Susan Friedmann [00:00:31]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books.
Today, my special guest is Doctor. Amanda Edgar. She's an award-winning author, ghostwriter, book coach, and founder of Page and Podium Press. Amanda has authored 2 nationally award-winning books and ghostwritten many more. She's got a knack for drawing out vulnerable stories and crafting engaging narratives. She aims to help visionary leaders tell their stories, changing the world one reader at a time.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:19]:
I love it. Amanda, what a pleasure it is to have you on the show. And welcome, and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.
Amanda Edgar [00:01:29]:
Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:33]:
So, Mandy, you've got a knack for helping people share their stories of trauma and adversity, and I think that's a really tough thing for people to do because it makes them so vulnerable. But why do you feel that it's important for writers to feel comfortable doing that?
Amanda Edgar [00:01:55]:
Well, I think there's a few reasons. Of course, the main reason is that when we are writing a memoir, but also nonfiction that is based kind of on your lived experience. The way that we really connect with people is not through the specifics of what they went through, you know, they went through a graduate degree or they went through a divorce or they had some kind of a childhood trauma, it's not the specifics of it, it's the way that the feeling of trauma and the overcoming really is the thing that connects us all as humans, all of us are fighting through our own battles and the more specific, the more you can share about what you went through and then pull it through to a larger, more accessible message, the more you're gonna connect with your reader and of course that's what we all want, right? But I think the other piece of this is that I see a real tendency in my work where people know that their story can help people, they know that they can connect with their reader if they share their story, and the fear isn't really about the reader, the fear is about themselves. One thing that I really like to do is encourage my authors to think about what are the things that you really need to unburden for yourself? What are the things that you really need to sit with because they're uncomfortable and they hurt? And what I always find is at the end, you know, we'll have some tears all the time I'll hear, I've never told anybody this story, but at the end there is such a feeling of being cleansed and uplifted and it is such a key part of the healing journey to allow yourself to be vulnerable like that, to allow others to come in and support you and share in your very human experience of suffering and overcoming. There's such a dual purpose here. It's good for our books, but really anytime you're sharing your story, it's so good for you.
Susan Friedmann [00:03:45]:
Yes. I was thinking of that dual purpose that, yes, it gives you some relief that you're unburdening yourself with this story. And then obviously helping the reader, who may have experienced it as well, but doesn't necessarily feel courageous enough to share their own experience with people because I think there's a lot of vulnerability, obviously, in sharing something that's exceptionally personal to people.
Amanda Edgar [00:04:16]:
I think that's right and the other thing that I will add is sometimes it's not even just that your reader doesn't feel brave enough to be vulnerable and tell their story, sometimes your reader doesn't even realize that what they've been through is a trauma. They don't even recognize that they have suffered, that they are being really trapped inside of this shell that we'll go into, you know, when we have been through something really traumatic. One of the things that I really like to talk about is the way that when we name things, when we describe things, that is so empowering. Before I came into this line of work, I was a feminist scholar, and one of the things that I always remember from that time was the story of how the term domestic violence was coined. Because up until the seventies, there was not a term for that, And what did that mean for people, women but also men, who were living in a situation like that to not be able to name their ongoing trauma? The answer is that you can't escape it if you can't name it. Right? If you don't recognize that what is happening to you is something extraordinary, something that is allowing you to find this point of survival and thriving that really is such the center of all of our experience, how can you ever move forward from that? So for those listeners who are working on sharing their story, I would posit that sometimes the most important thing you're doing is just letting other people see their experience through you.
Susan Friedmann [00:05:49]:
Yeah. And sometimes you don't even realize that it is something negative. Let's say that you talk about domestic abuse or verbal abuse, physical abuse in families, and if you grow up with that, you think it's normal. Right. And you don't think that it's different and it's like, well, everybody goes through this.
Amanda Edgar [00:06:12]:
That's exactly right. And then, you know, sometimes it'll be years later, your thirties, forties, fifties and you're in therapy and you start to realize, oh my gosh, that should not have happened to me, and it rattles you, of course, but at the same time, until you get to that point, there's no pathway forward for healing.
Susan Friedmann [00:06:31]:
Yeah. I mean, I know. I mean, I grew up with a verbally abusive father, but he did it thinking about it in hindsight for many reasons that were helpful and then some that were definitely not helpful. But I didn't realize that it was that until, as you say, it was given a label. Uh-huh. So naming it, I think, is really an important aspect. I mean, it takes a lot of courage to share something that's very personal to you and even me sharing what I just shared. I mean, I don't share that with everybody, and here I am, you know, talking about it on a podcast.
Susan Friedmann [00:07:13]:
But what about things that maybe we don't want to or isn't right for us to share? Where's the, sort of, the line that what's acceptable and perhaps what isn't acceptable?
Amanda Edgar [00:07:25]:
Yeah, that is a great question. It is like so many things with sharing your story, it's gonna be personal, it's gonna be a gut thing, but there are a few instances in which I will suggest that an author wait typically is what I'm recommending, think on it a little bit more. One of them is I believe that you need some time to process any trauma before you share it, whether that's in speaking, in a book, in a blog post. Until we have the time to sit with that discomfort and sit with what happened to us and start to allow ourselves to zoom out a little bit, we typically don't have the meaning to make of it. So So I was saying this earlier, right, we have the specifics, we have exactly what happened to us step by step, but until we have the general, the truth of it, what did it mean, the story is not going to have the impact you want it to have. There is nothing worse than sharing a really private, really personal story, and seeing that the person you're talking to or the people that you're talking to don't understand why you're sharing it with them. That piece is up to us as the storyteller to put together what does this mean, how does it relate to others' shared experience, and really why am I telling it? What I find in myself, in my clients, in my friends is that until we have some space, just chronological space, we really are not equipped to put that meaning to the experience. It's just too raw.
Amanda Edgar [00:08:58]:
The first thing is if you have just been through a trauma, sit with it for a bit, talk to people. I'm a huge proponent of therapy, life coaching, whoever you need to talk to, even if it's, you know, a friend or your spouse, but you've gotta work through all of the stuff that happened through from the details to the general so that you're getting from the facts to the truth. The other thing that I always caution people about is be really careful about sharing stories for revenge. Now this takes being really really honest with yourself because often it's you know, well, no I want to help people. Well, if you dig down further, are you sure that what you want to do is help people and not that you want to be vindicated? This is a totally normal response to any kind of trauma or hardship is that we want to point our finger, we want to defend ourselves, and I hate this about the traumatic experience, but oftentimes we come out of a trauma with really intense misplaced shame. And I don't want anybody to hear me saying that you know you deserved anything that happened to you, I don't believe that at all, but from my own experience I was a survivor of narcissistic abuse for many years. When you come out of it, you really want to defend yourself. Right? You really want to say, listen to what this person did.
Amanda Edgar [00:10:23]:
Let me give you the whole laundry list, and I know from myself that there was a part of me that wanted to share that stuff because I wanted everyone to know how terrible of a person he was, but that isn't really ours to share. What is ours to share is how those actions and those experiences shaped who we are and how they taught us something about how to live a rich full life and how they taught us something about how to connect with each other and how they taught us to see the world in a new way that helped us to grow. If there is any part of you that is really looking for finger pointing or revenge or this defensiveness that again I think is a really natural part of living through a trauma, again, I would wait. And sometimes people will say oh well I'm afraid of getting sued, I think that's a reasonable fear too, but what I usually find is underlying it is a real sense of being conflicted and I think it's that usually people know that that's actually not gonna be as rewarding as you think, you know? You can point your finger at your abuser and people are going to doubt you and there's going to be all kinds of things that happen. It's not going to have that emotional payoff that we want anyway, but once the story is out there, it's out there. Those are the two instances where I would say sit with your story, make sure that you have the full meaning, and make sure that you are framing it in your mind and in your heart as being about you rather than about this villain or this other person that you were interacting with.
Susan Friedmann [00:12:00]:
That's really helpful. I'd never thought of it from that standpoint, even though I know, you know, just internally, things that happen, and you're like, Oh my goodness, I wanna get my revenge on that person. But in terms of the retelling it, either verbally or in a written form, that's very poignant, yeah, to remember that. What are the first steps then an author should take when writing about trauma? Now, I know you said just think about it in terms of, is it revenge? But are there some other things that you need to go through before you actually begin this process?
Amanda Edgar [00:12:40]:
Yeah. Absolutely. The first thing is I'm a big proponent of journaling. All my clients will tell you that. And to me, one of the very first steps that you need to take is just do some journaling. Just get your ideas out. And I know you have writers that listen so I want to be really clear that I'm not saying, you know, hand write your scenes. I pull this exercise out of the excellent Julia Cameron book The Artist's Way which I highly recommend everybody pick up, but in The Artist's Way, she has an exercise called your morning pages and essentially when you wake up, before you do anything else, she asks you to long hand write 3 pages worth of just whatever comes to your mind.
Amanda Edgar [00:13:22]:
And it can be things like, ugh, I don't wanna do this. You can just write that over and over if you want to. But what happens is that we start to kind of clear out the things that are hanging out in our subconscious. You will wake up kind of feeling like your day is starting, but of course our brains have been working all night long, right? So the more we can kind of get up, just start dumping stuff onto the page, the more our brains are really ready to process the connections that they want to make, but that we don't often give them space to make. Starting with those morning pages is a great, great way to start to see the connections and by the way, truly hand write it because we know from neuroscience that that movement of your hand is actually quite healing. If you've been through a trauma, so you're thinking with your brain, you're writing with your hand, and it has a a really nice effect that those two things work together.
Susan Friedmann [00:14:17]:
I did that for one incident for myself, and I know that it's a fabulous exercise. So yes, thank you for that reminder because I'd forgotten that and I remember doing it and each day knowing that it was like an onion, you know, another layer going through. And it ended off that I was like, well, what are the lessons that I'm learning from this particular incident?
Amanda Edgar [00:14:45]:
That's exactly right and I think too one thing that is so common is that a lot of us are so mean to ourselves. I hate it, I am too, you know, is that you almost don't even notice that throughout the day, you know, there are really terrible things that we're saying to ourselves like, oh, of course you did that, you're so stupid, or oh my gosh, I messed that up again, what's wrong with me? We're saying these things in our head, and I find that when I do my morning pages, stuff like that will come out on the page, but I notice it because I wrote it down. It's also even sometimes right, oh my gosh, where did that come from? And it gives you a chance to pause a bit and reframe how you're thinking about that situation or the idea or whatever you put down in a much more intentional way, and I find that that is also just generally helpful for anyone that's trying to put themselves out in the public eye, right. It's scary enough if you aren't spending all of your free time telling yourself that you aren't worthy of being in the public sphere, right? So the more we can shift the way that we talk to ourselves, absolutely the better for anything book writing or marketing.
Susan Friedmann [00:15:54]:
Yeah. And that's so healthy. I know that how it helped me go through this particular traumatic situation. And even to the point, as I said, when it's like, okay. Now let's turn this around, and how can we make it positive? And lessons learned, How can I avoid this happening again, let's say? Yeah. Let's talk about challenges. What are some of the common challenges that authors face when writing about trauma or adversity?
Amanda Edgar [00:16:26]:
Well, I think the big thing is, I alluded to this earlier, we really have this instinct to make sure that everyone sees that it wasn't our fault and that is really not necessary and what often happens when we get at that point with our trauma where we're feeling still very defensive, we haven't really fully processed it, is we can end up with just pages that are both very vague, just sort of many many things that happen and it's just you know a sentence or 2, and it can read a little bit like a laundry list, we're just dumping all of these pieces of evidence out. The thing that I always encourage people to think about, this is a carryover from when I was a scholar, is if we can think of exemplars, that's the way to go. And an exemplar is just simply if we take a bucket of experiences and pull out one specific moment that can represent all of those, we can make our writing so much more vivid, we can make our speaking much much more engaging, and also we can actually get stuff on the page. Because the more we're trying to list every single thing we've experienced, the less we can find the end of the line, the more that our work will just multiply on itself. I think the big thing is really being very clear with yourself about what it is you're trying to communicate.
Susan Friedmann [00:17:49]:
That's really interesting. And I think that's got to be really challenging to be able to do that. Can you give us an example of what that might, you know, look like?
Amanda Edgar [00:18:00]:
Yeah absolutely, well and I'll give you a, this is just a word framing tool that we use in my program, it's called the memoir method. It's for women who are writing their memoirs, we take them all the way through the idea, all the way through the publishing process, but in that program we talk about the core topic and the key message and we ask that all of the women in our program differentiate between those two things. So the core topic is just what you're writing about. I'm writing about my childhood trauma, I'm writing about my divorce, I'm writing about my son having cancer. What is the topic, what's the thing that's happening? That's important, but just as important in memoir is that you have a key message. What do you want the reader to learn? That can be a little bit more challenging because it does require us to zoom out a bit. I'll use for an example one of our authors, Victor James Hill, and his book is called The Ignorant Man's Son, it's excellent, and what Victor was writing about was moving through this time in the suburbs of Detroit where he lived in the housing projects and really had been this beautiful place where people took great pride in their lawns and their gardens and everyone was a community through to into the 80s 90s when drug dealers started to come into the area and a lot of the children were getting sucked into dealing drugs, doing drugs. He was a young adult at that time and had been sucked into some stuff that he wasn't very proud of and what happened was that he was able to kind of turn his life around, really pour into the children of the community.
Amanda Edgar [00:19:42]:
As we talked, as we were shaping this book and figuring out what he wanted this book to be, one of the themes that kept coming up was fatherhood. Now Victor doesn't have any children of his own, so it's not about him being literally a father, but when we started thinking, you know, his childhood, he really had always wanted to have a dad in his life and his dad was, you know, kind of in and out and not really close to him. When he went through, you know, working with the children in the projects and helping them, he did a sports program so they had something to invest in that wasn't drugs. Well he was kind of a father figure to them too, and then all the way through to in the end the way that the book ends is that he ends up having to take in his sister's children after she's addicted to drugs. It kind of brings it full circle. So the core topic is that he founded these social programs in Detroit. That's easy enough to say. The key message takes a little bit more thinking, and what we landed on was that Victor had always wanted a father, but what it turned out was he needed to find his purpose in mentoring others.
Amanda Edgar [00:20:44]:
That's something then that many many people can connect to, right? We're all trying to figure out our purpose, most of us will find it through connecting with or helping others. What you do when you do separate out your core topic and your key message is you're really expanding the reach of your story and the reach of your book because you're making it something that many more people can relate to than if all you're talking about is just that very specific core.
Susan Friedmann [00:21:11]:
Oh, that was a wonderful example. Thank you for sharing that. That was perfect. Amanda, what about sharing stories of others? You know, you mentioned about Victor and his sister. What about sharing somebody else's story? How does that work?
Amanda Edgar [00:21:29]:
Well, this can be really touchy, and the thing to remember, really any storytelling genre, but memoir in particular, you really are never only telling your story. As careful as we want to be, and I mentioned this earlier when we were kind of thinking of your memoir as villain, as careful as we wanna be to take ownership over the story to make the story about us, your story undoubtedly has many other people moving and shaking and living their lives around you. Always you are pulling your community in and Victor's case I think is really poignant because Victor's sister got sucked into this crack cocaine epidemic when it was huge. Many, many people got sucked into this situation and it was a really terrible time. Now one thing was that Victor was able to share what his experience of seeing her sink into that place, what that was like, that's such comfort certainly for people who are experiencing that same thing. But at the same time his sister has recovered, she's just trying to live her life now. So there was some question as we were going through this, how much detail do we need to share? There's one scene in particular in that book where she's been living in his house and he overhears some sounds and what's happening is that his sister has been prostituting herself for drugs and he walks in and catches them. We talked a lot about that scene and whether that scene should should stay in the book.
Amanda Edgar [00:22:56]:
I will never push an author one way or another. I'll only give a framework to think about it, but what he said I thought made so much sense. He came back and he said, I sat her down and I told her what I wanted to share and I told her why I wanted to share it, which is to help other people, And what they came to together was that including her story in that way allowed her to also share this bit of wisdom and this hard fought, hard won knowledge so that she was able to be involved not only in the book, but that she was able to, you know, join him at speaking engagements and help kind of share her story as well. And that's an extreme example. Oftentimes, we're not bringing people so literally into our promotional efforts or our book efforts, but I do find that when authors reach out to their friends and family members who are in the book, oftentimes those folks will become your biggest cheerleaders. There's really nothing to be lost, right? If you're gonna publish it with their story, I assume you're gonna do it either way. And you might as well know what their reaction's gonna be in a 1 on 1 setting where you can, you know, finesse or think about how you wanna react to that rather than just releasing the book and crossing your fingers.
Susan Friedmann [00:24:08]:
Now what about the permission side of it? How do you cover your ass, so to speak? Being very crude here. But, you know, from a litigious standpoint, you know, we live in this society now that any excuse. So, but one minute, they might be okay with it. And then once the book is out there, they've been revealed to the world, and maybe decide, I don't like this.
Amanda Edgar [00:24:35]:
Yeah. Well, I will say, you know, I am not a lawyer, so I I never want to give any kind of legal advice and I'm not giving legal advice here. One thing to keep in mind is that there are very different types of stories that we are sharing. If you are talking about your literal abuser, that is a time when you probably need a literary lawyer who is gonna understand well what's going on, is gonna be able to advise you. I've had many many clients go this route and it can be very helpful even through the writing of the book to just check-in with somebody who's on that side. More though, I would really encourage thinking about the people that probably aren't going to sue you, but who play a role in your story, and I'll give another example here of what I mean. We had a book by Wendy Davis, she's a politician, the book is called The Fight You Don't See. It's excellent, it's a political memoir.
Amanda Edgar [00:25:28]:
She was very, very cognizant of going to the different people that she was describing in the book and making sure that not only, you know, that they were okay with it, that really more of her purpose was, hey, did I get this wrong? Is there anything I'm forgetting or I'm missing or is there context that you wanna share with me that I didn't have at the time? That didn't necessarily mean she was going to make changes and in fact there were a few people that she met with, you know, namely the person that was running against her who raised some eyebrows, had some questions, but one thing that she mentioned to me was that as she was doing that, she learned so much more about the political climate that she had survived. And she had a great deal of political trauma based on some of the things that I won't spoil, go get this book, it's excellent, but talking to those other folks more than, you know, getting the permission, more than kind of avoiding a lawsuit, talking to those folks really helped her understand her story even better. That's a bit of a non answer to your question about legal ramifications. Truly, I hope, you know, if you are writing any kind of a risky memoir where someone is going to be held up as a real true villain, a lawyer is never a bad idea. But most of the time, the people that are in our story are not being framed in such a way that a lawsuit would be, you know, their go to response. It typically is gonna be more of a relational loss, and that's why I would say, go talk to people, see what you can learn. Maybe you'll even learn more about your own story, and I think oftentimes we're surprised that people are okay with you sharing what happened as long as it really is what happened.
Susan Friedmann [00:27:04]:
Yeah, I love that. And what went through my mind, and I know, obviously, it doesn't necessarily fit the memoir genre, but the idea of writing the story in the 3rd person. That even though it's your experience, but you're not writing it as it happened to me, but it happened to, you know, somebody else.
Amanda Edgar [00:27:28]:
Sure. You're right. This does make sense if you're writing a leadership book or self help and you want to kind of use yourself as an anecdote effectively. I think to me it is just really what an author is comfortable with and I find, you know, when we're doing a book proposal for example, oftentimes your book proposal should be in 3rd person. Either people are much more comfortable writing it in 3rd person. It gives them that little bit of space, a little bit of distance, and they feel like, you know, they can even maybe shape the story a little bit if it's an anecdote, just an example, more than they maybe would feel that they could in first person, or they feel incredibly awkward writing about themselves that way. That's I feel that way when I try to write myself, you know, my bios and whatnot. I feel very, very awkward about that.
Amanda Edgar [00:28:14]:
I think the takeaway really has to just be you've got to know yourself. You've got to know what you're trying to do, you've got to know how you best connect with people whether they're, you know, in your media audience, your speaking audience, or your book audience. How do you best connect? Is it by being just there, no mask, being open, connecting? Then I think first person is probably more appropriate. Is it more of an intellectual, philosophical, there is a little bit of distance between you and the message as it stands, in which case that I, first person language, might even feel weird to your reader. But I think it's about understanding what is your brand, what is your strategy, and what is your audience expecting, and matching that.
Susan Friedmann [00:29:01]:
Yeah. What comes to mind, Amanda, is that when I was hired by a PR company many years ago in Birmingham, England, and the first thing I had to do was to write a press release, a my own press release. And I agonized over that. I was like, somebody else write it. I'll write yours. You write mine. Writing something about yourself, well, for me, it was really challenging. So, yes, I hear what you're saying there.
Amanda Edgar [00:29:29]:
Absolutely.
Susan Friedmann [00:29:31]:
It's a great time for you to share with our listeners how they can get in touch with you, find out more about your memoir message, or method rather, and how can they do that, Amanda?
Amanda Edgar [00:29:46]:
Yeah. Well, I would encourage everybody to check out our website, PageAndPodium.com. We also have a YouTube channel, so I put out a weekly video that is some kind of advice, usually to do with memoir, always to to do with book writing and publishing, but one thing I do wanna offer to your listeners especially if, you know, you've got your first book but you're thinking maybe you want your second to be a memoir or, you know, a second memoir and you want to make things a little bit more streamlined, we did put out a freebie that I'm really proud of. It's called the memoir method checklist and it has every single step with timelines that you need to do to go from your seed of an idea to the finished book. So you can download that for free at paigeandpodium.com/checklist. I would just encourage everybody go grab that checklist and if nothing else let that propel you forward to the second book project. I know it can be difficult to get into the second one, but I think it's a such a great rewarding thing to go through the process a second time. And if you haven't been through it, now is the time.
Amanda Edgar [00:30:47]:
Go grab that checklist.
Susan Friedmann [00:30:48]:
I love it. That's great and very generous. Thank you. I'm gonna download that. I think that's a great, you know, lead magnet. I know you've shared so much with us, but if you were to leave our listeners with a golden nugget, what would that be?
Amanda Edgar [00:31:04]:
One thing I want to always make sure people are thinking about is the truth versus the facts. And I've alluded to this a bit, but I think it's worth saying that the truth is always more important than the facts in memoir, but I think in general as well. And all I mean by that is when you're thinking of how to tell your story, there is a delicate balance between the very specific facts of what happened to you, the step-by-step, play-by-play, and the larger meaning of that experience, the truth of it, what's going to feel true to you and feel true to your reader and I always just want to encourage people remember that the truth is what connects us. The facts are important for sharing too, but it's the truth that really makes your book change the world.
Susan Friedmann [00:31:51]:
Mhmm. The truth from the emotional standpoint that you really feel it. I think that's when it's going to make the impact.
Amanda Edgar [00:31:59]:
Exactly right.
Susan Friedmann [00:32:00]:
Good. Oh, this has been eye-opening. I love it. Thank you so, so much for sharing your wisdom. Listeners, I know you're going to need to listen to this episode over and over again because Amanda has shared so many pearls of wisdom, so please do that.
And you know the drill. If your book isn't selling the way you want it or expect it to, let's you and I jump on a quick call and brainstorm ways you can ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got a return that you were hoping for. So go to BookMarketingBrainstorm.com to schedule your free call.
Susan Friedmann [00:32:43]:
And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparked some ideas you can use to sell more books. And until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.
