To construct a narrative family history one must gather the family lore and stories to supplement the facts drawn from vital records. Unfortunately, as most family historians know too well, the people we would like to ask about those stories are often no longer with us. When that’s the case, you need to reconstruct your family’s narrative from the limited records available.
Letters and diaries can be a rich source of family stories. Even a single letter can be a wonderful tool in understanding an ancestors time and place.
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Family history books are unique. They are usually targeted to a very small audience of family members. As a consequence, producing a family history presents an author with some unique challenges. Many family historians think finding a publisher is one of them. The truth is, they’d be better off without one.
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Telling a good story often depends on asking the right questions while you discover the facts of the tale you want to tell. Keeping three questions in mind as you research your genealogy will help you to create an interesting family history which will engage your readers.
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What are you doing for Preservation Week? It’s an important question for genealogists and family historians, whose mission is to preserve their family’s heritage. Here’s a chance to take action!
The American Library Association launched Preservation Week in 2010 out of a concern that “our cultural and information heritage…continues to be at risk.” The goal of this week, April 27-May 3, is “preserving and collecting personal, family, or community heritage.” You can see it on the ALA website Preservation Week: Pass It On!
The ALA’s efforts focus on our tangible heritage – documents, photos, artifacts, and digital collections of records. That’s good! But what about your family’s intangibles, the family stories and lore? Here are some things you should be doing right now.
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10 quotations about the craft of writing from great literary figures. These ideas will both inspire and instruct any writer.
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Any self-publishing author who wants to get his book out there might ask:
Is there a no-hassle way to sell my book on my website, Word Press blog, Facebook, or Pinterest page while keeping a larger share of the profits than I’d get on a third party site?
The 2013 Australian start-up Selz provides just that. Its website promises, “Effortless ecommerce for selling online from any website.”
Let's check it out.
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If you’re a self-publishing author, you have some important choices to make. In this blog series, we are discussing the pros and cons to help you with the most important decisions you’ll need to know about:
How authors can market their books online without technical skills?
In any group of self-publishing authors, this is always the big question. Here are five great ideas we have talked about in the past and links to our posts that explored the marketing tools in detail.
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How to hire self-publishing experts without the costs and problems of using a subsidy publisher.
When you hire freelancers they are responsible to you. You maintain control of your book’s production. You decide what kinds of help you need and keep costs down, paying only for what you need, rather than paying for a package of services that you don’t need.
Here are some things to keep in mind while hiring.
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If you’re a self-publishing author, you have some important choices to make. In this blog series, we are discussing the pros and cons to help you with the most important decisions you’ll need to know about:
Is self-publishing as a DIY project? Or should you hire others to help with editing, book design, publishing, distribution, publicity and marketing?
Beginning authors see the “self” in self-publishing and think it must be a DIY project; that they have a long learning curve ahead to master every step of the process. That’s not always the case; in fact, almost all experienced self-publishing writers take a team approach.
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“The indie author insurrection has become a revolution that will strip publishers of power they once took for granted.” - Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords
If you’re a self-publishing author, you have some important choices to make. Here is one of the most important decisions you’ll need to know about:
Do you really want to “self-publish,” or should you use a “self-publishing company”?
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“It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly,” advises Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer C. J. Cherryh.
One of the keys to transforming a rough edged draft manuscript into a well-edited, polished book is getting quality feedback about what you’ve written.
Many writers spend hours planning their draft – creating outlines, plot summaries, and character sketches. Yet those same authors ask for a critique of their draft without any real plan of how to make sure the feedback will be useful. They are disappointed when one reader’s sole comment is, “It was good. I really liked it,” and another does a hatchet job on the text (and its author).
Two questions will help you avoid such less than useful results:
1. Who should I ask to read my draft?
2. What specific instructions should I give them on the type of feedback I want?
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Writing well is difficult at best. Here are some tools gathered from around the net to help make it easier. Sometimes there’s nothing like having the right tool for the job. I hope you find these useful.
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Your family has lived through a variety of historical turning points. But if you’re like many genealogists who want to turn their research into a family history, you don’t think about your ancestors in relation to those pivotal moments in history.
Here's why you might want to.
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Thousands of people write memoirs every year. How do you make your memoir standout from the crowd? Here’s so advice from masters of the genre on how to make sure yours is a good one.
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Novelist Suzanne Berne’s book Missing Lucile: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew chronicles her search for meaning in her family’s history.
The experience is one that is familiar genealogists and family historians. It might also be a cautionary tale they would be well to examine.
At the heart is her grandmother, Lucile, who died of cancer in her early forties. However, her father, a very young boy at the time, always believed that his mother had abandoned him. He said, “We were told she was gone. No one ever said where.”
Berne decided that her missing grandmother was "the Rosetta stone by which all subsequent family guilt and unhappiness could be decoded.” She set out to unlock the family secrets by discovering what she could about Lucile’s story.
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Two of my new clients need me to perform OCR on their books. OCR, you say - is that like CPR? Sort of. OCR, or optical character recognition, can save the life of a book that would otherwise die in this digital age. It allows us to scan hard copies of books, one that are not already on a computer, and to transcribe the text into a word processing program like Microsoft Word. Then the text can be edited and designed just like a modern book.
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“Why are you still publishing print books?” a woman at the Tucson Festival of Books asked. “My friends tell me that everything is going to be digital.” That’s a legitimate question; so we had a friendly debate about the relative merits of digital and print books. As you know, at Stories To Tell we design both print and ebooks, but I don’t expect that print is dead or it will ever go out of style. Here are some reasons for a printed book.
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Today we have a collection of great ideas from around the web to help you market your self-published book.
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Elmore Leonard said, “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” That’s easier said than done. Well-written genre novels are often described as “page-turners.” Learning how to build and maintain momentum means choosing what to leave out, because that keeps the readers turning pages.
I love a good mystery. Nobody writes them better than Michael Connelly. The Gods of Guilt, the latest in his Michael Haller (The Lincoln Lawyer) series, is a wonderful example of omitting what’s unnecessary to maintain the novel’s pace.
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600,000 to a million new titles will be published this year, and far fewer than 1% of them will ever find their way onto bookstore shelves. 800,000 books are currently available for Amazon’s Kindle. The upshot? In this crowded marketplace, readers won’t find your book unless you help them. How can you work toward that goal?
Even as you’re writing, you can get started on building your audience. Begin early if you can, six to eight months before your book’s publication date, to lay your foundation and build some momentum. Here are some of the steps you can take in advance.
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