How I Turned My Blog Into A Book: Lara Lillibridge
I won’t lie, I started my Only Mama blog with the hopes of turning it into a book someday. I read mommy bloggers religiously. I was dying to add to the conversation about mothering—not just on the internet, but in paper as well.
I blogged heavily for the first year, but when I went back to college my blog dwindled to nothing. I had to stop blogging for a while to develop my writing voice—to stop seeing topics as 800-1000 word snippets but as more fully developed essays.
I started an MFA program, and my advisor said, “when your blog voice and your essay voice merge, you will have found your authentic writing voice.” Good luck with that, I thought, because my two writing voices were pretty disparate. Part of the joy of blogging was writing in fragments or starting sentences with the word “but.”
After I abandoned my blog entirely I focused on writing my first memoir, Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home. I went to a writer’s conference, HippoCamp, where I pitched Girlish (unsuccessfully) to both an agent and a big-5 editor. During that conference, an editor from Skyhorse Publishing talked about her manuscript wish list. Specifically, she wanted books that taught things like aroma therapy or that contained visual elements such as nature photography. She asked us to consider, “what can people do with your book?”
Throw them at people, was my first thought, though of course I didn’t say that aloud. Use them for blocks, or to hold up a couch that is missing a foot, like we did in college. When I stopped being facetious, I realized that I actually could make my blog into a how-to (or how-not-to) reference book/memoir complete with mediocre recipes. I mean, there are tons of books with good recipes, but not that many books that explain how to fake your way through life with a microwave.
As I wallpapered the internet with queries for Girlish I put together my blog-book. I figured that 1/3 of my book could be old blogs but the rest should be new or extensively revised material. After all, why should someone buy my book if they can read it in its entirety for free?
I looked at my stats and determined my top blog entries and started with them. Then I looked for blogs that could be expanded or combined into deeper chapters. At this point, several years had gone by since I had written the original entries, so I had some catching up to do. I wrote all new chapters of what had happened since I stopped blogging regularly and filled in all the gaps in-between old blogs to form a cohesive arc.
During this time, Skyhorse signed Girlish with an option for book two. I excitedly told them about Mama, Mama, Only Mama, and they were interested but wanted to wait to see how Girlish sold. I had to set it aside for nearly a year, which felt like a terrible kind of torture, but turned out to be the best thing for the book.
Originally, Only Mama was light and fluffy. It was my catharsis from the emotional ravaging of writing my first memoir. But after publishing Girlish, I realized funny and sweet didn’t feel honest. Readers of the first memoir might feel betrayed by the flippant tone of the second. I’d already written about the dirty dishes in the sink, but now I needed to add the emotional messiness of coming to terms with who I was as a woman after becoming being a mother.
I looked at all the material I generated for my Master’s thesis that had not already been consumed by Girlish and blended it in to Only Mama. This took quite a bit of reworking. The voices of the two projects were totally different. I couldn’t just mash them together and call it a day. My blogs favored direct language and sentence fragments. My essays were rife with complex sentences and flowery prose.
When Skyhorse was ready to hear my pitch, Only Mama had matured from my original concept. It was still about 30% original blogs, but the rest of the content had changed. It was more honest, had a clearer arc, and I only included recipes that made sense at least tangentially.
I offered to take the old blogs down in anticipation of the release of Only Mama, but Skyhorse didn’t think that was necessary. Instead, they formatted the page to look like you were reading my blog on a cell phone:
Side note: I recently took a class from Daniel Menaker, former editor at The New Yorker and Editor-in-Chief at Random House. He said that editors routinely comb the internet in search of blogs that can be easily turned into books. So if you are a blogger, there is still plenty of interest in blog-books!
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Lara Lillibridge is the author of Mama, Mama, Only Mama (Skyhorse, 2019), Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home (Skyhorse, 2018). She recently compiled and edited an
anthology, Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility (forthcoming Cynren Press, 2019) with co-editor Andrea Fekete. Lara Lillibridge is a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. In 2016 she won Slippery Elm Literary Journal’s Prose Contest, and The American Literary Review’s Contest in Nonfiction. She is a reader for Hippocampus Magazine and was selected to judge AWP’s Intro Journals Award for 2019. Read some of her work in Ms. Magazine, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Advocate, Hippocampus, Luna Luna and Salon.
MAMA, MAMA, ONLY MAMA: An Irreverent Guide for the Newly Single Parent―From Divorce and Dating to Cooking and Crafting, All While Raising the Kids and Maintaining Your Own Sanity (Sort Of), Lara Lillibridge
A Single Mom Shares Her Inspiring and Funny Tales of Parenting, Full of Love, Advice, and Humor
Being a single mother means relaxing your cleanliness standards. A lot. Being a single mother means missing your kids like crazy when your ex has them, only to want to give them back ten minutes after they come home. Being a single mother means accepting sleep deprivation as a natural state. Being a single mother means hauling a toddler, a baby, and a diaper bag while wearing high heels and a cute skirt, because you never know when you’ll meet someone. Being a single mother means finding out you are stronger than you ever knew was possible.
Since birth, Lara Lillibridge’s children wanted, “Mama, Mama, only Mama!” whether they were tired or just woke up from a nap—whether they were starving or had just finished a bowl of goldfish crackers. Over ten years later, not much has changed. Between hilarious episodes and candid stories, Lillibridge offers the bits of advice and enlightenment she’s gained along the way and never fails to commiserate on the many challenges that come with raising children in a non-nuclear family. This creative, touching memoir will resonate with single moms everywhere, whether solo parenting is new territory or well-trodden ground for them.
Written in the style of a diary with blogs, articles and recipes tucked between the pages, Mama, Mama, Only Mama follows Lillibridge and her two children, Big Pants and Tiny Pants, out of divorce, through six years of single parenting, and into the family blender with a quasi-stepfather called SigO. Complete with highly useful recipes such as congealed s’more stew, recycled snack candy bars, instant oatmeal cookies and a fine chicken casserole that didn’t pass Tiny Pants’s “lick test,” Lillibridge grows into her role as mother, finds true love, and comes to terms with her ex-husband.
BUY THE BOOK HERE
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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