Producing boutique books has never been easier. Self-publishing is a booming industry and there are quite a range of interesting models meant to help you capture your life/family stories and histories. The publishing part is easier, more dynamic, and cheaper than ever, but the main barrier remains … How do you help people produce meaningful content without the burden of a complex and work-intensive process? Writing is difficult, particularly when it involves finding and organizing rich content in a meaningful way. This is even more true when that process involves research, such as interviews, or finding and making sense of new information relevant to a family’s history from many potential sources (documents, photographs, ancestry-pages, disorganized family archives, multiple family members, etc.).
The publishing is easier and cheaper, but the work process required to produce something meaningful remains a fascinating issue. To resolve the work process issue, there are two common models:
- Expensive $
Do you have $15,000 to spend? Maybe. But, Modern Heirloom Books is clearly catering to a specific client-base with a bit of money to burn: https://www.modernheirloombooks.com.
They have some pretty wonderful types of family histories that they help produce. Still “bespoke book” and “heirloom,” in this case, are probably out of reach for most, given their minimum cost, with upgrades.
2. Outsourcing the Work to You
If you are interested in this, you’ve probably heard of and considered this model. The most popular company cited for it is –StoryWorth: https://welcome.storyworth.com.
I have been tempted and curious to sign up for this service. In so many ways, it makes sense. They give you a format, a structure, consistent prompts, a process and a publication avenue at the end. This process also breaks up the sometimes burdensome task of figuring out how to start and what to write. And there is a cumulative aspect to it, where quick, short work-cycles actually produce a significant amount of content, over a year, organized according to their series of prompts/questions.
Still, the burden is on you and your family member who is participating. Do they have the time to respond to each prompt? What happens if they do not feel confident, or comfortable with the process? And, in the end, you are paying them, in a sense, to do the work yourself. The value, they suggest, is in the series of questions that, “you’ve never thought to ask.” I don’t doubt they have a wonderful list of questions, but such questions are intuitive and available, in many forms, online with just a bit of research: “What is your birth story?” “What was your neighborhood like growing up?” “What kind of recipes and food did you eat growing up?” etc.
In the end, there is no perfect process. And the best approach is whatever process helps to minimize the intimidation factor and the most common barriers that people face when they contemplate trying to capture their most important family stories and histories -such as figuring out:
- Where to begin?
- What to write?
- Who am I writing to?
- How to establish and maintain a realistic scope and focus for a project?
- How to establish what is meaningful?
- How to avoid the sense that these stories have to be “perfect”.
- How to organize existing content, such as family-archive information?
- How to find new, capture, and organize information from existing documents, Ancestry sites, or living members of your family.
- How to turn bits of information into a meaningful story format?
- What technology to use to produce and publish this information?
- The often overlooked work involved in digitizing and re-formatting content in consistent and publishable form.
- Etc.
At Life Story Books, I will work one-on-one with you to help you resolve these issues. I only take on a few clients and projects at a time. And, if you hire me, my job is to provide you with a competitively priced process and product, paired with a plan and a structured process that minimizes the most common barriers involved. There are a few secrets to the process at Life Story Books:
- Quality over quantity. Together, we establish and then maintain a very focused scope for each project. Short 10 to 25 page books are typically enough. This keeps the work process contained and the production process from becoming burdensome.
- Your costs go to the right part(s) of the process. Since the production and printing costs are so reasonable, the primary cost of your investment in a Life Story Book goes into the most important part, producing meaningful and accessible story-based content.
- A personalized process. Since I only take on a few projects at one time, I am available throughout the ABC’s: A. the planning and researching (when necessary), B. the writing/editing, and the C. publication processes.
