Grand Publishers
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Memoir and life writing

You have written the hard part.

A life does not arrive in chapters. Getting it onto a shelf is a different craft from living it — and that is the part we do.

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What a memoir needs

Four things
a life story asks for.

Memoir is the genre most often turned away by trade publishers, and the one most often published badly without one. These are the four places it usually goes wrong.

  • A shape

    Chronology is not structure. An editor's first job on a memoir is finding where the book actually begins — which is almost never where the life did.

  • A voice left intact

    The reason anybody reads a memoir is that a particular person is speaking. Editing that flat is the commonest way to lose the book. Nothing changes in your manuscript without you seeing it and agreeing to it.

  • Care with real people

    Memoir names people who are still alive. We raise it where a passage warrants a second look, so the question is settled before the book prints rather than after.

  • A cover that suits it

    Life writing sits beside biography and history on a shelf. It has to look like it belongs there — not like a novel, and not like a family album.

Memoirs we
have published.

Real books, on sale now. Open any one of them and follow it through to its retail listing.

Cover of The Fathers in my Life by Louise Wynne JonesCover of Grandpa Billy's Book of Life by William H WebsterCover of Indian & Divorced… but it’s ok by Bejal ShahCover of At the Time of Writing This by Charlotte TytlerCover of Reg Dudley's Camping MemoriesCover of In My Happy Place by Vernon SmithCover of Bipolar Sunset by David SummervilleCover of The Rooted Soul by Alan McDonald

The Fathers in my LifeLouise Wynne Jones

How it goes

From manuscript
to shelf.

  1. 01

    You send it

    A sample chapter and a few lines about the book. Not a pitch — we are reading for the writing.

  2. 02

    We read it

    A publisher reads it and calls you. You get a straight answer about whether it is ready and what it would take.

  3. 03

    We agree a plan

    Scope, schedule and cost in writing before anything starts. No stage begins without your sign-off.

  4. 04

    It gets made

    Editorial, design, typesetting, proofs. You see and approve every stage.

  5. 05

    It goes out

    ISBN registered, listed on Amazon, and out to the trade — so it can be ordered in anywhere books are sold.

What our authors say

4.9out of 5Excellent

See all our reviews on Trustpilot

Publishing a memoir
in the UK.

Most memoirs are never going to be commissioned by a trade publisher. That is not a judgement on the writing. A large house acquires perhaps a dozen memoirs a year and nearly all of them arrive with an audience already attached — a public life, a broadcast career, a following. A good book by somebody without one has almost nowhere to go.

What that leaves

Three routes, in practice. You can query agents and wait, which costs nothing but time and can take years. You can self-publish, which is fast and cheap up front, and leaves you doing the editing, the design, the typesetting, the metadata and the distribution yourself. Or you can work with a publisher on a partnership basis, where you fund the publication and the house does the work of making the book and getting it out.

Grand is the third of those. We are selective about what we take on, because a book we cannot make good is a book that will do nothing for either of us.

What to ask anyone

Whoever you end up with, the questions are the same. Who owns the copyright when this is finished. Who owns the ISBN. What exactly is included, in writing, before anything is paid. What every commercial term is, in figures. Whether you can leave, and what happens to your files if you do.

Our answers are on the rights page and the longer questions page, in plain terms, whether or not you ever talk to us.

What we will not tell you

How many copies your memoir will sell. Nobody can, and a publisher who gives you a number is telling you something they do not know. What we will tell you is exactly what gets made, what it costs and when it is finished — and then we do that.

An old notebook lying open on stone, both pages covered in close handwriting.

Memoir questions
we get most.

No. Memoirs run anywhere from around 40,000 words to well over 100,000, and length matters far less than whether the book earns its ending. Tell us the count and we will tell you honestly whether it reads as finished.

Send us a chapter.

A publisher reads it and calls you. If it is not ready, we will tell you that rather than sell you something.

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