Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

"The Memoirists Collective is a group of four established, recently published memoirists who met online through MySpace.com, and have banded together to start a revolution in the world of book promotion, through collaboration instead of competition."

If this writing site had a motto, I'd steal that motto.  I work hard to connect writers with other writers, readers with writers, and readers with readers.

Today, our special guest is Josh Kilmer-Purcell, a writer who built a career around that motto as he co-founded a writing group called The Memoirists Collective to promote his book, I Am Not Myself These Days.

Welcome my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions.  In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog: 
Your MySpace page and readings are always packed with supportive readers. How did you build the Memoir Collective community? Any advice for fledgling writers looking to build online communities?

Josh Kilmer-Purcell:
I believe the memoirist collective community has been building because of the positive vibes of the original four members. (Danielle Trussoni, Maria Dahvana Headley, Hillary Carlip, and me.) Continue reading...

We all had books launching at roughly the same time, and somehow fell into each others' lives through nothing more than fate. We adore each other.  

None of us has an ego, which is pretty rare in a creative community. There is no competition. We felt so lucky to have the success we were experiencing individually, and we thought that by working together, we could share the love even more. I know that sounds all very California, but it's true.

And because we were all pretty good at drumming up publicity for our own work, we thought that we could apply that hucksterism to pull together a larger community. And it worked. A few contests and press releases later, we had a pretty sizable collective of established, as well as yet-to-be published writers. the challenge is finding time to keep it going.

We're hoping, this spring, to reformulate it a bit to include more user generated content. so that it's not all reliant on the four of us... Because we suck at organization. And we have A.D.D. And we can't find an intern cute enough.