Every now and then, someone emails me out of the blue to ask if I’d consider writing their memoir. The pitch rarely changes. They’ve lived an extraordinary life, the story simply has to be told, and they’re offering me a generous fifty per cent of the royalties to write it. All I need to supply is roughly a thousand hours of my working life. They’ll supply the sample life.
I want to be fair, because the people asking are almost never chancers. They’re sincere. They genuinely believe they’re handing me a gift. So before I explain why I keep saying no, and before we reach the harder question of which memoirs actually sell, let me deal with the maths. The maths is where the romance of writing a book hits a brick wall. Head first. Without a crash helmet.
The generous fifty-fifty split, examined under a strong light
Say the finished memoir sells respectably for a debut by an unknown author. A few hundred copies over its lifetime, which already puts it ahead of most. At indie royalty rates that might bring in two or three hundred pounds. Split down the middle, my half comes to somewhere near a hundred and fifty quid.
For a thousand hours of work, that lands at roughly fifteen pence an hour. I’d earn considerably more sitting outside Greggs with a paper cup and a hopeful expression, and nobody there would expect me to also handle three structural edits or design a cover.
This isn’t mercenary. Fifty per cent of almost nothing stays almost nothing, and half of a book’s royalties only sounds generous until you remember the book doesn’t exist yet, has no readers yet, and in all likelihood never will. It’s a share in a lottery ticket.
Everyone’s life is unique. That’s rather the problem.
The deeper issue sits underneath the money. Almost everyone believes their life is the exception. They’ve survived something, lost someone, clawed their way back from a place most people never see. Every word of that is usually true.
Hardship, though, is not rare. It’s the most common raw material on Earth. Grief, illness, betrayal, the long grind of coming back from a terrible year: these are near-universal. The event that feels seismic from the inside, the one that reshaped your entire sense of who you are, reads on the page like a Wednesday several million other people also survived.
I say this gently, because it sounds harsh and it isn’t meant to be. Your difficult life matters enormously. It simply doesn’t, on its own, give a stranger in Wolverhampton a reason to part with £3.99 and four evenings of their week. Significance to you and saleability to a reader run on completely different rails. Somewhere out there sits a self-published memoir called My Journey with a lighthouse on the cover, and there are four hundred thousand of them. EDIT: I checked again, and about half include a road or a path.
So what does sell? Almost never the drama itself
Here’s the part that surprises people. When a memoir does move in real numbers, the reason is rarely the life at its centre. It’s usually one of four other things.
The first, and the most deflating, is a platform. The author already has an audience built somewhere else: telly, sport, social media, or they’re one of those people who are inexplicably famous for just being famous. The book becomes merchandise for people who already like them. Unfair, unliterary, and the single strongest predictor of a memoir selling. A thin book by a familiar face outsells a magnificent one by an unknown almost every time. With the greatest respect to former model Katie Price, she’s no Virginia Woolf, but her memoir sold by the lorry-load. Not because of the writing, but because she’s lived her life in the spotlight, and people wanted to read about the dark corners.
The second is a genuinely rare vantage point. Not “I struggled and came through,” but “I stood somewhere almost none of you will ever stand.” Inside a cult. The kitchen of a royal household. The control room of a Ukrainian nuclear plant on the 26th April, 1986. The reader isn’t buying your feelings; they’re buying access to a place they can’t otherwise reach.
The third is the one a writer can actually engineer: a second reason to buy. The strongest memoirs smuggle something else in alongside the life. A skill to pick up, a country to travel through, a lost world to visit, an obsession to catch. Bill Bryson’s own life isn’t remotely dramatic; his books sell because they’re also about walking, or America, or the English language. The memoir is the vehicle. Something else is the road.
Fourth, a hook you can say in a single breath. A killer line a bookshop could print on a poster. A billionaire living on a council estate for six months. An attempt to sleep with a different stranger every day for a year (spoiler: failed on day one). A man hitchhiking round the entire coast of Ireland with a fridge strapped to his back. When the concept fits in one line and makes a stranger’s eyebrows arch, it can sell on premise alone, long before anyone knows whether the writing holds up.
Write it anyway, if the reason is the right one
None of this means you shouldn’t write your memoir. If you want to leave your story for your children and/or grandchildren, write the memoir and write it well. Print a dozen hardbacks, and hand them round at Christmas. That’s a lovely thing to do, and it needs no sales figures to justify it. Just be honest with yourself about which job you’re actually doing. Recording a life for the handful of people who loved it is one task. Selling that life to forty thousand strangers is an entirely different one, and only the second demands a platform, a vantage point, or a hook.
My own answer to all of it, the reason I keep politely declining, is that I found the workaround years ago. I write fiction instead.
Novels let me borrow the emotional truth of real hardship without needing my own life to have been remarkable. I can take the grief, the regret, the decision a person would give anything to make again, and hand it to an invented bloke who never has to sit across a table from me feeling exposed. Nobody’s real mother appears. The feelings ring true; the life is made up; and readers turn up for the story rather than the CV. If that appeals rather more than a fifteen-pence-an-hour ghostwriting arrangement, that’s where my books live. Try Tuned Out, an ordinary bloke given a trip to 1969 and an ending readers still haven’t quite forgiven me for. Or The Last Stop Video Shop, about a man running quietly out of road who finds a VHS tape of a memory that never happened. And The ’86 Fix if a second chance and a can of Coke from 1986 sounds like your sort of Friday night.
All the feeling of a memoir, in other words, and not one lighthouse in sight.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do memoirs sell well?
Most memoirs sell modestly. Unless the author already has an audience, a rare vantage point, or a strong one-line hook, even a well-written life story struggles to reach strangers. A difficult or moving life, on its own, rarely sells in large numbers.
Should I write a memoir?
If you want to preserve your story for family and the people who love you, absolutely; write it well and print a few copies. If your aim is commercial sales, be honest about whether you have a platform, unusual access, or a hook a bookshop could put on a poster. Those, not the drama of the life itself, drive sales.
What kind of memoirs sell the most copies?
Four types tend to sell: memoirs by people who already have an audience; memoirs offering rare access to a closed world; memoirs that double as something else, such as travel or a skill; and memoirs built on a hook you can describe in one line. The raw hardship at the centre matters far less than one of these.
Is it worth paying someone to ghostwrite my memoir?
A good ghostwriter costs thousands of pounds, because the work runs to hundreds of hours. Offering a share of future royalties instead usually means offering a share of very little, since most memoirs sell few copies. Pay a fair rate for the time, or write it yourself.
Can I write my life story if I’m not famous?
Yes. Anyone can write and publish their life story, and plenty of people do it beautifully for their family and their own satisfaction. Just separate the two goals: recording a life for the people who love it needs no sales at all, while selling it widely usually needs a hook or a platform beyond the story itself.