Golub lies at the other end of the spectrum: He spent two years producing Kaddishel. “I knew from the beginning it would be challenging, but we wanted the book to be held to a very high standard; we wanted it to be a serious book . . . with historical research from archives in Poland and Israel, with professional translations and fact-checking and lots of interviews with my father’s contemporaries.” Golub involved Axelson-Berry from the outset to conduct much of the research and fact-checking. “My experience is that unless you are extraordinarily disciplined or have lots of free time, it would not be possible to do a book like this by oneself,” Golub says.The cost of producing the manuscript (not a book, just a manuscript) for a high-end personal memoir ranges from $20,000 to $50,000 for, say, 35,000 to 75,000 words. The final figure depends on the extent of input from the author and how much research must be done by others. Printing, binding, illustrations, translations and indexing add to the costs. Some ghostwriting organizations have managed projects topping $150,000, including elegant typesetting and top-quality binding. Writing the book
is almost like I’m back in that period again. I almost get angry all over again.” |
Most service providers expect payment in some variation of pay-as-you-go: interview, pay; research, pay; first draft, pay. “We act as a firewall between the author and the writer/editor,” Leichman says. “We have two sets of contracts: one with the editor/writer, one with the client/author. We pay the editor or author stage by stage; the client pays The Floating Gallery only when he or she approves each stage of the project.”
Many affluent individuals, while recognizing the value of reminiscing about family lore and passing on ancestral traditions, seem to shy away from the personal memoir. Their stories, they deem, could never fill hundreds of book pages or a dozen megabytes on a DVD. But they are probably mistaken. Even if the chronicler never performed heroic service in World War II or created a mighty business empire, there are pearls of wisdom and insight that might be useful to future generations. If nothing else, consider the occasions when a private memoir, after languishing in obscurity for generations, is discovered by a historian or biographer. Suddenly it throws light on an individual, an event or an entire era.
The staff of The New Yorker magazine recently read, posthumously, the private memoir of one of their longtime editors, Gardner Botsford, titled Life of Privilege, Mostly. Botsford’s colleagues held him in high esteem, but he remained rather unobtrusive throughout his career. Now his coworkers and friends have been reading about a very different Botsford: rich kid growing up with a staff of five live-in servants, intelligence operative during World War II and combat hero awarded various medals, including the Croix de Guerre.
Be warned, however, that memoir writing can be habit forming. Bernstein is working on a new book of curious and amusing anecdotes from Wall Street. When Smart sent his manuscript for Indian Summer to a professional editor, she told him that he had two books in there, one on the Smarts, one on horses. Now the former CEO is engrossed in volume one of what he anticipates will be a three-part project on horses and their role in war, industry, sport and society.
Illustration by Tony Fox. British-born Ian Keown has written on a variety of topics for Gourmet, the Los Angeles Times, Departures and other publications; he has also authored a dozen guidebooks. iankeown@aol.com
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