I'm doing a free teleseminar on Wed. Sept. 8 at 12:00 noon Eastern, 9:00 am Pacific with writing coach Lisa Tener about how to put more 'me' in your memoir. And of course by 'me' I mean you not me. Click here to hear the free mp3 of the hourlong interview.

Read the pre-interview:

Lisa: Greg, I know we’re going to cover this in more detail on our call, but what are some of the factors that make a best-selling memoir, like Eat, Pray, Love?

Greg: My theory is that the major factor that made it such a publishing phenomenon is that it embodied a compound fantasy. 1) That Gilbert had the house and relationship to begin with. 2) That she was willing to walk out. 3) To chuck it all and just go traveling (which is a fantasy because, she got paid to write the book so she wasn’t really chucking it all: she was doing a job plus getting to eat in Italy, pray in India and find love again).

It seems like right now almost everybody has a story to tell. This is like the Age of Memoirs.

My theory is that post-Watergate we realized that we can't trust the government. Post-911 we feel like we can't really trust the media to know (or tell us) what's really going on either. So who can you trust? Only the personal testimony of credible individuals.

To me that explains the rise of the written memoir, the continued popularity of This American Life, the spread of alternative comedy including Un-Cabaret, live storytelling shows and personal essay reading nights like Say the Word, The Moth, Sit 'n' Spin, Afterbirth, Mortified and others across the country, plus wider trends like blogs, user reviews, tweets and the surge of subjective news like Jon Stewart.

So what about your memoir? If you're interested, I've worked with an number of first-time writers to plan, write and re-write their stories and have developed a simple 5-step plan (which I also think would work for any book project). Here it is: