Publishers Weekly and Self-Publishing

If there were any doubt about the impact of self-publishing on the industry, a quick look at the August 23^rd post on the Publishers Weekly blog by PW President George W. Slowick Jr. would dispel it. The publication which carries the tagline "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling" announced a policy change.

“We are returning to our earliest roots. PW dates to 1872, when it was first known as Trade Circular Weekly and listed all titles published that week in what was then a nascent industry. We have decided to embrace the self-publishing phenomenon in a similar spirit. Call it what you will—self-publishing, DIY, POD, author-financed, relationship publishing, or vanity fare. They are books and that is what PW cares about. And we aim to inform the trade.”

The quarterly supplement which will be titled PW Select promises a “complete announcement issue of all self-published books submitted during that period.” Each book will receive a listing will include author, title, subtitle, price, pagination, format, ISBN, a brief description, and ordering information. PW Select will choose 25 self-published titles for review.

What Publishers Weekly’s announcement did not do was place self published books on the same footing as those published by commercial publishing houses. For authors who submit a self-published book for inclusion in PW Select, “a processing fee of $149 will be charged.”

The reaction in the self-publishing community has been predictable.

“$149 for a brief listing that no one will read, plus the miniscule chance of an actual review in a segregated section? I'm sorry to see PW joining the ranks of the many businesses out to fleece self publishers,” said Aaron Shepard in a comment on the Publishers Weekly website.  

Another commenter, who did not identify himself by name, said, “PW has decided to launch a service that relatively few will be able to afford. So, in the end, rather than embracing any change, PW is simply laying down another type of self-appointed, financial “gatekeeper” to turn us away from the prize. Really disappointing.”

An article in the Self-Publishing Review gave a somewhat more balanced view of PW’s new policy: “Great news!  Unfortunately, the way they’re “embracing” self-publishing is by charging a fee.  The way that self-publishing could truly be embraced is by recognizing that self-published titles can be as good as any other and reviewing them alongside other books.  But it still places self-published titles in a separate ghetto. An argument could be made that pay to play is built into the self-publishing model, so this isn’t a terrible development, but this has the feeling of milking self-published authors like so many other promotional schemes.”

Whether you agree with the way they went about it or not, the important thing is that Publishers Weekly’s action recognizes that it and the industry it serves needs to find a way to address self-published books which are accounting for an increasing share of the book market each year.

Click here to read the full post on Publishers Weekly.

Click here to read the response on The Self-Publishing Review.

The Family Historian's Dilemma

In a recent Matilda Butler, who along with Kendra Bonnet, blogs at Women’s Memoirs discussed an insight about family history she had while visiting the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California.

Said Butler:

 I stood watching a video of interviews with workers who have contributed to the growth of Salinas over the past 100 years. I was struck by what was missing. One person described how his family, his grandparents, moved from the Philippines to Hawaii and then on to California. He said he didn’t know why they didn’t stay in Hawaii, he just knew that they moved to California several years before his father was born. Another man spoke about his parents leaving Italy for California. He didn’t know the year they moved to Salinas. The stories continued in this vein. It was interesting to see how many cultures have made a contribution to the farming in Salinas, but none of these descendants knew the details. They didn’t know what motivated their families to move or when they moved or what they found when they arrived or why they stayed.

 It was an eloquent statement of a dilemma faced by many family historians. While genealogical details of their family trees are complete, the stories of the people who inhabit its branches have been lost. A number of the conversations Nancy and I had with people at the Salt Lake Family History Expo focused on trying to find lost stories of ancestors.

What is clear is that the longer you wait to get your family history started, the more likely it is this will happen to you. If you followed Nancy’s series on story recording over the last few days, you have some excellent guides to help you in gathering your family’s stories. [If you haven’t yet seen the series, take a look at our last four posts.] But whatever you do, talk with relatives to gather the stories they have and make sure they are preserved.

You may wait to start your family history book, but don’t wait to gather the stories that will make it interesting and memorable for your readers when you do get it done.

To read Matilda Butler's full post, click here.



Recording Stories with Speech Recognition Software

Recently I have been corresponding with a blog reader, Edward, who has a lot of experience with recording his stories digitally. We both have used the prominent speech recognition software, Dragon Naturally Speaking. It seems like the perfect solution if you’re hoping to evade the onerous task of writing a book. Dragon has two modes: one in which you dictate with a microphone and it types as you speak, and another mode that transcribes audio files you have loaded from your handheld recorder.

I sent Edward this excerpt, among others, from my book, Stories To Tell: A Guide to Self Publishing.

“Another way to dictate into the computer is a software program called Dragon Naturally Speaking, which converts your speech to text. Unfortunately, this technology is not flawless. If you do decide to purchase this software, we offer this advice from long experience: edit the text immediately after recording. There is often an unintelligible gap between what you said and what was typed, and it is difficult to remember later what you meant to say. With practice and cautious, clear enunciation, Dragon Naturally Speaking can be a very helpful tool.”

Edward replied to me:

“I am somewhat ambivalent about Dragon. On the one hand, it eliminates the necessity of transcription, whether by me or someone else, but it is not as natural as I would like. If I become as informal in speaking as story telling really is for me “around the dining room table”, as you suggest, then my voice becomes less disciplined for the requirements of Dragon and my error rate increases. The necessity of remaining consciousness enough to speak properly for Dragon seems at times to detract from speaking naturally….a paradox, since it is called “Dragon Naturally Speaking”. At times, it is not “Naturally Speaking” enough for me. I think I sometimes use Dragon less than I might for that reason. As you say, it requires “practice and cautious, clear enunciation”, which isn’t necessarily conducive to relaxed, spontaneous story telling.”

Edward and I also compared our versions of Dragon Naturally Speaking. (He has version 8, I have version 10, and yet we both struggle with inaccurate transcription when we speak "too naturally".) The manufacturer, Nuance, http://www.nuance.com/dragon/index.htm has recently released an updated version 11, which is advertised to have better speech recognition than ever before (a promise they have made repeatedly, in each previous issue.)

What do you think about using speech recognition software? Have you tried Dragon Naturally Speaking, and has it worked well for you?


Recording Powerful Stories for Memoirs

We have been focusing on gathering stories through digital recording in the last few blog posts, with the focus on collecting digital recordings of stories from others, either through interviews or by telephone. To create a family history book, you often need to work with others who know the stories you want to preserve. But what if you are working on a memoir? You have far more control over the story recording process, because you are telling every story in the book.

Many authors use dictation rather than typing, across all genres, but memoir writers have a great advantage over fiction writers. That is because a memoir writer is working from recall, rather than generating original content. (Imagine the science fiction writer dictating… “The year was 2184, no, make that 2258, on the planet Paradise, no, call it Utopia…”) Too much freedom and spontaneity can be a dangerous thing. Memoir writers are grounded by the fact that you are telling the truth, as you see it, and you have only one memory to work from. There is still plenty of creativity involved in writing a memoir, of course, in how to describe your remembered experience.

The example of the science fiction writer above illustrates the first rule of story recording: do your planning first. It is only after you have decided the story to tell, and thought about what you want to say, that you should record.

 You can do a great job with your stories with some forethought. Consider this general definition of a story: it is centered on one event, which takes place at one time and place. If you can narrow your story in this way, you will control the action of the story (event) and describe the setting more effectively (time and place). Think of your chapter as a string of these specific, finite stories, and your book will be better structured and more pleasurable for the reader.

Once you have a plan for your story, the artistry of the oral storyteller can truly shine. How? In the choices you make on the sentence level, and in your choice of words. Your distinctive style of speaking, your “voice’, will b captured as you tell your story, lending your book far more style than if you attempted to write it.

This artistry is far more likely to occur if you are relaxed and feeling expansive. To relax, get prepared. Rehearse the story once in your mind from beginning to end, and think about details you would like to add in. Usually, in our “first draft” we tell the facts of the story, but with some thought we can add in more colorful details. Recall with all your senses: sights, sounds, smells how it tasted and felt to the touch. Then, when you record your story, include those details to supplement the facts to l make it “real” to the reader.

Some of our authors use notes to stay on track. If you are concerned that you can’t tell the story in order naturally, a written list of points you want to make can be handy. Or they can be distracting and ruin your storytelling “flow”. It’s up to you. Whatever you do, don’t write out the story and read it into the recorder, as this is usually a summary, not a true story.

Many storytellers begin by “circling”, trying to contextualize the story in its time and place. It doesn’t “sound good”, but it’s natural, and if you just press onward the story will unfold. Remember, this is just your first draft. You can always add content if you forget something by recording more later, and you can change or delete content easily once you have the story typed up. Story recording allows you to quickly generate the bulk of your book. Then you can refine the content on paper to make your stories shine.



How to Record Family Stories by Telephone

If you are currently researching your family history and interviewing relatives for stories, digital recording makes it possible to gather material from far-flung sources. Most of your relatives would tell you that writing is not a practiced skill that they enjoy. If you ask them for written family stories, you are sure to be disappointed. If instead of writing, you ask a family member to tell a story as you record it, you will find that they are relieved and far more helpful.

One excellent method to record others at a distance is by telephone. Everyone has experience telling stories over the phone, so your subject will be relaxed at the prospect. The technology you use depends on your equipment at home. There are analog devices that can be attached to your landline, if you only use a traditional phone. The recorder is connected to the telephone line. Later, you will need to convert the analog recording to digital, but the quality of landline phone signals is superior, and result in good recordings.

If you are a computer user, call recording over the internet is very inexpensive. Be aware that this method has limits if you are doing important archival recording. Because this is VOIP, (voice over the internet), your call recording quality can be subject to odd momentary drop-outs. However, if you are simply gathering the story to be transcribed, these blips should not interfere.

When you are using VOIP for call recording, make sure the phone connection is working well. Do not allow your subject to record with a cell phone. Cell phones and the internet don’t play well together. They result in noisy, indecipherable recordings and dropped calls.

Many people download the free software Skype to call their relative from their computer. If your relative also has Skype, a Skype-to-Skype call is free. (If they have a landline, you’ll need to pay to call out from Skype to the local telephone network, but it is very inexpensive.) Skpe even has video to video, if your subject has a webcam. Not everyone enjoys that kind of eye contact as they tell a story, though, so give it a trial run befor attempting to gather a family story this way.

 

There are a number of call recording software programs that work well with Skpe, for tteleophone or video, that silently run in the background as you speak. We recommend MP3 SkypeRecorder. It starts up automatically, and then automatically saves the file that contains your recording.

If you are doing a large scale project, we have set up an extensive system that works wonderfully using the software Trixbox. In this case, we don not initiate the call, or interview the storyteller in a two-way dialogue. Instead, storytellers dial our toll-free number and are connected to a personal voice mailbox, where they can record as many stories as they like. They can also call when the mood strikes them, rather than setting up an interview. It is a good method for the motivated, but doesn’t work with reluctant relatives who need you on the other end of the line to encourage then to speak. Trixbox allows you to control the quality of your VOIP recording, but is requires a dedicated computer server and some effort to set up, so it is appropriate only if you are gathering digital audio recordings on a larger scale, over time.

Telephone recording may require a little coaching from you, so that your subject is willing and able to share many stories this way. Encourage them to speak casually, to tell the story as they would face to face with another person. If it can be arranged, invite another person to sit in on the recording session to listen to the story. You’re more likely to receive stories recorded in vivid, full detail if the storyteller is enjoying the experience and feels “heard”.





Gathering Family Stories: When, Who, Why, How

Gathering your family stories is a different kind of research. They are rarely found in books, in libraries, or online. Genealogical records can only hint at the rich truths in the lives our ancestors have lived. This is just another reason why we, who live now, are so fortunate. Even though much may never be known, we can leave a far more detailed record of what we do know for our descendants.

Stories are always the greatest challenge to acquire, as are all rare and valuable treasures. This is because they are stored in human memory, and communicated in the context of a relationship. Memories, and relationships, can be faulty and limited. Moreover, many family historians use a hit-or-miss approach to gathering these stories. If they do not feel confident, they are less likely to preserve and publish the stories they do know.

I often hear miraculous tales about people who chanced on a fantastic family story, entirely by coincidence. What joy they feel as they retell that odd tale! Already, though, there is a chance of details slipping away, lost between successive tellers. All the more reason to preserve and publish family stories, while they are available and fresh.

The obvious, common obstacles are time, distance, and simply knowing what to do. (I’ll save dealing with recalcitrant relatives for a whole other article.) Assuming you are willing to give some time to your family history, prioritize your story gathering with my favorite adage “living things first”. Facts already preserved in a book may wait, but 85-year old Aunt Ida may not be around that much longer. Make a list of all the living people who are repositories of family knowledge, and go after them!

But the distance is the problem, you say? No worries. Telephone conversations can be recorded. There is even video chat, if your interview would go better face-to-face, and you can often find some young person on the far end to facilitate the technology. Recording truly is the way to go. It simply is too much to ask someone else to write on your behalf. It never seems to get done, and you can alienate your subject when you ask for the impossible.

Instead, make a list of what you want most from each individual, and charm their stories from them. How? If you can, visit in person and bring a small, thoughtful gift related to your family history. Come prepared to ask just a few questions (and hope to come back later with more.) Start with facts that aren’t threatening, just reestablishing the public record. Ask your subject what he or she thinks is important to be preserved, before sharing what you think is important. You may elicit more treasures simply by listening without revealing a detailed agenda. Don’t stand in the way of the stories by interacting too much, or you will wind up with a recording of yourself. Encourage monologues, and nod a lot.

Let’s assume you visit a number of relatives, and you’ve recorded all those sessions. What now? You must separate the wheat from the chaff. I use an excellent audio editing program you can download free, Audacity. Keep the originals, and listen to a copy, erasing the chitchat and preserving the history. Then it’s just a matter of sending your audio to a transcriptionist, and voilà! You have not-so-instant written family stories for your book. It really is easier than you think.

We’re at the Salt Lake Family History Expo at the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy, Utah this weekend. Come by and see us to learn more.



Printing Choices in Self-Publishing

One of the most important choices a self-publishing author has to make is who should print her book. To decide, she needs to know a little bit about the types of print processes she may choose from.

Joel Friedlander in his blog, The Book Designer, presents a good, brief overview of the options in his Self-Publisher’s 5-Minute Guide to Book Printing Processes.

He begins with a summary of the three most common processes available today.

Letterpress-used “from Gutenberg’s day until the middle of the twentieth century.” In this process metal plates are “inked and then paper is rolled over them, transferring the image to the paper, one sheet at a time.”

Offset Printing – a technology developed at beginning of the 20^th Century which creates an image transferred to paper by a rubber covered cylinder.

Digital – which is the fastest growing print technology today , marries a computer-driven high-speed copying machine to computer-driven bindery equipment.

”The major difference between letterpress and offset printing, on one hand, and digital, on the other,” says Friedlander, “is that digital printing is designed to create one copy of a book at a time. The other, earlier methods of printing produce books in stages, and only work efficiently when producing many copies at once.”

In choosing the printing method which is best for you, you need to consider the intended audience, the purpose of the book and the number of copies to be printed. Friedlander offers the following rules of thumb to consider for each print process:

 “Letterpress printing is used almost exclusively for fine, limited edition books …These books are usually made with lavish materials and can cost hundreds of dollars each.”

 “Offset printing is used for the majority of books produced today. Web offset is used to make mass market paperbacks, like the ones sold in racks at supermarkets and at airports, and for very large printings of other books. Sheet-fed offset book printing offers the best quality reproduction of artwork and photography, and is the most flexible when it comes to the number of sizes offered for books and the different kinds of paper available for printing…Use web offset for mass market and very high volume books that don’t need to be high quality. Use sheet-fed offset for print runs over 500 copies or where high quality reproductions are needed.”

“Digital printing is increasingly being used in the print-on-demand distribution model that’s becoming so popular…The self-publishing phenomenon has created a huge demand for digital printing through print-on-demand distribution, since it has eliminated almost all of the cost of putting a book into print…Use digital printing where print runs are very short or where you have no need of an inventory of books.”

Click here to read the full Self-Publisher’s 5 Minute Guide to Book Printing Processes

Scene, Summary and Reflection in Storytelling

One of my favorite bloggers, award-winning journalist Richard Gilbert, recently had a post Lessons from Writing My Memoir. They were lessons that both memoirists and family historians might consider.

Gilbert described dealing with three elements in telling his story – scene, summary and reflection. Scenes tell stories with the classic elements of setting, character, conflict and resolution. They employ the elements of drama. Summary on the other hand simply tells the reader what happened rather than letting it unfold before her. The reader is presented with a collection of facts. Reflection is the author’s attempt to capture the lessons, insights or wisdom to be gained from events in the past. All three are important tools in the writer’s toolkit.

 The problem is, of course, choosing when to employ each tool. Most of us are like Gilbert who said, “I had memories but some gaps and too few images.” The incomplete memories and shortage of stories is often even more acute if you’re writing a family history. So many people resort to mostly summary accounts of the past.

Gilbert had the same problem. But his book got better when he started “…realizing that I didn’t grasp the importance and power of dramatic presentation – scenes – to convey an experience … and let me tell you, scenes are infinitely more powerful.”

Keep this in mind as you work on your book. It’s worth the time to try to find stories to replace summary in as many places as you can. Interviews, or at least conversations, with relatives or friends can help fill in partial memories to allow you to transform summary into scene. You can’t always do it, but where you can you should.

Scenes which tell stories dramatically will bring the people in your book to life. The stories will also help make the insights you draw from events in your reflections more easily understood and vivid. Make the most of the stories you have. Your readers will thank you for it.  

Click here to read Richard Gilbert’s full post.



Prize-Winning Story Telling Tools

The process of creating a memoir or family history, when done well, is one of telling stories. Washington Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing by telling stories well, offered an excellent into the process in a recent interview in Mother Jones magazine.

Said Weingarten: “Basically, I think the art or craft of [story telling]mostly boils down to figuring out internal kickers—how each section will end. Then you need to build the section to justify the kicker, to make it fair, and clear, and earned. I never start a section of the story without knowing how it will end. I also consciously try to shape the story as though it were a movie. I really try to think cinematically, because that’s how people read. They create a theater in their minds.”

If these ideas appeal to you, let me offer you a couple of tools to help you employ them in your own memoir or family history.

Let’s begin, as Weingarten suggests with the end. What’s the point of the story you want to tell? Here’s a simple exercise to clarify the meaning in your stories.

Children’s stories often end “and the moral of the story is…” We can draw conclusions about the meanings of our stories the same way, by making a simple summary statement about its meaning. Think of a story or two you want to include in your book. Write one sentence summarizing the meaning of the story.

The exercise should help you to determine the insight, wisdom or lesson that will serve as what Weingarten calls your “kicker.”

If the idea of a theater of the mind appeals to you, here’s another exercise you will find useful as a tool in organizing your material.

My Life as a Movie: You are a director in Hollywood and you have been hired to make a movie – of your own life (or your family’s life). Your film must be limited to only two hours of screen time, so you must identify only the most essential elements of  the life (lives) it will portray. As you know, movies often jump from scene to scene. And in some films, the scenes are not in chronological order. On a blank piece of paper, list the ten to twenty scenes from you life (your family’s life) that you think are essential to include.

Click here to read the full Mother Jones interview with Gene Weingarten.



Choices in Writing Memoirs and Family History

When you decide to write a memoir or family history book you may find yourself facing a large pile of memories and memorabilia, photos and documents, not to mention the sometimes not so reliable memories of friends and relatives.

Award-winning journalist Laurie Hertzel, now book editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, confronted the same problem when she decided to write News to Me, her memoir of twenty years as a reporter at the Duluth News Tribune. The decisions she made offer some useful guidance for anyone undertaking a book of their own.

Hertzel began by deciding on exactly what the purpose of her book should be. ”I started thinking about all the things about old-time newspapers that people nowadays know nothing about,” she said. “Horseshoe-shaped copy desks – those are gone. Editing on paper with the time-honored editing marks – that’s gone. Cropping photos with a cropping wheel and a pica pole – all of this is gone. I wanted to remember them, and I wanted people to remember them.”

Having fixed her purpose, Hertzel could decide what to include in the book. And what to leave out. “I left out a lot, she said.  “I didn’t write much about my family, I didn’t write much about my private life. This wasn’t a book about how I got married and got divorced.”

Hertzel said, “I tried to structure it by pivotal moments in my career, so it was structured job by job by job.” But even then, she had to make choices about which details of her career to include. ” The tricky part is figuring out what parts of your life to tell that keep moving the story of your life forward,” said Hertzel. “And that was trial and error.”

Hertzel’s experience illustrates the need to make choices in writing any kind of personal history. At the heart of creating a successful book is the decision of what story you want to tell. Once you have made that decision you can take control of all the memories and material you might draw upon and make decisions about what to use.

Laurie Hertzel’s remarks appeared in an interview with Andrea Pitzer on the website Nieman Storyboard maintained by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

Click here to read the full interview.

Truth & Story Telling in Memoir & Family History

In a recent interview with the torontoist.com Canadian Poet Peter Norman discussing his new collection of poems All the Gates of the Theme Park spoke of an issue he faced in writing poems:

"Memory is deceptive; I imagine we all rearrange our histories to fit some sort of narrative. Retelling distorts things further. I have a few stock anecdotes—the time I inadvertently sat on a piece of art in a gallery; the time the cops mistook me for an armed robber—and these have probably mutated to become sleeker or funnier, while memory scrambles along behind, modifying itself to match the tale….I distrust the precision of memory and anecdote…”

Grappling with issues of truth and memory is a conundrum faced by many memoirists and family historians.

Looking backwards, we find details of events missing. We’ve heard Uncle Harry tell stories about his exploits as a fisherman or Grandma’s tales of the life during the Great Depression enough times to know that they have been improved upon over the years.

What’s our obligation in creating a memoir or family history? Are we documenting history or telling a good story? Both, I hope.

There are historical facts that are part of any life story. But they are not the whole story. They are certainly seldom, if ever, the most interesting part. When we write a memoir or family history, we are trying to make sense of the past and the people (including our earlier selves) who lived in it. That means looking backwards to impose an order on events that might not have been evident to the person who was experiencing them. Some we may arrange events into an order that makes more sense. We may decide that some things which in fact happened actually detract from the stories flow and should be left out.

One of the purposes of a memoir or family history is to help readers come to know the people about whom they were written? What kind of people were they? What made them unique? The stories they told, no matter how far they may stray from what the facts appear to be, provide an insight into their character and personality in a way that a scrupulous historical documentation never could. In trying to capture our life story or that of our family, we must recognize that it’s as important to capture the family lore and the way our ancestors remember it as it is to get the facts straight.

Click here to read the full interview with Peter Norman



First-Hand Advice on Self-Publishing

The website cnet is not a site one normally visits for information on self-publishing books. Executive Editor David Carnoy’s column Fully Equipped: The Electronics You Lust For seems a most unlikely source.

But Carnoy wrote a novel, a medical/legal thriller titled Knife Music, which he self-published. In a recent column, Carnoy compiled the lessons he learned from the experience into Self-Publishing a Book: 25 Things You Need to Know.

Carnoy was interested in commercial distribution. As a consequence, many of his 25 things focus on promotion, marketing and sales. If you are thinking about selling your own book you will find his insights useful.

If, however, your goal is to create a self-published book for limited distribution to family and friends you can skip over those items and focus on the advice he offers on writing a book and preparing it for the printer. Here are some examples of Carnoy’s tips:

• “Have a clear goal for your book.” Clarity on the intended audience will both help you decide on the books content and make a good choice on who you should select to print it.
• “Buy as little as possible from your publishing company.” He explains that many subsidy publishers like Author House and Create Space make money not on the sale of author’s books but by selling authors packages of “publishing services.”  He says, "Personally I’d never work with Book Surge’s [his publisher’s, now part of Amazon's Create Space] in-house  editors, copy editors and in-house design people…it’s better to hire your own people and work directly with them.”
• “If you’re serious about your book, hire a book doctor [content editor] and get it copy edited.”

Whatever your plan for your self-published book David Carnoy’s column will help you make it a reality while avoiding some potentially expensive and frustrating pitfalls.

 Click here to read David Carnoy’s full column.

Why You Need a Content Editor - A Demo

How important is editing? Anyone who wonders should take a look at a recent review in the Smokey Mountain News of Waynesville, North Carolina.

Gary Carden reviewed a recently published memoir Appalachian Roots written by David Waldrop and Michael Revere. Says Carden, “Appalachian Roots captures the essential facts in two very different (but equally daunting) journeys to adulthood in Appalachia.”

After examining the books strengths, Carden shifts gears with a question, “Does Appalachian Roots have problems? Yes it does…it could have used some serious editing and revision.”

He finds three problems that editing could have avoided.

1. The book needs a preface. “There’s no attempt to define this book’s purpose.”
2. “There’s also a lot of repetition.”
3. On the other hand, the book is sometimes short of descriptive details. It “…does not tell the reader enough about the book’s most provocative episodes…”

A good job of editing could have avoided all three. Unfortunately developmental or content editing is a step often skipped on the path to publication. Self-publishing authors find someone to proof read their manuscript and send it off to the printer. Publishers save money by going straight to copy editing and proof reading. In either case the author never has the opportunity to have a conversation with an editor who can help him improve the way he tells his story. When an author works with a content editor he can expect help on how to make sure his meaning is clear. His editor will advise him as on which repetitions can be cut to improve narrative flow and where more detail is needed to improve the story.

As you prepare your book make sure you get a good edit from a qualified content editor. You will avoid the kinds of problems which marred Appalachian Roots. Your readers will thank you for it.

Click here to read the full review of Appalachian Roots



A Resource Rating Publishers and Publishing Services

Looking for a Publisher? Preditors and Editors which bills itself as “A guide to publishers and publishing services for the serious writers,” is a website that can provide some useful assistance.

 The site offers hundreds of listings of publishers, publishing services, editors and literary agents. Not all services providers are listed in any category. (Stories To Tell doesn’t appear at present.) A link to the provider’s website is provided for each listing. Most entries are accompanied by recommendations or warnings concerning the provider. (There is a thorough explanation of the criteria used in determining ratings.) Entries indicate services provided by each listed publisher, editor or agent. Warnings consist first of general advice on how to spot “scam publishers” or “scam literary agencies.” Both in the general listings and in a special section there are warnings about specific providers. Many of the warnings are reports from writers who have had problems working with a provider. A lot of the content is submitted by readers to the site.

The site’s emphasis is on commercial publication, but it does provide information on some small publishers who may be of interest to self-publishing authors.

Whatever your publishing goals, the site is worth checking out.

Click here to visit Editors and Preditors.



Telling Stories With Pictures in Your Personal History

Telling good stories is a critical part of writing a memoir or family history. But it’s possible to enhance the written stories by using images to illustrate them or to tell others that don’t make it into the text. Darren Rowse offers some excellent ideas on how to use pictures effectively in his article Telling Stories With Pictures on the Digital Photography School website.

In selecting the photographs you intend to use in your book begin by realizing what emotions, moods, story lines, ideas and messages the images you choose may convey. Individual photographs may convey a story in a single image by emphasizing the context in which its subject is placed or by displaying the relationship between two subjects.

A series of photographs might document a specific event or experience. Think of someone’s wedding photos or pictures taken on a vacation.

Using photos to tell stories can, on a larger scale, parallel the kind of thinking a writer does in planning a written story. Carefully select introductory photos which will present important characters visually and provide a view of the settings in which events will take place.

Consider themes you may want to develop as your story unfolds. The themes might relate to the types of photos you employ – visual themes or stylistic themes. Or the photographs might convey details of time, place or relationship by focusing on a single character or characters in a similar pose at several different moments in time or images of a setting taken years apart.

Select the final images by deciding what lasting impression you want to leave with your reader, just as you plan the book’s concluding chapter.

Click here to read Rowse’s full article.

The Best Way to Preserve Family History Research

After a wonderful weekend at the Midwest Family History Expo in Kansas City, I was once again reminded of how much genealogists love research. Me too! But I also found myself having numerous conversations with people about what to do with their research.

 Donna Przecha offered some good advice to family history researchers in her article From Planning to Printing: Your Family in Print on Genealogy.com. She said, “Devoted genealogists love going through their many collections of family group sheets, boxes of photographs, copies of census reports, notes from all sources and the ubiquitous photocopies of relevant pages of books. To us these are the building blocks of history — our personal history. However, if you want to get the attention of your children, your cousins, other people with the same surnames or even other genealogists, you have to present your material in a more concise and logical manner.”

 

Her conclusion was exactly the one we had been discussing at the Expo, “…the most efficient and logical way for most people is in a book…” I was happy to see that Przecha went on to advise people to, “Try not to make your book a recitation of names, dates and places. Add as much story as you possibly can.”

 The other thing we frequently discussed with Expo visitors was limiting the scope of the book they wanted to create. A lifetime of research is often more than a single volume can reasonably contain. Deciding to limit a book to one line of the family or deciding on a chronological limit, the family’s arrival in the U.S. or the Civil War, or deciding to include three generations can all allow you to work with a manageable amount of material to include in your book.

Click her to see Donna Przecha’s complete article.



A Great Self-Publishing Resource

If you are thinking about self-publishing The Self-Publishing Review is a resource you should check out. The site is an online magazine, and indeed a community, for people interested in self-publishing. Many of its articles are written with people who have commercial self-publishing in mind. These features focus on publicity and distribution channels.

However, there is plenty for the potential self-publishing author who isn’t in it for the money. The Publisher Reviews are of particular interest. Current posts include Get It Together Lulu which looks at the digital publisher’s problems with ebooks and a look at subsidy publisher iUniverse in an iUniverse Review.

Reader forums provide interesting comments on topics including: “Knowledge of Copyright Anyone”, “Evaluating eBook Schemes”, and “DIY or Hire It Out?”

The resources section offers a variety of tools for self-publishing authors. I found the Book Design resources of particular interest.

Click here to visit the Self-Publishing Review Site.

How to Interview a Printer or Publisher

It’s tricky to choose a printer or publisher because they may provide different services, at very different prices. You may hope to shop around by asking the price, but the answers you receive can be confusing. Instead of trying to compare apples to oranges, think of selecting the printer or publisher who is the best match for your needs.

Make a list of printers and publishers you are considering and call them with your interview questions. If they do not have the exact services you want, move on. You don’t want to compromise on something so important.

Question 1. Do you provide printing services for books with/without an ISBN?

If you are privately self-publishing, state that you do not want any marketing services to get “just printing” price quotes.

Question 2. Can you print my book to my specifications?

Ask about the size, hard or soft cover, (or both), color interior, acid-free paper, and a sewn, not glued, binding if you want your book to last. If you are looking for specialty features like faux-leather covers or embossing, specify this now.

Question 3. Will I retain all rights to my book?

Even if you receive an unequivocal “yes”, make sure there will not be any rights issues you didn’t anticipate. Clarify by asking, “Will I retain the rights to any files I upload to you?” And, “If I want to print the same book with some other printer, or decide to market the book on amazon.com next year, is there any conflict?” This should shake out publishers with contractual terms you don’t want.

Question 4. Do you have a minimum order? Are there set-up fees in addition to the cost of the books?

Depending on how many books you need, fees may seem negligible, or they may be a deal breaker.

Question 5. How much will my books cost? Is there a bulk discount?

Some printers offer discounts after 10 books, some after 25, etc. This may make a big difference.

Question 6. What if I want to order more books later?

Some printers will have different terms for reorders. They may or may not keep your files. For family histories, it is good to have a plan for reprints in the future.

To read the complete article, click here.



Three Questions About Books at the Family History Expo

We just finished a wonderful weekend at the Midwest Family Historry Expo in Kansas City. We presented a seminar on Family History Books: Editing, Design and Publishing and had the opportunity to talk with a lot of very nice people about their family history book projects.

The questions we were asked most often related to three topics:

• What should the scope of my book be?
• What will I need to submit to a editor, book designer or printer?
• How do I choose a printer or publisher?

We’ll look at the first two today and the third in our next post.

If there’s one thing genealogists and family historians love it’s research. The question they all face is, “How much research is enough?” We advised people to recognize that there is a difference between the process – reaching the family history, which will probably never be finished – and their intended product – a family history book, which will contain a finite part of that ongoing research. The difficult decision for most people is, which part?

For people who have been researching for years it many not be possible to include everything they have learned in a single family history book. We discussed several possible ways to decide what to include. You might include only one line of ancestors in your book (with the possibility of doing a future book on another line). You might place a chronological limit on the book. For example, you might deal with only the last three generations or choose a year like 1900 or an event like World War I as the starting point.

Some of the people we spoke with were somewhat frustrated by the fact that they have had difficulty finding stories about segments of their family. They felt blocked by gaps in their research. We talked with some of them about writing their own memoirs and including their own memories of their families.

The scope of a book will vary from person to person, everyone must decides what fits their family and their research in deciding what to include in their book.

We have recently posted an article on the second question, “What will I need to submit?” on our website. Click here to see the article, What Your Editor Wants From You.



"Fair Use" in Memoir and Family History Books

A question that arises freqently when talking to first time writers is, what if I want to use material published somewhere else? Can I include it in my book? What do I have to do for it to be legal?

 The legal principle used to answer the question is called “Fair Use” which has been developed to determine how copyrighted material may be used by other authors. It weighs the original author’s ownership of her material and right to be compensated for it if someone else wants to publish any part of it against the need of another author to use some of the material in his work.

 The U.S. Copyright office lists four elements used to determine whether a use is fair:

• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
• The nature of the copyrighted work
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
• The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

The 1961 Copyright Law explained the fair use principle in this way: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”

Any material used under the fair use principle must cite the source from which it is take.

If you are uncertain of how the fair use principle applies to the material you want to use, the Copyright Office advises, “The safest course is always to get permission from the copyright owner before using copyrighted material.”

Update on 2012-07-02 21:26 by Nan Barnes

Pat, the U.S. Copyright Office offers some information on the length of copyright on its website. That's probably a good place to start. Part of the question is the original publication date. Another is whether someone who obtained and changed it before publishing a new version and possibly establishing a new copyright. What does the publication in which it appears say? If you found the maps in a library or archive ask the archivist about rights to the material. Doing some research about rights before publishing anything is always a good idea.