Tough Categories: Five Top Book Editors on Publishing Memoir and Essay Collections

"Writing an essay collection or a memoir is an act of generosity. A common misconception is that these kinds of books are all about the author. They’re not. They’re about the reader. "

Tracey Emin, “I Am the Last of My Kind”

If you traffic in literary rejections—and by that I mean you either work in publishing or want to be traditionally published—you’ll eventually come across the phrase “tough category.” Publishing a book is always hard, but as The Smiths once put it (sort of) some categories are harder than others. Given that I largely represent nonfiction, my personal toughest nuts are essay collections and memoirs.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you find this surprising. Go to any writers’ conference or visit any MFA program and you will meet dozens of writers looking to publish collections of essays, memoirs or their many subvariants: the memoir-in-essays, the lyric essay, the braided memoir, the family memoir, the memoir-plus. These terms can be helpful descriptors in finding the right agent and comps, but no clever portmanteau can obscure the fact that if you are writing a memoir or essay collection, you’re looking to publish in a tough category. When I’m feeling especially salty after a weekend spent at a writers’ conference, where once (I kid you not), I found someone waiting outside of my bathroom stall to pitch me her memoir, I go home and look up the Bookscan numbers of the most recent well-reviewed and award-winning memoirs or essay collections, and I become once again convinced that there are more writers of these categories than actual readers, and that all of those readers could fit into the bathroom of a Denver Hilton.

This post isn’t meant to convince you to pivot to romantasy (though I do hope it serves as a reminder that you should be reading books in the category you wish to publish in and if you have the means, spending your own cash dollars to support them). It is meant to help you understand what kind of books editors and publishers actually seek to publish. To that end, I’ve brought together five very experienced nonfiction editors I know and trust to ask them just that. Read on to learn more about:

• What these editors look for in memoir and essay collections

• Why these categories are considered hard

• The importance of platform in essay collections and memoirs

• Some really great book recommendations!

Like this newsletter? You’ll love my forthcoming book even more. You can preorder TAKE IT FROM ME here and then enter to win a chance for me to review your book proposal. We’re also offering five runners-up a query letter review, also by moi. Good luck!

❦

Hilary Redmon is the Editorial Director of Nonfiction at Knopf (Penguin Random House). Books she has published include BRAIN ON FIRE by Susannah Cahalan, EDUCATED by Tara Westover, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES by Ed Yong and TATTOOS ON THE HEART by Father Greg Boyle.

Kate Napolitano is the Editorial Director of Nonfiction at Atria (Simon & Schuster). She has acquired and published books by Anne Helen Petersen, Phoebe Robinson, Michael Harriott, and Pamela Anderson.

Maria Pantojan is an Executive Editor at Random House, where she publishes both nonfiction and literary fiction. She has recent or forthcoming books with Cristina Rivera Garza, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Malcolm Harris and Rebecca Donner.

Rakia Clark is an Executive Editor at Mariner Books (HarperCollins), where she acquires literary and narrative nonfiction and fiction. Her recent titles include BRIEFLY PERFECTLY HUMAN by Alua Arthur, PUNCH ME UP TO THE GODS by Brian Broome and BURN IT DOWN by Maureen Ryan.

Maria Goldverg is a Senior Editor at Liveright (Norton). She has acquired and edited books by Samantha Irby, Margo Jefferson, Keith O’Brien, among many others. She was also the acquiring editor for my forthcoming book, TAKE IT FROM ME.

What makes you actually want to bid on a memoir or essay collection? (Points deducted for saying, “It’s all about the voice!”)

Hilary Redmon: And yet, voice is so important! Maybe it’s better to break down what we, or at least I, mean by voice. When I read something—really any kind of nonfiction—and come away with an indelible sense of having had a frank personal encounter with someone, that’s what I think of as voice. It’s not about being showy. A writer’s voice should leave a mark just like an honest conversation does. Hua Hsu, Deborah Levy, Tara Westover, Sasha Bonet, and Julian Brave Noisecat, each have an outsized presence on the page. (If anyone’s looking for advice on how to develop voice, I have to recommend George Saunders on editing your own work, either in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain or on his Substack.)

Voice aside, in memoir I’m either looking for a writer who has experienced something extraordinary—a near death experience, a solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, a psychotic episode, being kept out of school in Idaho—and can not only recount those experiences in vivid detail but make them recognizable to the rest of us. Or I look for a someone who can render tremendous meaning and beauty from the quotidian as Michelle Zauner does in Crying in H Mart or Kathryn Schulz does in Lost & Found. In either scenario, it’s important to me that the author undergo a profound psychological journey and is able to take us with them.

More technically, in a memoir, at least, I’m looking for someone who knows how to tell a good story. I know the arc of a life can’t be neatly tied up, but I love when a writer thinks in episodes, can depict themselves in conflict with something, and has a firm grasp on a beginning, middle, and an end. In essays, I am hoping to see someone genuinely change their own mind on the page or to show us how they have. I love a surprising argument (in good faith,) And I think the best critical essays challenge something that the writer, overtly or not, has a real stake in. Most importantly, the author needs to be great company. (Back to voice, again, I know…)

Kate Napolitano: This is going to sound a little wild, but the first indicator that I’ve found something truly compelling or unique is that I feel it in my body. That sort of electric shock, through-the-veins buzz that hits when I’ve become captivated by a writer’s prose is an invaluable barometer for me; it’s how I know I’ve found something fresh, vibrant, attention-grabbing. As a general rule, I’m drawn to memoirs or memoir-in-essays that can kickstart a cultural conversation about a topic in a new or unexpected way. I’m obsessed with power dynamics—who has it, who doesn’t—and all of the things that you’re not supposed to talk about in polite company: class, money, sex, politics, religion, mental health. I love the good troublemakers, the rebels, the writers who come from unusual or surprising creative backgrounds, and am especially drawn to writers who can invoke a bit of hybridity or structural weirdness in their writing, especially within the realm of cultural analysis. And importantly, I do not believe you have to have a MFA or even a college degree to write a memoir or an essay collection—some people are just born storytellers, with a natural command of voice and pace and language. And that type of talent is worth shepherding, nurturing and celebrating.

Marie Pantojan: ​​Beyond falling in love with the writing and the subject matter, I need to have a clear, specific idea of who the reader is for the book, and I need to be confident that I know how to reach them, either through earned media or marketing efforts. For me, this means that I usually fall for memoirs that I refer to as “memoir plus”—personal narratives that directly speak to broader cultural or political issues—because it helps me visualize the reader more easily. For example, Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer is a memoir about the author’s journey towards finding justice for Liliana, her younger sister, who was murdered by a former lover. Ultimately, Cristina delivers not only a stunningly tender portrait of Liliana, but an impassioned critique of intimate partner violence, and the global epidemic of femicide. It was a book I instantly knew I wanted to publish for mothers, daughters, sisters—women who have witnessed, or been subjected, to gendered violence and misogyny. Cristina’s story felt both intensely personal, and urgently universal, and that helped us (i.e., marketing and publicity) define which readers we wanted to target, and chart a path to reaching them.

Rakia Clark: I love when a writer is connecting ideas I’ve not seen connected before or is connecting them in a way too impressive to ignore. Relevant themes are a must. With memoir and essays, for me it’s also a great sign when I can tell a writer can write beyond the memoir or essays. I like to see signs of a deep, deep well.

Marie Pantojan: I think most “serious” books are challenging at the moment! Especially if they’re by debut or emerging authors who aren’t already in front of, or regularly speaking to, a big audience on their own. There’s a lot we can point to to explain why things are so tough—the fractured media landscape, the inscrutability of social media algorithms, readers’ changing tastes and a desire for escapism. Because there’s no single culprit, there’s no easy fix, but publishers are actively trying to combat these various forces.

Maria Goldverg: The quality of the prose and the strength of an author's voice should both be a given. If I’m being honest, without those, I probably wouldn’t even be considering the work to begin with. Beyond that, I really need the proposed book to be about something, it needs to be making a point, or it needs to be doing something new with the form, and ideally it will be doing both.

Margo Jefferson’s memoirs are always about more than just her life story, and every time she publishes a new book, she reinvents what a memoir even is. Just take a look at her most recent, Constructing a Nervous System, which is extraordinary and dizzyingly unlike any other book I’ve read. The same is true for another author I’ve been lucky to work with: Samantha Irby. Yes, she’s a humorist and her essays are plain hysterical. But, remember that she broke ground by how openly she wrote about human foibles—our aches and pains and embarrassments—and that she pioneered a now much-copied style.

Sometimes, from where I sit, it feels like essay collections are what people propose when they can’t find a strong-enough idea or structure for a full-length work. To me, that’s a sign that an idea hasn’t fully cooked yet. An essay collection is a beautiful art form in and of itself, and it shouldn’t be a fall back. Your book still needs to amount to a whole and it still needs to be about something. Ask yourself: what are you trying to communicate and what do you want people to come away with?

The same questions apply for memoirs. We’re all human beings and we all have stories to tell, whether they’re tragic or inspiring or humorous. But, this isn’t The Moth and we publishers are not actually in the business of storytelling. We’re in the business of trying to convince people they should spend thirty of their hard-earned dollars on your book while also reordering their supply of diapers on Amazon.

To my eyes, both the memoir and essay collection are literary endeavors, at heart, even when they’re also what we publishers like to call “commercial.” That means that, unless you’re a celebrity or someone with a real fanbase, these are books that, I think, need to be operating on multiple registers. Every time I am considering either, I ask myself: what would I write if I was nominating this book for an award or making the case the book be covered in the precious pages of our paper of record? And then I see if I can’t come up with something that convinces me, or the person who sits closest to me at the office.

That said, the best way to get me jazzed is if your work is laugh-out-loud funny. Not that I want to see jokes and punchlines, but being sharp, witty, or surprising always catches my eye. People tend to underestimate just how hard it is to write funny. Mostly, I want to feel that the writer is taking risks. I haven’t actually read it yet, but the other day, I opened the first page of a memoir called Tart, newly out from Simon & Schuster. I immediately snorted with laughter, and immediately decided that this was a book I was going to take a chance on, and devote some precious time to reading.

Unless you’re Cher, and then everything I just said is moot. Do what you want Cher, and we will buy it!

What makes these categories so challenging at the moment? Are there subjects and themes that are particularly tough or currently overrepresented? (I get pitched “essays on my fraught relationship with pop culture” at least once a week.)

Hilary Redmon: Without a famous name or story, memoir has always been difficult, but that’s even more true now as publishers try to cut through the noise. It’s harder than ever to convince a reader to spend their time and money on something without some kind of explicit sense of what they’ll take away from reading that book. But if the story is universal, we—the author, the publishing team—can articulate what that promise for the reader is, and the book is immersive and novelistic, there’s hope that it can build the kind of word-of-mouth momentum that gives a book a long life.

Essays are even tougher, though they’ve always been a niche category in which a few notable exceptions—Joan Didion and, more recently, Jia Tolentino and Hanif Abdurraqib—have skewed the picture. Possibly it makes more sense for essayists just starting out now to reserve essays for literary magazines or for a platform like Substack where one can build a devoted following piece by piece. It’s difficult to launch a career with a book of essays.

Kate Napolitano: We’re living in an era of constant stimulation and cultural consumption; if anything, I think that our industry as a whole is finding it increasingly challenging to captivate readers, and that’s not just limited to memoir. There are real existential threats to the culture of reading, to our attention spans, to our emotional and physical safety. But I do think that at this moment, there is a legitimate desire for escapism, which is why we are seeing a profound gap in sales between fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction, and memoir in particular, may not feel like a portal into a different universe for readers, which is why I think it’s critical for authors to 1) write with vividness and authenticity; and 2) to think about what motivates their potential readership. Get curious about who your potential readers are. Talk to folks outside of your circle of close friends and peers about the best memoir they’ve ever read, the scenes that have stuck with them long after they close the book. Be a bookstore snoop.

In terms of overrepresented categories—and I don’t want to sound callous—but I do tend to get pitched a lot of abuse and trauma-laden family narratives. I can be drawn to darker material—this world is tough, and I love a writer who can approach that reality with sharp humor—but I’ve found there can be a tendency for these narratives to feel quite internal, where it doesn’t extend beyond the writer’s personal experience. It’s important for people to write and name their trauma; it’s such an integral aspect of processing. However, I would encourage writers to think about the evolution of their trauma—are you writing through your experience? Or have you processed your own story enough that you can you extend some of that hard-won self-awareness outwardly to readers?

Rakia Clark: Most writers aren’t creating work that’s as distinctive as they think it is. (Sorry.) So to stand out, I don’t expect the subject or themes to be revelatory but I do expect the writer’s approach to be. For example, I’m publishing an essay collection in March by a magnificent but little-known writer named Savala Nolan, who’s writing about the expectations of womanhood and what happens when women say To hell with it. The book is called GOOD WOMAN. This isn’t a unique subject but Nolan puts her stamp on it. She combines history, reportage and memoir elements, and the way she synthesizes the three is a feat of rare technical skill. Layered on top of that is the emotional potency of her writing and ideas. It’s the kind of stuff you immediately have to call somebody about after you’ve read it. That quality makes a well-trod topic feel bold, fresh and irresistible. When a writer can do that, they’re going to find readers. Doesn’t matter the familiarity of the subject.

Marie Pantojan: Other editors are better at platformed books than I am, so take my answer with a grain of salt! I think platform almost always helps, but it’s not a precondition to my wanting to work with an author. And because “platform” can mean so many things, it’s important to be really specific: an author might be a public figure or celebrity, they can have a million followers on social media, but those “platforms” don’t always necessarily translate into book sales. So, one way I think about this is: I want the author’s platform to match the book they’ve written. I’m publishing a book next spring called Original Sin, which is part memoir, part genre-bending work of science and moral philosophy. The author, Kathryn Paige Harden, is a gorgeous writer with brilliant, provocative ideas about human behavior, but her “platform” is also critical and will hopefully help her publicist build a major campaign: Paige is a tenured psychology professor at UT-Austin, where she runs her own lab; her previous book was published by an academic press, but resulted in major national print and broadcast media hits, including a New Yorker profile. While Paige doesn’t have a huge Substack, or a big Instagram following, she has a platform that supports the kind of serious publication we envision for her book.

Maria Goldverg: I’m going to answer this question in a roundabout way! Selling books in general is challenging at the moment. I think we all know why. Life is hard. We all spend too much time at work. When we’re not working, we also want to languish in front of our television sets, go the movies, catch up on our favorite podcast, read the news, doomscroll on whatever mind-numbing platform, get lost in a video game, hike the alps, bake cookies, knit a cardigan, argue with our parents and children, and drink too many martinis with our friends. And, everyone agrees that our attention spans are shot.

People read books for leisure—pleasure and escapism—or because they want to expand and deepen their knowledge about a subject. When I read for escapism, I’m likely to turn to Sci Fi. I want ideas and drama and inventiveness on the largest possible scale. Otherwise, I choose a work of nonfiction by an academic or a journalist on a subject that interests me, one that I want to learn more about. So, where do memoir and essay collections fit in here?

My point is, I think one reason these categories are considered hard is: there probably aren’t already people who are waiting for your book, waiting to read your story. And, there isn’t a strong community of people out there who pretty much only read memoirs or only read essay collections and talk about them with each other. It’s a tall order, but it’s the author and publisher’s job to make the case for why people will want to buy a book despite that. What will it do for them? Why should they care?

I’d also warn against making the mistake of thinking that if you choose to write about something that’s popular, an existing fandom will become a built-in audience for your book. That’s just not true. Think about how you consume your favorite media. At this point, I’ve seen every episode of Survivor there is. I’ve listened to too many podcast recaps, and I’ve watched the YouTube videos. But, not once have I even considered buying a book that’s about Survivor. And, why would I? What would I get from it? If you write an essay collection about Survivor, it needs to tell me something about Survivor that I don’t already know, and that something needs to be significant enough that I would be willing to pay for it.

Actually, one of my favorite essay collections from recent memory (at least among those that I haven’t published myself) is Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches, and it has nothing to do with my favorite television show. It’s about how strange sea creatures like the Bobbitt worm have carved out lives for themselves in hostile environments. I found it to be a totally awe-inspiring work, and I didn’t even know the Bobbitt worm existed until I read it. It was a book only they could have written.

So, yes, these categories are “hard." But, that’s not a reason to despair! Think about why that is. Look around and see what’s already been published. Find an approach or idea that you and only you can own, and once you do: also think about what you are giving to a reader. Writing an essay collection or a memoir is an act of generosity, I believe. Another common misconception is that these kinds of books are all about the author. They’re not. They’re about the reader, and what the author gives them.

How important is “platform” in your decisions and how do you think about?

Hilary Redmon: This one I’ll leave for the marketing and publicity folks! I’ll just say that it’s a huge help to know where to find a writer’s readers now that we see fewer sales from mainstream media and more from reaching the niche where the author or subject of the book lives.

Kate Napolitano: It would be disingenuous for me to say that platform doesn’t matter, especially in this era where traditional media isn’t necessarily breaking through in the way that we have in the past. We no longer live in a monoculture, so I would encourage writers to think about how they can be the most effective hypeman/woman/person for their work, and to then become an expert to whatever niche of readers they can curate. Are you someone who isn’t afraid to yap at a phone screen? Do you have a newsletter? Do you have a community of fellow writers that you can lean on for support and exchange of ideas? To me, engagement is more important than pure social numbers. Can you build a community of people who will root for you? And then can you get a little weird with it, figure out a way to position yourself to make your book’s message stand out in a noisy media environment? There’s no exact science to it, but I do believe it’s imperative to think about your book as both a beautiful piece of art, and a product that needs to be discovered—so how will you as an author become an asset to that process of discovery?

Rakia Clark: For me, breaking out a genius writer nobody’s heard of is more exciting than nearly anything else. So platform is helpful but not necessary. If the manuscript is excellent and compelling and unique, my team and I will find the audience. It’s nice to feel inspired enough by a writer’s talent to do that. With writers like that, I’m usually thinking about how to break them out over the course of a few books instead of just one. That platform will grow as we publish each book. The whole thing becomes a team effort.

Maria Goldverg: Books written by people without platforms are published all the time. But, I’d be lying if I said platform didn’t help or wasn’t important to the editorial board at any house. I’m not here to suggest everyone make themselves a profile on TikTok. More helpful, I think, is to think about what “platform” means, and why it’s important.

There is no guaranteed one-to-one relationship between how many followers you have and how many copies your book will sell. Rather, we all know we respond more to “authenticity” than to a corporate ad campaign. People want to feel a real connection, and publishers will want to know that you, an author, know your audience and how to reach them—not because publishers can’t do their jobs, but because that’s what consumers respond to.

Maybe you only have 2,000 followers, but those followers are engaged and hang on your every word. That’s great. Maybe you’re not on social media, but you have made it your business to develop expertise, you've become an authority on a particular subject, and maybe you get invited to give lectures and panels and talks. That’s also great.

My biggest piece of advice is that you not force yourself to do something that feels artificial. What I recommend instead is thinking, deeply and practically, about who you are writing for. Get to know those people, and have them get to know you, whatever that looks like.

By the time Samantha Irby sold what became We Are Never Meeting in Real Life to Vintage Books, she had, over the course of many years, built a devoted readership with her then blog, “bitches gotta eat.” I’m also thinking of the publication of Dani Shapiro’s memoir, Inheritance, back in 2019. In tandem with the launch of that book, she also released a podcast series called Family Secrets, on which she invited guests to talk about exactly that: their family secrets. The podcast was an enormous success, took on a life of its own, and it’s still going—on season 13, I believe.

No company can artificially engineer those kinds of platforms, which don’t tend to come easily or quickly. So, if you do decide to start a Substack, a TikTok, whatever—don’t do it right before your book goes out on submission, and choose something that feels natural, something you will happily spend hours (and maybe years!) developing.