Guest post: What it Takes to Write an Autobiography that Sells by Nina Bingham

Today’s guest blog post is brought to you by author, life coach, and clinical hypnotherapist Nina Bingham.

What it Takes to Write an Autobiography that Sells

I’ve wanted to write an important book ever since I was in the 4th grade. However, I couldn’t have imagined that important book would be about such a tragic topic. In 2013 my daughter secretly stopped taking her anti-depressant, and in the middle of the night, hanged herself. Life as I knew it came to a screeching halt. Although I’d worked as a mental healthcare professional for over a decade, nothing I’d learned prepared me to lose my own daughter in such a devastating way.

A year after my daughter’s suicide, I realized that this was the book I was meant to write. Once the Storm is Over, chronicles my descent into grief, and how I found my way back to healing. It will be published in February, 2015. I’d like to share what I learned about writing an autobiography.

I approached Big Table Publishing with a manuscript several years before my daughter’s death. The Acquisitions Editor gently rejected it, advising me to personalize my writing. She said she needed to have a better sense for who I was as a person. Even as she said it I knew it was true: I wasn’t willing to be vulnerable. She couldn’t tell who the person was hiding behind the academic bravado. I was masking my problems and playing up my intellect, and it made for a dull book full of platitudes and unemotional observations. Cough.

Several years later, I approached Big Table again, this time with a very different book… a heart-wrenchingly honest, intimate, intense and riveting autobiography of my own lifelong struggle with depression, and my daughter’s subsequent suicide. This time my publisher knew she held an important story in her hands: a counselor’s confessional of mental illness, and this time she was thrilled with it.

The contrast between the first manuscript and the second can be summarized in one word: vulnerability. If you’re going to write an autobiography, it’s going to have to be honest and sincere. It’s going to have to tell a magnificently tragic or radiantly redeeming story, or one like mine, a story of how tragedy redeemed you. But as my publisher taught me, you can’t hide behind monotonous words or hackneyed storylines. An autobiography invites readers to take refuge, to crawl up into your soul with you, to agonize and triumph with you. It allows readers see clear through you; to see all the scared, lonely and confused parts, as well as all the wise and wonderful parts. An autobiography is a quivering open heart on paper, a celebration of vulnerability.

These days, I’m a woman on a mission. While counseling has been a wonderful job, being an advocate for suicide prevention has become more than a job-I guess you could say it has become my new calling in life. However, I’ve got a second mission, just as important as the first: to keep my heart open, so that whatever I write bears the hallmark of every true writer: courage. When you’re writing an autobiography, what it takes to sell it to a publisher or to the public is the same thing: heart. And I’m convinced that you have plenty of that.

Thank you so much, Nina. It such a sad story but I love that you’re a “woman on a mission”. You’re doing great work.

About the author

Nina Bingham is an Author, Life Coach, and Clinical Hypnotherapist. Inspiring, sincere and whole-hearted, she educates not only from her academic knowledge, but shares from her own hard-won life experience in a new and profound way. In private practice since 2003, she has treated individuals and couples with a wide variety of mental health issues. She is the author of 3 books of poetry and one recovery workbook, Never Enough. Her fifth book, “Once The Storm Is Over: From Grieving to Healing After The Suicide of My Daughter,” is due out in early 2015. It’s the autobiographical confession of a counselor who lost her teen daughter to suicide. What she learned about love and forgiveness changed her life forever. It will change yours, too.

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One thought on “Guest post: What it Takes to Write an Autobiography that Sells by Nina Bingham”

Diane says:
November 28, 2014 at 2:41 am


Thank you for a very interesting post, Nina. I shall be keeping a look out for your book next year, and I truly hope that it is a success for you. With such a book, however, I would imagine that ‘success’ is measured in the number of people who are able to connect with the book more than in any kind of finacial gain from the book.

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