By Scott Lorenz
Westwind Book Marketing

Biographies and memoirs are commonly confused, both telling personal stories about an individual’s life. However, there is a distinct difference, and this plays an important role in the purpose of the book and how it is marketed. Let’s take a look at both!

Biography

A biography is a nonfiction account of a person’s entire life. It includes key events that shaped them as a person, as well as information about their relationships, work, education, and defining character traits. Biographies can be written about both people who have passed or people who are alive today. Sometimes, biographies are written by the subject themself, and this is known as an autobiography.

The information presented in a biography is objective and factual, often taken from first-hand accounts such as interviews, letters, diaries, newspapers, and more. Biographies are often written in the third person. The main goal of a biography is to present a fact-based record of someone’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Here are some examples of well-known biographies. All of these extend over their subjects’ entire lives and come from reliable sources.

• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson: “Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries.”
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot: “Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?”
• Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges: “This New York Times bestselling biography of the founder of computer science, with a new preface by the author that addresses Turing’s royal pardon in 2013, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life.”
• Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera: “This engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences.”
• Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted by Andrew Wilson: “Drawing on exclusive interviews with friends and lovers who have never spoken openly about Plath before and using previously unavailable archives and papers, this is the first book to focus on the early life of the twentieth century’s most popular and enduring female poet.”

Memoir

A memoir is a story of a person’s life as told by that person. Unlike an autobiography, a memoir centers on emotion and reflection rather than a timeline. Memoirs tend to be limited to a specific time or experience. Memoirs generally fit into one of the following structures: flashback, chronological, themed, or overcoming a struggle.

Memoirs come directly from the source and don’t take an objective approach, since they focus on how the author perceived a situation or event. They are written from a first-person point of view. Memoirs take aspects of fiction novels as well, as they include scenes, dialogue, and an engaging narrative. The main goal of a memoir is for an author to explore a specific theme or situation in their life in an emotion-based way.

Here are some examples of memoirs. Each one focuses on a theme or event that had a profound impact on the author’s life.

• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou: “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.”
• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer: “A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that ‘suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down.’ He was wrong. By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons and lay to rest some of the painful questions that still surround the event.”
• Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert: “This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and set out to explore three different aspects of her nature, against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.”
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: “This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the ’weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness, about marriage and children and memory, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.’”
• Night by Elie Wiesel: “Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.”

Why does this distinction matter?

Websites like Amazon categorize biographies and memoirs into the same section, so why should they be marketed differently? In a nutshell, biographies and memoirs hold different purposes for readers. A person researching an individual will likely prefer the fact-based biography, while someone looking for a relatable story will gravitate towards a memoir. Therefore, books should be marketed as such to reach their intended audience.

When marketing biographies, focus on the factual aspects. Highlight the first-hand sources, such as photos or interviews. Emphasize what your book offers that a source like Wikipedia does not.

When marketing memoirs, use the emotional aspects to your advantage. Many memoirs focus on childhood events, marriage, divorce, or other life events that readers can relate to. Memoirs can be marketed similarly to fiction novels, although the non-fiction aspect sets them apart as unique stories.

The Bottom Line: Biographies are factual accounts of an individual’s entire life, while memoirs focus on the emotional aspects of a specific event or theme in the author’s life.

About Book Publicist Scott Lorenz

Book publicist Scott Lorenz is President of Westwind Communications, a public relations and marketing firm that has a special knack for working with authors to help them get all the publicity they deserve and more. Lorenz works with bestselling authors and self-published authors promoting all types of books, whether it’s their first book or their 15th book. He’s handled publicity for books by CEOs, CIA Officers, Navy SEALS, Homemakers, Fitness Gurus, Doctors, Lawyers and Adventurers. His clients have been featured by Good Morning America, FOX & Friends, CNN, ABC News, New York Times, Nightline, TIME, PBS, LA Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Woman’s World, & Howard Stern to name a few.

Learn more about Westwind Book Marketing at https://www.WestwindBookMarketing.com or contact Lorenz at [email protected] or 734-667-2090. Follow Lorenz on Twitter @aBookPublicist. Want help titling a book? Check out Scott Lorenz’s new award-winning, bestselling book: Book Title Generator- A Proven System in Naming Your Book www.BookTitleGenerator.net.