You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right.
Stories To Tell is a full service book publishing company for independent authors. We provide editing, design, publishing, and marketing of fiction and non-fiction. We specialize in sophisticated, unique illustrated book design.
Giving a book a good title is hard. Author’s often struggle with it. Would you read a novel titled Trimalchio in West Egg? That’s what F. Scott Fitzgerald titled his third novel until his editor Maxwell Perkins convinced him The Great Gatsby might work better.
As Michael Hyatt, Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers explains, a book’s title is “…like a newspaper headline: If prospective readers are intrigued, they keep reading. If they don’t, they move on to the next book…”
How do you make sure you have a good title?
We’re looking forward to the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree which begins Thursday in Burbank. One of the things we enjoy is that the participants come ready to learn. Many come equipped with questions they want answered before the conference ends on Sunday. If you have attended a few genealogy conferences you know that the questions people thinking about writing or already working on a family history book will ask usually follow a predictable pattern. Here are five we are sure we’ll here more than once?
I am currently reading John Sayles’ massive (955 page) novel A Moment in the Sun. .It is in every sense a big book focusing on the United States at the turn of the 20th Century by focusing on dramatic events including the Alaskan Gold Rush, the Spanish-American War, it’s lingering aftermath, the Philippine insurrection against American intervention and the 1898 Wilmington North Carolina race riots ...
But there’s something about the style of Sayles’ book that I think writers ought to reflect on.
I never met my Uncle Cecil. He died June 17, 1944, just over two and a half years before I was born. But I thought a lot about him as we took a few days off over Memorial Day Weekend. That was appropriate because Uncle Cecil, known to everyone in the family as Squeak, was killed in Normandy, along with so many other American soldiers, near the town of Sainte Mere Eglise, eleven days after D-day.
We are working on a second edition of Squeak’s War: Letters from the Front Lines of World War II, a book that travelled around the family in a type-written form for more than sixty years before it was rescued and published as a hardback book. It consists of the letters he sent home from the time he was drafted in 1942 to training at Ft. Ord, near Monterey, California, Camp Crowder, Missouri, and Ft. Bragg, North Carolina and front line service in North Africa and Sicily before landing in Normandy.
The general rule in scanning photos for inclusion in a print book is that they be scanned at a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. What’s important to understand is that means that the quality of the scan will be acceptable if it is printed at exactly the same size as the original. A 4”x6” photo scanned at 300dpi can be printed at 4”x 6” or smaller in the book. But that’s only part of the story. If you want to enlarge the photo size in the book the original must be scanned at a much higher resolution. The Scantips.com website gives a good summary of the basics of the relationship of scanning dpi and print size in an article Pixels, Printers and Video – What’s With That?
The writer of fiction, the memoirist, and the family historian are all story tellers. To be sure, they tell stories differently. But in each literary form, the author is the teller of a tale. In that role what do these story tellers have in common?
It is instructive to see what two of our greatest contemporary storytellers have said about their art.
Self publishing authors who are working on manuscripts often try to mix two steps of the process of creating a book – writing and book design. This is unfortunate, not to mention often frustrating. What happens is that these authors try to format their books in Microsoft Word and place their photos as they create their manuscript. When they edit text the photos move from the spot they were originally placed. Word 2010 is better than previous versions, but the reality is that it’s not a tool for book design. A printer will ultimately require a manuscript designed in Adobe Creative Suite’s InDesign software. So let’s look at a better way to manage your photos as you create your book.
This one's just for fun - geeky fun. As you know, part of book design is having an eye for fonts. How do we learn about fonts? If you're of an academic mind, the best book on the subject, ever, is The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. You can learn about the history of type, structural forms, shaping the page, and much, much more. Bringhurst writes with such passion that you find yourself deeply engaged with the rules of acronyms and ellipses, ligatures and page proportions.
No? OK, then, how about playing a goofy game online instead? Check out www.typeconnection.com, a wonderfully designed site that lets you think about type in a whole new way. It's set up like The Dating Game, the old TV show.
You pick your font and try to find a good connection for it. You need to choose a strategy for finding a good match - by (font) family, by (visual) similarities, or by dissimilarities, since "opposites attract", or by shared history and influences - perhaps the same period or font foundry.
Next comes the part where you might actually learn a thing or two. Like the dating game, you skim the bios of the fonts competing for a match. Pick one, and you go on a date. You can see how the two fonts pair up. Incidentally, you'll learn about ascenders and descenders, serifs and strokes and curls. Mostly you'll just enjoy this website's interactivity and the creative way they make fonts the subject of a game. Check it out!
I am reading an excellent sci-fi novel, The January Dancer, by Michael Flynn. In describing Brigit Ban, one of his characters, Flynn says, “…she was the sort for whom a well- constructed narrative is worth a thousand detailed facts, and on occasion she was known to discard a fact or two to save the narrative.” Great description! Also, important advice for memoirists and family historians.
Whether telling your own story or that of your family you have a mass of facts at your disposal. Creating a book involves choosing which of those facts to include and which don’t make it into the book. Not all facts are equally important.
Authors published by traditional publishers counted on and received quality editing before their manuscript went to press. A self publishing author must make sure that his book receives no less professional attention before publishing it.
Harriet Evans, author of the novel Love Always, said recently in a piece in The Guardian, “It is vital that an author has someone willing to be tough with them. It's in their best interests.”
Why?
There’s a branch of the family tree that a lot of family historians ignore – themselves.
People often express frustration about not being able to discover interesting stories as they research ancestors. They say, “I wish I’d asked ________to tell me more family stories before he/she died.” When future historians in your family look back, will they say that about your generation?
They won’t if you preserve your own personal history.
If you haven’t yet explored the TED talks (TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading) check them out at http://www.ted.com/talks. You’ll be sure to find something that speaks to your particular interests.
For me, that particular interest is in books – reading them, making them, sharing them. So this talk from Chip Kidd, king among book designers, pleased me to no end. Chip Kidd brought us the distinctive book cover of Jurassic Park, and one of the best-designed, all-around-best books on my reading shelf right now, Haruki Murakami’s IQ84.
Chip Kidd is clever, he’s funny, and he is right on about books! Check out his performance for a laugh, and maybe it will also inspire an idea for how you’d like your book to look.
“One in three children admit they don’t want to listen to their grandparents because they find them ‘boring,’” said The Mail Online reporting on a poll taken by print on demand publisher Blurb.com. “42% of parents say children tune out when elders start to speak about the past.”
That’s a real challenge for anyone working on a family history book. The vast majority of those authors say they want to write a book to preserve the family history for the grand children.
How can a family historian make sure she captures the grand children’s interest? One important way is to recognize the difference between researching and recording the family history and telling the family story.
An author aiming for commercial success must approach their book as a business person. Your book is, after all, a product you wish to sell. One of the first questions to consider is, how have similar books done in the marketplace.
Michael Larsen, a partner in Larsen-Pomada Literary Agents wrote in Katherine Sands’ excellent book Making the Perfect Pitch:
“The moment you have an exciting idea for a book…
• Check the competition
• Make yourself an expert on your subject by reading the most important the most important competitive books and browsing through others.”
Anytime you run into anyone interested in books, be they readers, authors, book sellers, or publishers, you find people anxious to talk about what’s happening in the publishing world.
Lately that conversation has focused on the implications of the Justice Department’s recent lawsuit against Apple, and publishers Hachette Group, Harper Collins, MacMillan, Penguin, and Simon and Schuster who the government alleged engaged in the fixing of e-book prices
Everybody seems to have an opinion. This weekend the New York Times Sunday Dialogue presented some excellent opinions on the topic Books in a Digital Age. They are worth your time.
We spent the weekend at the L.A. Times Festival of Books having some wonderful conversations about books. One of the topics authors seemed most interested in was who controlled the rights to their books. Great question!
Copyright is what often comes to mind first. The U.S. Copyright Office says, “Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.” Should you register that copyright? The Copyright Office explains, “In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work.” The so-called “Poor Man’s Copyright” in which you mail a copy of your work to yourself may establish the fact that you created the work, but does not provide legal protection. The Copyright Office explains, “There is no provision in the copyright law regarding any such type of protection, and it is not a substitute for registration.”
“One of the markers of a life well lived must surely be the stories, experiences and memories that are told, retold, remembered and re-experienced throughout the life span,” said Kathleen Adams of the Center for Journal Therapy in Denver which conducts life story writing programs for seniors.
The Grub Street Memoir Project in Boston has recently published its second anthology My Legacy is Simple. The first is titled Born Before Plastic. Alexis Rizzuto, the Memoir Project manager and senior writing coach, says that two striking features of both books are the ability of the seniors to make their stories “come alive” and the “profound sense of place” their stories of Boston contain.
Self publishing requires a lot more decisions for authors than traditional publishing ever did.
The first question is whether the book is intended for a commercial audience or a private publication for family and friends. The answer to this question can affect every aspect of the production of the book including editing, design, printing and distribution.
Here are some questions to consider in deciding which type of self publishing is right for you and your book.
Faced with the need to close and renovate the west wing of the American History Museum, interim director Marc Pachter had a problem: what would happen to all the beloved and famous objects housed there, like Kermit the Frog, or Archie Bunker’s chair?
The museum staff solved the problem by selecting just over a hundred objects for display in a new exhibit titled American Stories. These objects were chosen to symbolically represent the larger American story.
“We wanted to create an exhibit that would give people an introductory experience to American history,” explains curator Bonnie Campbell-Lilienfeld. “…this was supposed to set a context for the rest of the museum.”
Memoir writers and family can learn a valuable lesson from the way the Smithsonian dealt with its problem.
People often think of an interview as a Q & A between the interviewer and her subject. That might be the case if you are doing a radio interview or a piece for a celebrity magazine. But to do a successful oral history interview you need to think about the process in a quite different way.
The goal of your oral history is not generally an attempt to add to your store of facts, but a quest for colorful and detailed stories to enhance understanding of the facts you already know.
