What next?
Can't be bothered with publishers? Mark Le Fanu explains how to take your publishing career into your own hands
Mark Le Fanu writing in The Guardian,

A conventional publisher will edit, design and print your book. Warehousing, marketing, distribution, selling, and chasing payments (not to mention paying you royalties) will all be down to your publisher. Self-publishers take on all these tasks themselves. If copies sell, you will make much more money per sale than you would as the author alone. But you may need to invest - and risk - a substantial sum and must be prepared to spend a great deal of time and energy dealing with the business aspects, not least selling.

If you want to provide a limited number of attractive copies for friends and relations, it may well be best to pay a good local printer to produce copies to your specifications. A more conventional print-run of, say, 750 copies will cost a few thousand pounds. However, these days much self-publishing is done using print-on-demand (or POD), whereby the company you deal with produces single copies in response to firm orders. You will be expected to pay for specific services such as producing promotional materials and managing typesetting, but that should be all. You as the author should retain all rights. POD books tend not to be stocked by bookshops, which generally work on sale-or-return.

Mark Le Fanu is general secretary of the Society of Authors, which publishes a Quick Guide to Self-Publishing and Print-on-Demand. Read his full piece on this subject at the Guardian online.

And here is another piece on memoir/biography writing from the same issue of the Guardian:

Checklist
Midge Gillies writing in The Guardian,

Does every fact deserve to be there?
By the time you're ready to write your memoir or biography you will have gathered a mountain of material. The temptation to put a fact in simply because you've gone to a lot of trouble to find it can be overwhelming. Resist the urge. Include only what is interesting or necessary to drive the story forward.
· Are my facts right?
A silly mistake or omission will make your reader doubt you. Double-check figures, dates and place, and personal names. Find an expert (probably someone who's already helped you) to read the manuscript for factual errors.

Read the full Gillies piece here.