You have just been through unique or dramatic events, overcome apparently overwhelming obstacles, or traveled to exotic places. These are all experiences which might be the stuff of a compelling memoir. Or, maybe friends tell you that you’ve had such an interesting life that others will be fascinated to read about it. All you need to do is get an account of your life into a book and you’ll have a best seller.

Before you start your first draft it might be a good idea to think about a recent comment made by British novelist Hilary Mantel, winner of consecutive Booker Prizes for her novels Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies set in Henry VIII’s England. Mantel, who in addition to her novels has also written a memoir, was asked for the NY Times Book Review, By the Book feature, “What Makes a Good Memoir?” She said:

“Memoir is not an easy form. It’s not for beginners, which is unfortunate, as it’s where many people do begin. It’s hard for beginners to accept that unmediated truth often sounds unlikely and unconvincing. If other people are to care about your life, art must intervene. The writer has to negotiate with her memories, and with her reader, and find a way, without interrupting the flow, to caution that this cannot be a true record: this is a version, seen from a single viewpoint. But she has to make it as true as she can. Writing a memoir is a process of facing yourself, so you must do it when you are ready.”

What is a reader likely to be looking for in your memoir? The most important thing, simply put, is understanding and insight about life. What you must understand as a memoirist must understand is that the insight is not about your life but about the reader’s own. How can your account of your experiences help your readers understand themselves better?

This is where the art Mantel refers to comes in. A good memoir deals not so much with what happened in the author’s life as with what it means. What lessons does it have to teach others? Perceptions of this sort are the product not of the author’s experiences, but of her reflection upon them. Writing a memoir requires that you apply a mental and emotional Rosetta stone to the events you are recalling in order to decipher the lasting significance of what happened and the universal nature of your story.

Don’t rush to write about your experiences while they are fresh in your mind. A memoirist is often well served by time and distance from events which allows her to strip away some of what seemed so important in the immediacy of the moment to discover the greater truths those events reveal in retrospect.

You should wait to write your memoir until you’ve had sufficient time for reflection in order to understand what your life experiences demonstrate that your reader will find useful in understanding our common human experience.

The short answer is write great scenes.

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Think about why readers read. They are looking for a powerful emotional experience. A romance reader gets the vicarious opportunity to fall in love. The mystery reader shares the detective’s sense of urgency; if he doesn’t succeed, someone will die. The sci-fi reader is literally out of this world. And it’s not only fiction readers who are drawn in by the emotional pull of the world you create for them. Readers look to biographies, memoirs, narrative and family histories to provide the same kind of drama a novel delivers.

Here are five things to do to create scenes that will make sure you deliver on your promise to the reader that she will have an emotional experience:

Tie every scene to your book’s story arc. Your narrative is based on your protagonist seeking a goal he is strongly motivated to reach. If your scene doesn’t involve your protagonist striving to achieve that overriding goal, it doesn’t belong in the book. Each scene shows your protagonist taking a step toward his goal, but facing some sort of obstacle which must be overcome to get there. That means action. Something has to happen. It’s only through action that your protagonist advances toward his overall goal. That action revolves around the protagonist seeking to achieve some smaller goal or resolve some obstacle impeding his progress. The protagonist may achieve his immediate goal (although if this happens too often, the story won’t be very dramatic), partially achieve it, or be totally frustrated in his attempt. Whatever the result of the conflict, by the scene’s conclusion the protagonist should be presented with a new problem that he must solve in an upcoming scene.
Use your point of view character as a lens through which the reader experiences the action. What is the character experiencing as the action unfolds? The action is external and objective. The reader can see what’s happening. But what is your character feeling? What interior monologue is going on within the character’s head? Is the gorgeous hunk your romantic heroine is lusting after really going to choose that vacuous bimbo? And more important, let the reader see her reviewing her options to prevent that from happening. What she’s thinking and feeling may not be reflected in the actions she’s taking in this scene, but they will be important later in the book.
Heighten the tension by tightening the relationship between your character’s actions and feelings. Literary agent Donald Maas, in his book Writing the Breakout Novel advises, “… the most common flaw I see in manuscripts …is failure to invest every page of the novel with tension. Low tension equals low interest. High tension equals high interest.”
Both what happens, the action, and what the character feels about those events and what may occur down the road are sources of tension. A good scene intertwines both. Confronted with a problem, the character acts anticipating a certain outcome. The action provokes a response from her antagonist. It’s not the one the protagonist hoped for. She reacts emotionally, and considers what to do next, then acts again. An effective scene is a feedback loop reflecting the tension between action and the emotional reaction it provokes moving the conflict which projects the story forward into the next scene.
Pay attention to world building. Wait a minute, you’re saying, I don’t write sci-fi or fantasy. The world you build for your characters is still essential to telling your story even if your setting is familiar in the present day.  Your reader can’t experience the emotional impact of a scene unless she can truly feel like she’s there. Whether you book is set a gritty neighborhood in Oakland, features the glamour of Hollywood, is driven by the cut-throat pursuit of profits on Wall Street, or unfolds amid the languid beauty of a Caribbean resort, your setting creates an atmosphere which makes the action and your character’s feelings about it feel appropriate to your reader. Verisimilitude matters, and you have to provide it in a way that doesn’t interrupt the forward flow of the action and emotional tension of the story. If the action you’ve written could happen in either Paris or Peoria you have a problem with thescene.
Nothing beats good dialogue. “Readers tend to skip along through novels,” said Elmore Leonard, “but, they won’t skip dialogue.” One of the best ways to create strong scenes is to make them dialogue-driven. For one thing, a dialogue-driven scene will never fall into the trap of narrative summary. If your characters are talking your reader gets to eavesdrop. That’s about as immediate an experience of what’s happening on the page as you can provide. Just make sure your characters aren’t giving speeches. Unless they are politicians or lecturing in a college classroom few real people do. Find the crisp rhythm of the speech you would be likely to hear in the world you’ve created. Nothing builds dramatic tension in a scene like sharp dialogue.

Scenes which contain these five ingredients will create powerful emotional experiences for your reader, keep her turning pages, recommending your book to friends and buying your next one.

Coker summarized his remarks, which are based on an analysis of indie e-book sales data, on the Smashwords website in a post titled New Smashwords Survey Helps Authors Sell More e-Books .

Coker advises authors to “…imagine dozens of levers and dials attached to your book that you can twist, turn and tweak.  When you get everything just right, your book's sales will increase … through word-of-mouth.  … I refer to these tweakable things as Viral Catalysts.  A Viral Catalyst is anything that makes your book more available, accessible, discoverable, desirable or enjoyable to readers.”

He examines six of these potential viral catalysts. We’ll summarize what he had to say, but the Smashwords post has all the data and graphs to illustrate exactly what it shows.

1. e-Book Sales Conform to a Power Curve

• Most books don't sell well, but those that do sell well sell really well.  This finding wasn't a surprise.  Just as in traditional publishing, very few books become bestsellers.

2. Viva Long Form Reading: Longer Books Sell Better

• The top 100 bestselling Smashwords books averaged 115,000 words.  When we examined the word counts of books in other sales rank bands, we found the lower the word count, the lower the sales.

3. Shorter Book Titles Appear to Have Slight Sales Advantage

• We looked at character count, which indicated slight advantage for shorter titles, and then we looked at word count, where the advantage appeared to be more pronounced.

• The top 100 bestselling Smashwords books averaged 4.2 words in their book title.

4. How Indie Authors are Pricing Their Books:  $2.99 is the Most Common Price Point

• The most popular price points are FREE through 2.99.

• They chose $2.99 more frequently than any other price point. In last year's survey, $.99 was a more common price point than $2.99.  In this year's survey, $2.99 was about 60% more often.

5. How Price Impacts Unit Sales Volume:  Lower Priced Books (usually) Sell More Copies

• As you might expect, we found there's a definite relation between price and unit sales volume.  Lower prices generally sell more copies than higher prices.  But not always.

• …books priced between $1.00 and $1.99 significantly underperform books priced at $2.99 and $3.99.   $1.99 appears to be a black hole.

• If you've written several books, consider pricing at least one of the books at free.  If you write series, consider pricing the series starter at FREE.  Nothing attracts reader interest like FREE. 

6. The Yield Graph:  Is $3.99 the New $2.99?

• …books priced at $3.99 will earn about 55% more than the average book at any price.  Books priced at $1.99 are likely to earn 67% less than the average.

• One surprising finding is that, on average, $3.99 books sold more units than $2.99 books, and more units than any other price except FREE.

As interesting as the data Coker presents is, it is offered here with a big caveat. Be aware that the numbers apply mostly to adult genre fiction books. It’s important to understand that if your book is non-fiction. So let’s add one more thing that e-book authors should know.

7. The Above Don’t Necessarily Apply to Nonfiction E-Books

• Sourcebooks, in a post titled E-Books: How Far How Fast? Reviewed the Bookscan data and found that Adult Nonfiction is 42.3% of the market for physical books, but accounts for less than 25% of e-books sold. The post reported that nonfiction accounts for approximately 20% of the bestsellers among e-books. “Looking at BN Nookbook top 100 bestsellers, there were 12 non-fiction ebooks on the list. On the Kindle top 100 bestsellers (paid), there were 16 non-fiction titles.”

• Book Buzzr, was more pointed in its post When Will the eBook Expressway Explode Sales for Nonfiction – as It Has for Fiction? Comparing the e-book success of fiction and nonfiction authors, it said, “Exactly zero nonfiction authors have seen eBook sales that are comparable to the sales that these genre fiction authors have attracted.”

Regardless of whether your book is fiction or nonfiction Coker has given authors something to think about.

If you have published an e-book leave a comment and tell us about your experiences.

Do templates help? Do they make this process easier? Is the outcome better? We will explore the pros and cons of the three types of template-based publishing that we’ve seen:

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• Book and photobook software templates provided by digital printing companies.

Many people have made a photobook using the free software provided by photobook printers such as Shutterfly and Blurb. These drag ‘n drop interfaces are very user friendly, and they have the page all laid out for you, ensuring that margins and alignments will look neat and nice. Blurb, in particular, tries to match real design software by offering a range of fonts and some text styling. Why are these templates free? The printing cost is very high, especially for longer books; most limit the page count. These services are charging a premium for color printing. This is fine if you are gathering a small photo collection and want to add brief text or captions, but longer books or ones that contain lots of text don’t make financial sense here.

• Database software with a “publish” feature.

Databases such as Ancestry, Roots Magic, and Legacy’s Family Tree all allow export as a PDF and as HTML. They also have their own proprietary templates as a way for users to publish their research in a book. Ancestry.com’s “My Canvas,” for example, appeals to Ancestry users who have all of their content already in place. The pro is that the template feature makes it easy to drag and drop existing material into the book. The cons? No control over the design at all. The templates are inflexible, so the page layouts can look pretty bad, and they won’t allow you to customize. This may be suitable if you want your book to look just like their screen interface. But wow, are their books expensive! It’s a quick and easy method for just a few high-end copies, but the printing cost is prohibitive for more books.

• Online social sharing sites

There are hundreds of sharing sites that encourage users to upload photos, documents and more. These online templates are, by necessity, pretty rudimentary. Because they must pay to host your files, users view low-resolution images. The web is not conducive to long-form reading; in many cases there are limited text boxes for stories. When there is just enough space for a paragraph or two, it results in cursory summaries. People don’t really write all they have to say as the interface itself discourages it. When these sites have a “create a book” feature, it is limited with few choices for size, page count, cover quality, paper, etc. The books are cheaper, and unfortunately, it shows.

In particular, beware of subscription template sites. They make their profit from monthly payments, yet few members get their money’s worth. They too require you to use them as your (overpriced) printer. Then there is the issue of “member sharing”, where other members are allowed to copy and use your book’s contents! Read the fine print before joining or uploading anything to the web.

I once experimented with a template service. I put my text and pictures into a basic design, and the book came out okay. What I didn’t realize was I didn’t own the book. If I wanted to take the book that I worked so hard to create elsewhere to use a different printer, that wasn’t possible. Two years later, they updated the software, and my book couldn’t be opened! To revise it I had to start from scratch.

That’s why I love Adobe InDesign, the pro-level software we (and most other book designers) use. It has infinite flexibility to do things templates cannot. In fact, if you’ve ever seen a book with interesting and complicated features such as sidebars, section dividers, text wraps, margin notes, custom frames around images, layered artwork, indexing, etc., you can be sure it was created in InDesign. You may not notice, in a well-designed book, how the pages have running headers, or the cool things that can be done with fonts, but these are the tools that make my print and e-books look great. Web templates can’t even begin to do that.

I think the most important thing is to retain control of your book. First, to control the content it contains – don’t let bargain software limit the very material of your book’s pages. Second, control your rights and make sure you own your book. We encourage our clients to self-publish with their own ISBN, and we give our clients every file we create. That means you can revise, reprint, and republish any way you like. It matters.

It’s day three today at the National Genealogical Society Conference in Las Vegas. We’ve been on the lookout for tips on new sources.

Ed Zapletal and Rick Cree of Family Chronicle Books showed us two newly released additions to their Tracing Ancestors series.

Tracing Your Colonial American Ancestors, by David A. Nash, explores a spectrum of sources beginning with more conventional ones like maps and newspapers and moving to less familiar sources including out of the box tips on locating vital records and how to find ancestors by tracing the records of their livestock. It includes features on using ship records, tax rolls, colonial census records, voting and poll books, probate and land records, records of political committees, and records of indentured servants. There is additional online state by state material available to supplement the printed version.

Tracing Your Female Ancestors, by Gena Philibert-Ortega advises, “Female ancestors are different, and shouldn’t be researched exactly like our male ancestors. Women historically did not always leave the same type of paper trail; a result of not having the same legal rights as their male counterparts.” Philibert-Ortega offers valuable insights and tips on how to techniques to uncover stories of female ancestors

that won’t appear in the traditional channels of research. Of particular interest are lists of 25 online sources, manuscript collections, and university libraries which provide information on the lives of women. She also includes an excellent article on Writing Their Stories. [Full disclosure: Gena mentions Stories To Tell in the article] In addition photo expert Maureen Taylor discusses Women in Photos and offers tips on finding your ancestors in photographs.

Gary Clark of PhotoTree.com released the third book in his Kwik Guide Series, Real Photo Postcards at the conference. In his Introduction Clark explains, “Postcards containing personal photographs or studio photographs are known as Real Photo Postcards. The use of real means that the postcard was created using the photographic process. It is a real photograph, developed on sturdy paper with postal markings like Address Here and Place Stamp Here preprinted on the back.” He explains, “Real Photo Postcards give us a look into the lives of our ancestors during the first few decades of the 20^th century.” With the availability of affordable cameras, a more open lifestyle, and changes in postal regulations during the 1890s everyone wanted to share photos with friends and relatives. “The best method was by postcard,” says Clark. “One could say it is similar to sending pictures via e-mail or text in the 21^st century.” The book is a fascinating look at both how our ancestors looked and what they valued.

All three publications provide plenty to interest and entertain any genealogist or family historian.

It seems like a large share of them also want to create a family history book. They have kept us busy this morning with a barrage of questions. Most of the conversations seem to begin, “I want to publish a family history. Can I …?”

I think the reason people begin this way is that they have never been through the process of bring a book to life before. It seems overwhelming to them. I can understand that. We try to demystify the process and help these would be authors get from where they are to the beautiful heirloom book they dream of. Here’s how:

First, you need to understand the process of getting a book into print. We call it The Author’s Journey.

Whether a book is self-published or published by a traditional publishing house, the six steps are the same. Each of the steps is a creative process. The difference between traditional publishing and self-publishing is that traditional publishers buy the manuscript in order to sell it, so they take over after step three, and they have the right to shape the book as they wish. The author creates a draft and then the publisher edits, lays out the interior, designs the cover, and prints the book. When you self-publish a book you are responsible for all six steps. And that is a good thing.

As a self publisher, consider how to get the manuscript edited to prepare it for publication. Some authors ask friends or relatives to edit their books, but beware - unless these people have some professional editing experience, they won’t be able to make sure that the prose looks professional. You will also want to think about what you want the interior and cover of the book should look like. How will your text and images be laid out on the page? Which fonts are best? Do the photos need correction? 

Finally, who should print your book? This depends on the features you choose: color, or black and white, hardcover, paperback or e-book, and whether you want it to be available through Amazon or another online bookstore.

All of these can be complex questions, involving both specialized knowledge and skills. We help people to make these choices, and to do the technical preparation of their book.  Go ahead - do as much as your knowledge and skills allow. For the things you can’t or don’t want to do, hire professionals like us to do them for you.

When you self publish, your book can be whatever you want it to be. You get to decide what it will look like. If you don’t do all of the work yourself, anyone you hire should help you to realize your vision, not theirs.

The world of self-publishing leaves the creative responsibility for the book totally in the hands of the author. So for any author asking us, “Can I…?” the answer is, “Yes!” That kind of possibility is something to be excited about.

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Before you begin banging away at the keyboard, take a little advice from playwright David Mamet. He said, “The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned in to watch drama.”

So how do you find the drama in the mountain of information you have gathered? Here are five places to look:

Look for the conflict in your ancestors lives.  Conflict is the heart of drama. What were your ancestors’ goals? What motivated them to strive for those goals? What obstacles did they have to overcome to achieve them? Or, if they were unable to overcome the obstacles, what adjustments did they make in their goals?

My grandfather, originally from upstate New York, was like a series of waves of young men who headed west during the late 19^th century. He found his way to Alaska in 1898 in search of a fortune in Yukon gold. Plenty of drama there. But, grandfather didn’t find gold. After a year he headed east on his way home, but stopped in South Dakota where he me my grandmother. Now we’ve added romance.

Relate you ancestors to a larger story. Looking at the time and place where the events in your ancestors lives took place lets you see how what was happening to them was part of a larger story. The time and place can create a dramatic setting for events.

When grandfather met grandmother in 1899, life of the plains was anything was anything but sanguine. The revolt of farmer, who believed they had been exploited by railroads and bankers, had swept across the plains in the mid-90s resulting in the nomination of William Jennings Bryan for president on the Democratic ticket. When the Great Commoner lost to William McKinley in 1896 a lot of people on the plains decided it was time to look for greener pastures in the growing cities or farther west.

Look for turning points. In every person’s life there are points at which the direction things are moving shift and head in a whole new direction. Sometimes that means moving to a new place. The immigrant story where an ancestor decided to leave the old country and come to America is a classic. But deciding to enter a new business or become part of a social or political movement can be equally dramatic. Find these turning points in your ancestors’ stories and build upon the drama inherent in them.

My grandfather and grandmother got married, but they didn’t stay in South Dakota. They headed west, once again following my grandfather’s dream of striking it rich. This time the goal wasn’t as exciting as finding gold, although it did put them on the edge of California’s gold, country where they bought a hog ranch in Roseville, California, not far from the state capitol in Sacramento.

Find the values and themes that run through your ancestors’ stories. In nearly every family’s history there are recurrent themes and values evident in multiple generations. Some of them might include: searching for a better life, confidence that self-reliance will lead to success, dedication to their community and helping others, the importance of religious faith, a belief that education is essential, the entrepreneurial spirit, trust that hard work will be rewarded, confidence that love will help overcome our setbacks, certainty that family is the most important thing. Discovering and emphasizing these themes and values gives meaning to the life stories of your ancestors.

My grandfather never struck it rich. The hog ranch failed when hog cholera swept California’s central valley. He and my grandmother moved to San Francisco and grandfather opened a print shop, pursuing the trade he had learned before he left New York. He did well for a while, but like a lot of small businesses his was wiped out during the Great Depression.

The themes running through his life seemed to be optimism that he would eventually strike it rich, but when he failed he would be resilient and self-reliant enough to reinvent himself. His was a quintessentially western story. Was it dramatic? I have always been struck by the similarities in grandfather’s story to those described by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Wallace Stegner regarding his own family in the novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain.  

Discover the lessons your ancestors’ lives have to teach. One of the questions students often asked when I was teaching history was, “So what?” If I couldn’t provide a good answer, I wasn’t doing my job well. The same thing is true with family history. You need to answer the “So what?” question regarding the lives of your ancestors. What meaning did their experiences have.? Ultimately what any reader is looking for is an insight that will be useful to her. Make sure you make those lessons evident.

In listening to my parents talk about my grandfather I learned two important lessons. First, willingness to take risks can lead to great rewards, but failure can put you and those close to you in difficult circumstances. Second, preparation and hard work is a better formula for success.

By seeking the dramatic elements of the stories of your ancestors you can create the kind of engaging family history book that will appeal to an audience well beyond genealogists.

A lot of people dream of being an author, seeing their words printed in a book which flies off bookstore shelves and almost overwhelms Amazon’s buy button.

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When the Author House website promised: “You set your book publishing goals. We’ll help you reach them,” or the Tafford Publishing website said, “Our publishing experts and production team are on hand with whatever your book needs,” the best seller took on the quality of Gatsby’s green light for the would-be authors, a dream clearly visible and sure to be realized.

160,000 of them flocked to Author Solutions, the parent company of Author House, Tafford, iUniverse, XLibris, Palibrio, and other imprints, which proclaimed itself “The leading indie publishing company in the world.”

Last July, Penguin Publishing, one of the Big Six publishing houses, no doubt with an eye on Author Solutions’ $100 million annual revenue, purchased the Bloomington, Indiana-based company.  

Author Solutions is the biggest fish in the rising tide of self-publishing.

Last week the New York law firm Giskan, Solotaroff, Anderson & Steward filed a complaint against Author Solutions suggesting that it is a shark. ( See Class Action Complaint)

For many people familiar with the self-publishing world, ourselves included, the assertions in the complaint were not surprising. We have heard the laments of many authors who felt that an Author Solutions imprint had failed to deliver what it promised. Nevertheless, it is good to see that these authors may get their day in court.

Among other things, the complaint asserts that:

“Author Solutions fails at the most basic task of a publisher: paying its authors their earned royalties and providing authors with accurate sales statements.”

“Author Solutions also fails to take diligent care of its authors’ works, making numerous and egregious publisher errors – errors made by the publisher not the author. These errors include errors on book covers, in addition to various typographical and formatting errors… Aggressive sales techniques ensure that these errors are corrected only for a fee of several hundred dollars. Even though, as a matter of policy, Author Solutions promises to correct publisher errors for free, it rarely does.”

“Most of Author Solutions earnings are derived from its publishing and marketing services. These services, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, likewise fail to deliver what they promise: more book sales and opportunities for authors.”

“…authors often discover, once it is too late, that Author Solutions is not an ‘indie publisher’ at all. It is a printing service that fails to maintain even the most rudimentary standards of book publishing, profiting not for its authors, but from them.”

The complaint goes on to specify a list of deceptive marketing practices, misrepresentations, or failures to deliver promised services.

The lawsuit should be a caution flag to all authors considering not only Author Solutions imprints, but other heavily advertised providers of turnkey solutions like Outskirts Press or Publish America. Know what you are paying for and know what your rights are before signing any agreement. Mark Levine’s book The Fine Print of Self-Publishing is a great way to check.

At Stories To Tell we always advise authors to do as many things as they can themselves. Pay only for things you can or don’t want to do yourself. Doing so will minimize your cost.

As for high priced marketing packages like those offered by Author Solutions imprints, we agree with the marketing advice of best-selling author Guy Kawasaki, who said in his book, APE: How to Publish a Book, “For self-publishers, guerrilla tactics are the way to gorilla-size success. The cost for most of these ideas is $0, and the expensive ones are no more proven than the free ones. This is because the quality of your book and the quantity of your moxie are more important than the amount of money you’ve spent.”

Authors who want to contact Giskan, Solotaroff, Anderson & Stewart can use this online form.

Have you published with an Author Solutions imprint? Leave a comment about your experiences.

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A lot of people writing life stories, particularly first time writers, lock into the timeline they have created to produce a draft that essentially says, “This happened, then that happened, then the next thing happened.” The resulting draft is a list of events chronicling the subject’s life without much analysis or interpretation. The incidents are recounted with a somewhat plodding quality. The account reports the details of its subject’s life, but doesn’t engage the reader.

It shouldn’t be that way. You as an author need to step back from the chronology you have created to find its meaning.

As with any book that deals with people – fiction or nonfiction – the best place to begin is with your main character. Why did she do what she did? What were her ambitions? What motivated her actions? What emotional response might she have displayed as various events in her life played out?

What was the broader context for the events in the life of the character you are describing? If you look at what’s going on socially, politically and economically during your character’s lifetime you can make some inferences about how the broader sweep of history might have shaped her actions.

Trying to provide a detailed account of all of these things for every event in your character’s life is generally not a wise idea. Each event is not of equal importance. One way to decide what deserves greater emphasis is to look for turning points in your character’s life.

I am currently editing a biography of Henry Bothin who was the president of one of the most successful steel companies on the Pacific Coast, the largest commercial real estate owner in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, and the founder of one of the first charitable foundations in California. Let’s look at how author Mike Casey is employing the turning points in Henry’s story.

The first occurs in 1870 when Henry runs away from his parents’ farm in Wisconsin to join his older sisters in San Francisco. On the personal level Henry saw no future for himself in the relative isolation of farm life in the Upper Midwest. But Henry’s action was part of a trend seen all over America. On the one hand, thousands of people had responded to the advice Horace Greely had offered less than five years earlier, “Go west young man and grow up with the country.” Henry was also joining a second migration, from rural farms to cities, which just beginning as he headed for San Francisco.

When Henry arrives in San Francisco his sisters get him a job in the wholesale grocery business run by their husbands. Eventually he starts his own company selling coffee, teas and spices. He builds his business to a level of moderate success.

The second turning point occurs in the late 1880s. Henry leaves the commodity business and becomes a large stockholder in a steel manufacturing company, eventually becoming its president. At the same time he begins buying commercial real estate. This seems like quite an abrupt change, but if you look at the people Henry had befriended they were the children of the city’s most successful businessmen. Clearly he wanted to join them at the pinnacle of economic success. On a broader scale Henry is following successful role models like Andrew Carnegie into the steel business. The nation had just seen the first steel frame skyscraper built in Chicago. Applying that new technology to the limited geographic area of San Francisco’s commercial district made building vertically the best way to maximize profit from real estate. So what Henry was doing was capitalizing on two trends just getting underway nationally.

By 1906 Henry had become a wealthy man, indeed city’s largest commercial property owner and rapidly expanding his empire when Mother Nature precipitated the third major turning point in Henry’s life – the devastating earthquake and fire which destroyed much of San Francisco including 79 of Henry’s 81 commercial properties. Henry rebuilt immediately, but his life shifted directions. He no longer bought property, but rather seemed content to manage what he had. Instead, philanthropy began to absorb an increasing share of his attention. Part of the change was not doubt the impact of the ruin of the city which followed the 1903 death of his son from polio. It may have made him question whether devoting all of his energy to business was truly worth it. But he was also emulating a number of the industrial barons like Carnegie when he created his charitable foundation.

Focusing on these turning points in Henry Bothin’s life provides a context for a much briefer discussion of the events in the intervening and subsequent years.

By slowing down the narrative of a person’s life story to focus on turning points you create the opportunity for your reader to gain a deeper understanding of your character and the lessons her life has to teach.

You have devoted countless hours to researching your ancestors. You have created pedigree charts and family group sheets for a tree that spans three centuries and you have plenty of documentation for all of them. There’s no doubt you have done good work to get to where you are.

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The question is, how will you pass all you have done and all that you now know on to the other members of your family, particularly the next generations?

GotGenealogy.com’s Golden Rules of Genealogy offer a good guide on what to do. Rule #9 advises, “…leave your research the way you’d have liked to have found it.” The future genealogists in your family will thank you for it.

But don’t stop there. Rule #10 says, “Genealogy isn’t about just doing research. Genealogy is about telling the stories and ensuring that your ancestor’s legacies live on for generations to come. Without the stories, the research won’t do anyone much good. The legacy of your ancestors rests in your capable hands.”

The majority of genealogists say that someday they will write a family history book that tells their ancestors’ stories. They just aren’t ready to do it right now. There is more research to do before they can start. I understand. I love to research. The truth is that research is never done. There’s always something else to check out.

So at some point you have to stop researching and start writing. Barbara Tuchman, a historian who won two Pulitzer Prizes, understands the problem well. She said: “The most important thing about research is to know when to stop. How does one recognize the moment? …One must stop before one is finished; otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.”

Pausing your research to write a book is not to stop it forever. The book you produce will certainly reflect what you know now. If you return to your research after you write the book you’ll probably learn things that you will want to add. The beauty of digital age is that it’s easy to add to your book’s file and upload it to a printer who can produce a second edition.

The important thing is to make sure you get that first edition done and into print – e-book, physical book or both – and into the hands of family members. It will assure that your genealogical legacy is secure. Your whole family, not just the future genealogists, will thank you for that.