Category: Announcements

Writing the Six-Word Hawaii Memoir

Ready to flex those memoir-writing muscles?

SixWordMemoirGiveaway

To celebrate the release of Writing the Hawai‘i Memoir: Advice and Exercises to Help You Tell Your Story by Darien Gee, we’re giving away three sets of memoir books, including the new how-to guide, plus a 15% discount credit on a Legacy Isle Publishing package. All you have to do to enter is share your own Six-Word Memoir®. See the end of the post for complete details.

The Six-Word Memoir® is the brainchild of SMITH Magazine. The goal is simple: Write your memoir in exactly six words, no more, no less. You can’t break up compound words but you can play with contractions (“do not” = two words, “don’t” = one word). Their tagline sums it up: One life. Six words. What’s yours?TM

Here are some examples shared in Writing the Hawai‘i Memoir:

“Born on O‘ahu, raised on Hawai‘i.” (Kai Ibana)
“Got hit, life bit, rage quit.” (Taran Takahashi)
“I live clean and surf mean.” (Kamuela Spencer-Herring)
“All my scars are my stories.” (Ryan Hooley)
“Roping wild cattle is a battle.” (Levi Higa)
“He loved me but left anyway.” (Elsbeth McKeen)

And here are a few written and shared by visitors to our booth at the Hawaii Book & Music Festival:

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Here’s how to enter:

  • Post your own Six Word Memoir in a comment below. Your memoir MUST be six words, exactly.
  • Additional entries: Post a DIFFERENT memoir on our Legacy Isle Publishing Facebook Page and/or on Twitter (don’t forget to tag us @LegacyIsle). Memoirs submitted for each channel must be unique. Duplicate entries will be discarded. You may enter once per channel (blog comment, Facebook, Twitter).
  • Each memoir submitted is entered in our drawing for one of three prize packages to be given away.
  • Entries must be submitted by July 15, 2014. DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JULY 31, 2014!
  • Legacy Isle Publishing is not responsible for misdirected or improperly tagged entries.
  • Open to U.S. residents only.

Each prize package consists of:

The Beginnings of Legacy Isle Publishing

Legacy Isle Publishing is a division of Watermark Publishing devoted to providing self-publishing services for aspiring non-fiction authors — particularly in the personal memoir, business biography and family history genres.

At Watermark, we began to receive so many inquiries from clients interested in self-financing their own book projects, we came to realize that we were well-positioned to offer these services as a regular part of our business, not just one-off clients. And so, Legacy Isle Publishing was born.

Not every book is meant for the traditional publishing route, in which a publisher takes on all the financial, production and promotional responsibilities. It doesn’t mean it’s a “bad book.”

Many of those who approached us for help had wonderful stories — but the realistic audience was only a few hundred readers. In other cases, clients were looking to share their business knowledge or the background of their founder — the potential audience was in the thousands, but it would take a long time to get there, would require a lot of dedicated effort, and the readership for these books wouldn’t be found browsing in the bookstore. And still others had no interest in selling their book on the public market — “I just want something nicely done that I can pass on to my children,” they said.

Before establishing Legacy Isle, we turned away several of these potential clients; others found the pricing too high and the quantity of copies included in the proposal too numerous. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what our potential clients were looking for in a finished book —most of them didn’t know what they wanted, or where to start — and assembling each job quote piecemeal.

We have, since then, fine-tuned our offerings to meet the most commonly requested formats and options. The packages we now offer are the most economical and efficient options.

If you have a personal memoir or family history that you would like preserved for future generations; the story of your company’s founder that you’d like to present to potential clients to help them understand how you conduct business; industry expertise that you’d like to present professionally and offer for sale…we can help!