The Northwest Author Series Presents Memoirist Melissa Hart on How to Craft & Market Life Stories

Hosted by Christina Katz at the Wilsonville Public Library
Sunday, November 15 at 3:30 p.m.
$5 at the door ($3 for students & seniors)

If you can tell your own stories skillfully in an entertaining voice, you’ll find opportunities to publish short essays in magazines and newspapers. You’ll also have a shot at publishing book-length memoir. This presentation will teach you how to identify a particular time period and/or theme in your life on which to focus your memoir. We’ll talk about the structure of short memoir and the various forms it can take, including essays, social commentary, and slice-of-life vignettes. The course will cover characterization, plot, setting and theme. We’ll discuss how to craft a book-length work, and we’ll pay particular attention to the challenges of memory, dialogue, hyperbole, and responses from family members and friends. Participants will receive a bibliography of current books on crafting memoir, as well as a list of magazine and newspaper editors particularly interested in the genre. You’ll come away with a new-found respect for the stories that only you can tell, and a solid sense of where and how to market them to editors.

Melissa Hart is the author of the memoir Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood (Seal, 2009). Her short memoir has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Mothering, The Advocate, Hemispheres, Fourth Genre, Woman’s Day, High Country News, Orion, and various other publications. Melissa teaches journalism at the University of Oregon, and memoir writing for U.C. Berkeley’s online extension program. She’s a contributing editor to The Writer Magazine.

Highlights from Christina Katz’ Presentation: A Platform Primer for Aspiring Authors

By Ashleigh Rousselle

• Strategy: when making goals for your writing, aim lower so you’ll achieve/succeed sooner.  (Build up a series of small accomplishments, which will grow over time.)
• Promoting yourself on the Internet (through blogs etc) can be wonderful but it’s pretty crowded.
• You need to know who you are writing to, and why. Clarify your audience, find your niche.  Brand yourself.
• Be visible to the people you want to reach; be accessible, hear your audience speak, email them.
• Memberships are give and take relationships—join three inexpensive associations.
• Pick a topic in which you have a depth of knowledge—a writer’s job is never done.
• We all want readers!  Being a writer is about finding readers—we want to be read!  And we need to be read by the right people at the right time.
• Books that don’t sell, don’t stay in print.
• Discover the balance between the quality of your writing and the quality of your platform.
• Agents love platforms, they look for recognizable people.
• Find your focus, you need hypothetical people to buy your book, which means knowing why you do what you do and why others should care.
• You need to take 100% responsibility for your writing career; no finger pointing—work with people you trust.
• Stay with the times, experiment with new things, like Twitter perhaps (though if your audience wouldn’t be on it neither should you).
• When dealing with media be aware of the word “no.”
• Visibility doesn’t always happen in the traditional way.
• Get yourself a “tribe”—people who can help.  Network!  Network!  Network!  Find a “matchmaker” for your work.
• Once you find out who you are, what you do, and what you’re about, good things will start happening.
• Figure out your “author name” it needs to be recognizable and unique.
• Get a tagline, an email signature, consider getting professional headshots, and keep your bio updated.

More about Christina Katz at www.christinakatz.com.

Platform Primer for Aspiring Authors: NAS Welcomes Christina Katz January 25th, 2:30 – 4:30 p.m.

Oak Room, Wilsonville Public Library
Cost is $5.00, $3.00 for Seniors & Students

Even if you are not yet known and you don’t have a writing specialty, you will enjoy this lively presentation about how to name, claim, cultivate and explain your all-important writer’s platform from scratch. Becoming visible is more crucial to landing a book deal than ever, according to agents and editors in every facet of the publishing industry. Simply churning out a book isn’t enough. Aspiring authors need to develop a platform in order to get noticed. Based on her book, Get Known Before the Book Deal, Christina Katz, will help you see the bigger platform picture and then take the small steps every writer must in order to get known and land a book deal.

Christina Katz is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). She started her platform “for fun” seven years ago and ended up on Good Morning America. She teaches writing career development from beginner through book deal, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several free e-zines including Writers on the Rise, The Writer Mama and The Get Known Groove. Christina speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and writing conferences around the country. More at www.christinakatz.com.