Last year the Department of Justice won the anti-trust lawsuit against Penguin Random House when it had tried to acquire Simon & Schuster. The financial penalties led PRH to eliminate a good number of people from top executive positions. Not surprisingly, some of those great minds decided there might be a different business model for book publishing worth investing in and have started Authors Equity. Madeline McIntosh (former chief executive of PRH) Don Weisberg (former chief executive of Macmillan) and Nina von Moltke (former president of strategic development at PRH) provide executive leadership for Authors Equity with investments from some big name authors including Louise Penny and Tim Ferriss. Their business model signals an inflection point in publishing. Authors Equity won’t offer a contract with money upfront or guarantee payment, but it promises to provide authors with 70% of the profits in return for an initial investment. Successful authors recognize a better deal than 5% net profit on their books with traditional publishers. Subsidy publishing has gone mainstream. Advances on copyright royalties have dropped so low in recent years that it is untenable for authors to spend a year or two writing a manuscript for a few thousand dollars. Increasingly, agents are unable to sell manuscripts to the top trade publishers who are only acquiring new projects from authors who have previously had blockbuster sales. I now hear traditional publishers referred to as “legacy” publishers. There is a fundamental shift of financial risk from the publisher to the author underway.…

How far should a daughter go to fix a fraught relationship with her mother? Rica Ramos-Keenum examines this question in her forthcoming memoir, Nobody’s Daughter: A Memoir of Healing the Mother Wound, which releases from She Writes Press on May 9. In her early forties and about to remarry, Rica Ramos realizes that starting over could mean leaving her mother behind. She longs to heal the relationship, but her mother still refuses to acknowledge the sexual abuse Rica suffered at the hands of her stepfather, or her own culpability throughout the years. With old traumas resurfacing and a new life unfolding before her, Rica grasps the power of unspoken grief—and the potential to suffer or heal. Will she and her mother ever cross the chasm between them, or are some secrets meant to stay buried? As Rica navigates her options, she faces two ultimate choices: submit to a culture that shames daughters for not honoring their mothers, or muster the courage to go her own way. Offering a bold and lucid look at mother-daughter relationships, Nobody’s Daughter underscores every woman’s right to truth and validation. In addition to Nobody’s Daughter, Rica Ramos-Keenum is the author of Petals of Rain: A Mother’s Memoir. She’s also contributed to several anthologies, including “Art in The Time of Unbearable Crisis” and “Forgiveness is the Hardest Thing.” She’s a former journalist and current mother of two adult sons and one 60 lb. rescue dog that thinks she’s a lapdog. Rica enjoys connecting with readers and…

If you are an author of memoir, then you know the story isn’t entirely about you. It’s about the reader. Taking the “me” out of memoir is important if you seek publication for your story. If you use the pronoun “I” in every sentence you actually create a division between you and the reader. Imagine the difference between these two passages. The trees formed a canopy high above my head. A gentle breeze and the shade provided some relief from the summer heat. In the forest, the birds hid in the lush branches and sang. I walked under a canopy of trees high above my head. I felt relief from the summer heat in the shade with a gentle breeze. In the first, the narrator creates a world with words that the reader can step into and experience for themselves in their imagination. When you read this passage, you feel as though you are there walking through the forest. As a memoir writer, you show the reader what you have experienced or witnessed. The second scenario is too egocentric. Such narrators call attention to themselves. This style of narration excludes readers from the meaning-making process which is what makes this genre so rewarding to readers. Readers want to make their own inferences about the tree canopy, a breeze, shade, and birdsong. The narrator in this second example tells the reader what to think, instead of what to think about. Memoir needs to offer the reader an arm-chair adventure, vicarious experiences,…