Adding Backstory to an Essay Collection

I recently read a memoir in which a woman shared a traumatic health emergency she ultimately survived. In addition to sharing this story, she also wrote about her background.

 

At first, I wondered if she added this background about her life in order to make the book an actual “book” in the event that her chapters documenting her health emergency were not sufficient. But as I read more about her background and everything else about her life leading up to the health emergency, I realized that it was a good thing she provided that background about her life, because it helped me to understand her and know her better. Of course, I do not know the author personally, but reading about her life helped me to get the full scope of what her life was like before, and after.

 

This made me think: Should I do the same for an essay collection I have been writing?

 

I have been working on an essay collection about my experience in sobriety, and I felt that it was a good idea to do so since I am going on my sixth year of being sober. Some people have asked me how I have managed to get this far being sober, so I thought it was a good idea to write about just how I have managed to do it.

 

But I am also writing my memoir. I am writing about my experiences of being a burn survivor, being a person who is deaf (and lost her hearing when 13 years old), and a person who has been coping with certain health issues – namely, panic attacks, a heart condition and a sleep disorder that have all wrecked havoc on my chances of getting and keeping a job. (The only job I have managed to keep despite all that? Working as a freelance writer! But, mainly, working from home, since I work my own hours.)

 

I am starting to wonder if I should combine the two books. If I should provide some background on the kind of life I have lived, my experiences that threw me deeper into drinking (plus a suicide attempt), and basically all the things I went through that shaped me into the person that I am today.

 

I will, of course, write about my experiences with alcoholism in the memoir, but now I’m wondering if I should throw ALL of those stories together into one book.

 

A part of me wasn’t sure if I should do it, because that’s like saying, “All of this bad stuff made me drink!” or “My crappy upbringing is to blame for my alcoholism.”

 

I don’t want to blame my life for my drinking problem. I don’t want to say “I was an alcoholic because of THIS!” or use bad stuff from my past as an excuse for why I drank. Yes, it did contribute to my drinking problem, but it’s not why I started drinking in the first place. I started drinking in the first place because EVERYBODY in my family drank! My parents, older siblings, in-laws, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. EVERYBODY DRANK! It was like an initiation into adulthood. Although, some of us started drinking before we were legally old enough to drink.

 

And the more bad stuff that happened in my life, the worse my drinking got. That’s all there is to it. The bad stuff did not make me drink, it just made my drinking problem worse.

 

Then I think, well, it’s easy to judge people you don’t know. Readers might see that essay collection on sobriety and wonder, “WHY did she even start drinking? Why did she keep drinking?” And who knows what kind of conclusions they would reach about me from that line of thinking.

 

Probably wrong conclusions. I’ve been judged by a lot of people my entire life, and they usually get me wrong. They usually don’t understand me, my line of thinking (which was at its worse during my drinking days), that I wasn’t raised the same way as them, that I grew up with violence in the home, and that I’m JUST NOT LIKE THEM. I don’t think the way they do or see things the way they do. People often misjudge me. They usually get me wrong. Very few people know the real me.

 

Maybe sharing some of my background will help people know the real me. And better understand things about why the alcoholism happened.

 

Not only this, but I could basically tell all my stories and share my success at sobriety in just one book. Maybe my success at sobriety and not so much my material accomplishments in life are the highlight of my story, and should go towards the end of the book. (My success at sobriety is definitely not the end of my story, though; there’s more to tell.)

 

The more I thought about doing this, the more it made sense. And the more it made sense, the more I was able to figure out the organization of the book. Yes, it could definitely work.

 

One thing is certain: I am not my past. I am NOT the person I used to be. The beauty of sobriety is that my thinking is clearer, and healthier. I am not what I have lived through; I am what I choose to become. I am not where I come from; I get to choose where I will go.

Tell All About It! New Ebook Offers Ideas for Book Promotion

 

When I made the decision to self-publish ebooks for my monthly newsletter, The SPARREW Newsletter, I knew there is one rule to book publishing which I should follow: Give readers what they want. I couldn’t self-publish just ANYTHING. Sure, I have self-published some poetry books, but these were the personal poetry collections I knew would not sell if sent to a regular publisher. And, besides, there are probably other readers out there who love poetry just as much as I do. So, I figured, why not self-publish some poetry books too? After all, I have poetry books that are not available for free, so it wouldn’t hurt to include some free poetry collections among the free ebooks offered on my website.

 

Even so, I know just how important it is to provide readers with reading material they want and could use. So I shifted gears and decided to self-publish more ebooks specifically for writers and authors, since the newsletter is for writers and authors!

 

That’s what led me to the decision to self-publish the newest ebook, Promote Your Book on a Shoestring...or Less.

 

I got the idea for this book years ago, but I couldn’t really figure out just how to put it together. Then the idea on just how to put this book together and what kind of slant it should have came to me earlier this year, and it was so simple!

 

Simple enough, in fact, to create a short, 20-page ebook I could offer to subscribers of my newsletter for free!

 

The result is the new ebook mentioned above. It contains 50 ideas of methods to promote your book both online and offline. I decided to just include 50 suggestions for each option because if I included a looong list of suggestions, then it might be too overwhelming for readers. So, 25 suggestions for each option seemed about right. I also made sure all of the suggestions in this book were either low- or no-cost book promotion methods.

 

Thankfully, I was able to come up with 50 suggestions thanks to my many years of keeping my finger on the pulse of the book industry, following authors on social media, checking out various author sites, subscribing to many author newsletters and paying attention to what other authors are doing to promote their books. I have also used some of these methods myself with my own books.

 

While the book promotion suggestions included in this ebook will not guarantee sales, they will absolutely help spread the word about your book, which is what book promotion is supposed to do. Every little bit you do to promote your book and help get it in front of more readers will help. So give some of these suggestions a try and see what works for you and your book!

 

Here is the blurb:

With so many free opportunities available to authors for promoting their books, it can be hard to decide which promotional method works best. Where can authors find good free or affordable book promotion methods? Which ones are right for them? If you are an author with a book to promote, but you have a tight budget, then Promote Your Book on a Shoestring...or Less will give you the resources you need to spread the word about your book!

 

Promote Your Book on a Shoestring...or Less is available as a free download on Kindle Unlimited here.

Rediscovering My Voice as a Book Reviewer

 There’s a page on my website that lists all of the books I have reviewed in the times I have spent as a professional book reviewer. Some of these gigs were paid while some of them are unpaid. (The standard in the book review industry is that the free book offered to the reviewer serves as payment. However, when I have been paid for my reviews, I make attempts to not only turn them in faster, but also to make them as thorough and in-depth as possible. There’s something to be said about getting paid for your time and effort!) What people won’t find on there, though, are reviews I wrote for a publishing company seeking in-house reviews of their books.

 

Maybe that is a good thing, because there was one review I wrote of an author’s book which wasn’t very favorable of her book. And, sadly, she later committed suicide.

 

This news of her death was devastating. I did not know her personally, but I did occasionally communicate with her through social media. Her life was so short and she is still very missed.

 

Meanwhile, I was dealing with a personal issue in relation to her death. I didn’t talk about it openly, because I didn’t want MY problems to interfere with the mourning period her family, friends, associates and fellow authors were going through. But, later on, I did talk about it.

 

And I need to talk about it again here, because things have since changed.

 

For a long time after this author’s suicide, I couldn’t review another book. I felt so terrible about the review I wrote of her book, that I started to wonder if it played a factor in what drove her to end her life. I know it probably didn’t, but that was how I felt at the time. It was awful. I was ravaged by guilt. I even vowed to never review another book again.

 

Well, obviously, that has changed. I did start leaving small reviews of books I read on Amazon. They were all very short reviews and I tried my hardest to make them positive. I gave 5-star reviews to books which I really felt did not deserve five stars, but I was worried that anything less would be hurtful to the author. I just didn’t want to make anything negative of those mini reviews that I wrote.

 

Anyway, after several months of this, I found the strength to publicly share book reviews under my name again. I started a book review blog – first on LiveJournal then on Blogger – and then I decided it was time to review books professionally again. First I tried one online book review service, but the owner was pressuring members to review his book (one which I was not interested in reading!) and the editors of the reviews were rude. Plus, it would be several weeks until the reviews I wrote for them finally appeared on the site – although there is one that I wrote several months ago that was never published. I didn’t stick around there for very long!

 

Then I remembered a site my friend, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, had mentioned in her many communications with me through the years: Reader Views. I checked out the site and liked what I saw. I noticed they even had a presence on social media AND they reviewed self-published books. I decided to give them a try and applied to be a book reviewer. Fortunately, I was accepted. The two ladies operating Reader Views are lovely. They have promptly answered my emails, were always kind and considerate, and the reviews I wrote were promptly included on their site and in their socials. I have been happily reviewing books for them ever since.

 

I don’t know if it was the act of writing those mini reviews that helped me to regain the confidence to write book reviews again, but I know it certainly helped.

 

Also, I have been more mindful of the reviews I write. If I don’t like the book, I won’t review it, even if there is one thing about the book that I DO like. (Thankfully, as an ARC reviewer for a publishing company and some authors I know, I have only received books to review that I actually liked.) But if I don’t like the book, I decline the review. I am grateful that this is an option. I know there are ways to still write a positive review of a book you don’t like, but I’m still not comfortable doing that.

 

And I know I am not doing the authors any favors by giving a 5-star review to books that are not exactly 5-star books. I have since changed that bad habit as well. I’m not so negative with my reviews of books I don’t give five stars to, but at least I am now more comfortable to be more honest about how many stars that I personally feel a book should receive.

 

And “personal” is the keyword here. All reviews of books are just that: a personal opinion about a book. They are not meant to be a way of lashing out at an author or a universal statement about what kind of book this author has written. They are only personal opinions about a book. (Sidenote: This is true in MOST cases. I am aware that there are so-called “book reviewers” out there leaving negative reviews of books simply because of what they know about the book’s content, even if they haven’t read it, or as a means of leaving hateful comments against an author currently in the news for a crime or something similar. There was one author who was accused of killing her child and people left angry and hateful comments about her on Amazon where the reviews go, and another author who was murdered ended up having people who knew her leaving sentimental and thoughtful comments on her book pages on Amazon where reviews are supposed to go.)

 

The bottom line is, not everybody is going to like a book. There WILL be readers out there who don’t like the same book that everybody else likes, and readers that do.

 

As to that one author, I DID like her book. The only thing I pointed out were certain mistakes she made about things in her story (they weren’t writing mistakes; they were mistakes about certain items the characters used). But overall, the story itself was good. And I think that as long as the author manages to tell a good story that readers enjoy, then a mistake or two in their story doesn’t really matter.