing for a lot of reasons, but I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who would rather avoid becoming an entrepreneur.

Those who succeed with crowd-sourced funding have the advantage of starting with the book already in the black, without any money out of their own pockets, and without giving up a major stake to anyone else. They also have the advantage of knowing before proceeding with publishing that the book has public interest and approval, knowing that there is a market for the book.

For those who fit as described above, crowd-sourcing can make writing dreams a reality.

What about you? Have you considered crowdsourcing your book through Kickstarter or PubSlush? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Mike Spinak began photography in 1998. He’s been writing since he was young. Lifelong passions for travel nature and creative expression developed into a lifestyle and career in photography and writing.

His nature photography studio is wherever he finds himself with a camera and nature’s largesse.

2. Have a focus to your tweets. You could be the funny guy (@shitmydadsays) or you could tweet about wine (@jorgrama), or you could be famous and tweet about anything and everything (@susanorlean).

3. Tweet often. It’s possible, but difficult, to tweet too often. If someone is tweeting every five minutes and clogging up my whole stream à la @guykawasaki, I’ll unfollow them. But if someone is tweeting every hour, sometimes more frequently when they are online and at-replying people, that’s okay. That’s what Twitter is for.

4. If you don’t have a lot of time to tweet, try this strategy: every day send one tweet, one at-reply, and one retweet. Twitter, like blogging and Facebook, is all about building community. You need to interact with other tweeters by at-replying, retweeting and follow-Friday-ing them. (On Friday, type the Follow Friday hashtag #ff followed by one or more people you suggest your followers follow. For example: #ff @meghancward @SFGrotto @SheWrites.)

5. Your tweets should be 80 percent interesting (links, funny observations, insights, etc.) and 20 percent promotional (read my blog post, buy my book). Don’t tweet only when you have something to advertise, or you will quickly lose followers.

6. Follow people. There are three reasons to follow people.

One is to build community. At-reply them, retweet them, DM them if they’re following you back, and make friends.

Two is to find interesting links and information to read and retweet. This can be a great source of material for your own tweets as well as your blog. Just make sure to give the original tweeter credit by retweeting them.

Three is to get followers. About a third of the people you follow will follow you back. You can increase that percentage by paying attention to how many people those people are following. If someone has 1,000,000 followers and is following 6 people, chances are, she won’t follow you back. If your goal is to keep track of what an agent is doing, to entertain yourself, or to mine Twitter for interesting articles to blog about and retweet, you don’t care whether people follow you back. If your goal is to get followers (and my suggestion is that your goal be BOTH of these things), you may want to focus on following the people who tend to follow their followers back. The San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, for example, has a policy to follow its followers back unless they look spammy. We don’t want a feed filled with ads for remodeling your bathroom.

7. Use Mashable Twitter lists, WeFollow, Twellow, GalleyCat, (www.mediabistro.com/galleycat), TwitterGrader, Twitter’s “Who To Follow” suggestions, and other people’s Twitter lists to find people to follow. Another way to find people to follow is to look at the lists of other people you follow. You can follow the whole list or just the people who interest you. You can also Google phrases like “best writers to follow on Twitter” and you’ll find articles about interesting people to follow. Be sure to list yourself on WeFollow, and use these sites and the others listed on the handout of Twitter apps I gave you to find people in certain categories to follow (You can look up writers, editors, etc.)

8. Use hashtags. All you have to do is put #writetip, #pubtip, #amwriting, or whatever else you want somewhere in your tweet and then that tweet will show up when someone searches that hashtag. For a list of popular hashtags for writers, see the handout. For hashtag-search websites, see the attached list of Twitter apps.

9. Let people know you’re on Twitter. Put a Twitter button on your blog, add your name to WeFollow, put your Twitter ID on your business card and at the bottom of your e-mails (Hey, I should do that!). One popular tweeter, @danegolden, suggested putting your Twitter ID at the bottom of publications. “Meghan Ward can be followed on Twitter @meghancward” for example.

10. Use TweetDeck or HootSuite. There are many Twitter clients. Twitter has its own client that can be used on a smart phone or an iPad. The other two most popular clients are HootSuite (which I use) and TweetDeck. I love HootSuite because it integrates my multiple Twitter accounts, it allows me to customize the streams I view (sent tweets, mentions, a particular list I’m following, etc.), it allows me to schedule tweets, and it permits old-school retweets. I’m not that familiar with TweetDeck but know people who love it. Here’s one article that outlines the differences between TweetDeck and HootSuite.

What about you, expert tweeters? What advice would you add?

The number one problem first-time memoir writers encounter is a lack of story. Their prose my sing, their anecdotes may make you laugh and cry, but if there’s no story, no one’s going to read your book.

But how do you impose a story arc onto your life? Life is messy. It doesn’t follow fiction conventions. It doesn’t have a neat inciting incident, a crisis, a climax, and a resolution. What should you do?

First, don’t panic. All memoirists face this dilemma. Second, pick up a copy of Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. Although McKee’s book and seminar are ostensibly designed for screenwriters, I know many novelists and memoirists who have benefited from his advice on how to write a great story.

Next, sit down and plot out your story. What is your protagonist’s (your) goal? What is at stake? (What will happen to her if she does not achieve that goal? Will she die? Will her lose her children? Will she lose her job?) What are the obstacles to her achieving that goal? What action is she going to take to overcome those obstacles? Remember that your protagonist must be active, not passive. She must go after her goal, not just sit back and let things happen to her.

Yesterday I began reading Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for a King (a novel). In the first three pages, he sets up the protagonist’s goal, the stakes, and the protagonist’s first obstacle to achieving that goal. Bam. Tension created. Story set in motion. All in three pages: Alan Clay is broke. He owes money to all his friends, he can’t pay his daughter’s college tuition, and he’s about to lose his house. One thing could solve all his problems: If he can sell Saudian Arabian King Abdullah on his company’s holographic teleconference system, he will earn a commission large enough to pay off all his debts and more. First obstacle? Alan overslept and is running two hours late for his meeting with the king.

Of course, you don’t need to so obviously state your protagonist’s goal and the stakes in the first three pages, but you do need to make it clear early on in the book. Otherwise, the reader isn’t going to care what happens to your protagonist, isn’t going to have any reason to keep turning the pages.

These rules apply for fiction, too, of course. So whether you’re working on a memoir or a novel, take a seat right now and write down your protagonist’s goal, what’s at stake if she doesn’t achieve that goal, and what obstacles lie in her way. Then share it with us below in comments. This is an important exercise, and it will help both you and others to see the framework of each other’s story in text. Here’s mine:

Goal: To make $50,000 working as a fashion model
What’s at stake: Her freedom, her college degree
First obstacle: Her modeling agent tells her she needs to lose weight.

What’s yours?