Rachel Shukert on Her Lonely Planet Memoir Strategy

In a bookselling world filled with memoirs, it requires some ingenuity and online work to make your work stand out from the pack.

Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was author Rachel Shukert, talking about her newly released memoir, Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour. Shukert shared advice for aspiring memoirists about creating a unique book and writing frankly about one’s personal life.

Here’s an excerpt, as the author explained how she will use CafePress to promote her book: “I’m designing a CafePress site with themed merchandise–which is honestly more of a stunt than I think anybody will buy it. But I think it could be funny … there were a lot of funny phrases and things and thoughts I had in the book that I thought would be funny merchandise … there will be tote bags and buttons and underpants that will somehow reference funny scenes in the book.”

Shukert concluded, explaining why she included inter-textual items like badges, boxes, and a photo in her memoir: “It’s important to keep reinventing the [memoir] form–because there is only so much you can do when you are in the confines of things that already happened to you… I had this idea of making it like a travel book, in a sense. That’s what I always loved about the Lonely Planet books–when there’s that little box that tells you something really odd over to the side. ‘By the way, 17 witches were burned on this spot where this bed and breakfast is now.’ I wanted to see how I could weave that into a fairly traditional narrative.”

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