10 Indie Presses Looking For Memoirs
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You want to publish a memoir? Fantastic. Are your odds great? Nope—but it’s definitely possible.
In order to understand the landscape of memoir publishing today, it’s important to look at the past few decades. While historically authors were more likely to write their life stories as fiction rather than memoir, in the 1990s the “memoir boom” began. From Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1993), Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995), Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), to Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (2003) and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (2005), memoirs took the literary scene by storm and surprised everyone by selling really well.
Many of these best-selling memoirs were eventually adapted to the screen, too, bringing even more attention to the genre. It was a revolutionary moment for nonfiction, and in many ways the catalyst for creative nonfiction being added as a genre in creative writing programs.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. And while memoirs had their boom season, three decades later, the genre is a hard one to break into for most writers. Since I’m in the process of submitting my own memoir for publication at this very moment, I’ve been doing a lot of research into this phenomenon. Why are memoirs hard to sell? What is special about the ones that get published? And most importantly, how can I have the best chance of selling my memoir?
Let’s get into it.
Why Are Memoirs Hard to Sell?
Ask most agents, publishers, and book distributors, and they will all say the same thing: The memoir market is saturated. The early success of a few authors seemed to validate the dreams of everyone with a story to tell. And soon, anyone capable of putting words together on a page was interested in writing their own memoir! This is a simplified version of the truth, of course, but it’s more or less the reality. The questions soon started. What made one person’s story of divorce, or addiction, or cancer, or a backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail different from the others that had already been written?
As it turns out, not enough to make people buy more.
Now, what does sell regardless of whether the story has been told before are celebrity memoirs. Think Prince Harry, Michelle Obama, Britney Spears, and Matthew Perry. I just finished watching the latest season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and about finished off an entire bottle of wine when one of the celebrity wives announced they had a book deal for a memoir. Why her memoir and not mine? I wailed into my empty glass. Let’s look at the numbers. My social media following? 600, and no TV show. Hers? 803k plus a global viewing audience of five million over the course of five days. It’s a no-brainer for a publisher: a no-risk venture with guaranteed sales.
So, between a saturated market and a new “boom” in celebrity memoir, the average memoir writer is likely to get a bit lost in the crowd, unless they bring with them a wide-reaching and established platform. And yet—some memoirs still sell.
What’s Special About the Memoirs That Get Published?
This one required a bit more digging to answer. I spent a long time on Publishers Marketplace, looking at all the deals for memoirs over the last year. As I expected, there were a lot of celebrity memoirs or celebrity-adjacent ones (someone promising to spill the tea on a famous person they had a close association with, for example), but there were others, too. I pulled out a few with their description to showcase here as examples:
Girl Gone Wild by Courtney Kocak: Comedian and host of the Private Parts Unknown podcast Courtney Kocak's Girl Gone Wild, the author's debut, about the Hollywood misadventures of a small-town girl, including selling T-shirts on the Girls Gone Wild tour—pitched in the vein of How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell and Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton (sold to Trio House).
I Will Give You Everything by Stephanie Foo: Author of What My Bones Know Stephanie Foo's I Will Give You Everything, a journalistic exploration of parenting with complex PTSD that chronicles the ups and downs of new motherhood: navigating postpartum depression, learning how to simultaneously care for yourself and a small child, and ultimately, becoming a cycle breaker (sold to Ballantine).
Breaking Good by Nikki Mammano: Nikki Mammano's Breaking Good, in which the author shares her journey of metamorphosis—from queen of Waikiki's underground crystal meth empire to unassuming soccer mom living with her happy family in the suburbs (sold to Regalo Press).
Bodies in Heat by Erica Berry: Author of Wolfish Erica Berry's Bodies in Heat, an exploration of how our sexual and romantic lives are evolving on a warming planet beset by environmental crises, using memoir, cultural criticism, science, and investigative reporting to interrogate our 21st century expectations around romance (sold to Flatiron Books).
There are more, but to be honest, there was already a lot of scrolling involved in finding just these few. The non-celebrity memoirs being picked up were either very specific or incorporated more than just memoir, adding in cultural criticism, research, and journalism. In recent years, there have also been beautifully lyric memoirs selling mainly to independent presses—think authors like Chloe Caldwell (known for only publishing with indie presses), Jeannie Vanasco (a longtime Tin House author), and even Carmen Maria Machado, who published In the Dream House with Graywolf Press.
Based on everything I learned, I came up with three reasons a memoir sells (even without a big platform):
It’s a niche or specific topic/circumstance that hasn’t been written about before
It’s “memoir-plus”—more than just a personal narrative (there is research, journalism, cultural criticism, etc.)
It’s the most beautiful writing you’ve ever read in your life, and it's bold and new, subverting expectations around the genre
So, How Can I Have the Best Chance of Selling My Memoir?
If you have a memoir in hand, or the idea of one brewing, ask yourself: Is there any way my memoir can become a memoir-plus memoir? Do you have that literary gift for making your reader’s brain melt on the page with your words, or with how you uniquely structure the telling of a story? Do you truly have a story that has not been told before—either in content, identity, or demographic?
If your answer is yes to any of these, I think you stand a chance of getting your memoir out the door. There are no guarantees in this business, of course, but these are the kind of memoirs currently selling, and we all know most agents and editors are all about the market. Keep in mind, too, that your memoir can be sold on proposal and this allows you to position it in a way that grabs attention—you know your story matters, and a proposal can be a great way to convince everyone else that more people than just your family and friends will want to read your book.
And while the Big Five may be publishing a majority of celebrity memoirs, independent presses are still interested in a compelling and well-written story. And thankfully, those are the places that tend to take on un-agented submissions, too. Good news for everyone :)
Join me (free for paid subscribers!) for Get that Yes! Book Proposals to Hook Agents & Editors on June 25, where I’ll break down the key components of a standout book proposal—from the overview to the comps to those all-important sample chapters.
So here’s what you probably really wanted—a list of indie presses that publish memoirs, even if you don’t have an agent. ↓
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