Memoir and Family History: Part 6—Publishing and Distribution

Some memoirs and family histories will appeal to a wider audience and be appropriate for traditional publishing. If your story falls into that category, this installment won’t apply to you. Since the percentage of personal and family stories that are published by conventional publishers is small, I will focus on self-publishing and subsidy publishing in this section.

If you self-publish, you handle all the aspects of publishing yourself, negotiating and contracting with providers for work you cannot do yourself. If you use a subsidy publisher, you pay a publishing company to publish the book for you, an option if you are publishing a trade paperback or hardcover book. Learn more in the Self-Publishing Primer.

The first step is publishing your manuscript is to choose your format. Your choice will depend upon the size of your audience, your financial resources, and your method of distribution.

Your options include:

• Loose-leaf binder—If you are distributing copies only to immediate family members, you can print the pages on your computer printer or at a print shop, then insert them into three-ringer binders. This is inexpensive and easy; it also allows for additions if you write piecemeal as my mother did. You can print on high-quality paper and choose a binder with a clear plastic cover that allows you to insert a page as a book cover. If you’re printing only a few copies, you can include color photos in your book; color printing is too expensive in most other formats.
• Spiral bound—If you’re printing dozens or a few hundred copies, you can take a computer file with a camera-ready manuscript in a word processing program to a copy shop. The copy shop can print the pages (which can be either 8.5” x 11” or 5.5 x 11”) and bind the books with spiral or comb binding.
• E-book—You can convert your word processing file to a PDF file for electronic distribution. Adobe will convert up to five files for you at no cost, and there are several other free online servers to convert Word or other files to PDF. When you have your book in a PDF file, you can send it as an e-mail attachment or create a Web site where the file can be downloaded. An e-book is the most cost-effective way to deliver your book, but most people also want a physical copy of the book. You might consider offering the e-book for free and charging for a print edition.
• Trade paperback or hardcover—Trade paperbacks are larger and higher quality than mass-market paperbacks. They can be printed in small print runs (usually most cost-effective for at least 500 copies) and can also be printed digitally as print on demand (POD). Hardcover books are the most durable; however, they are also the most expensive and generally require a fairly large print run.

After your books are printed, you are ready to distribute them. This can be done in several ways:

• Gifts—If you publish loose-leaf binders for family members, you will probably give the books away because the cause is minimal. The cost is even less for e-books, so they can be freely given away as well.
• Sales—If you publish larger quantities or more expensive formats, you will probably need to be compensated for the books. Determine all your costs for writing and publishing the book and divide that number by the number of copies being distributed to determine the unit cost. You can sell the books at cost or increase the price to make a profit. Taking advance orders can help generate money to pay printing costs as well as help you determine how many books to print. Since most people tend to procrastinate, it helps to offer a discount for prepaid orders received before the specified deadline, which should be before you place the printing order. Even if you base your print run on the number of pre-orders you receive, be sure to order extra, both for late orders and for your future children and grandchildren.
• Combination—You may decide to give away books to immediate family but sell to extended family and others. Or, as mentioned earlier, you may give away the e-book and sell the print book. You might sell the book to everyone, but charge family members only the actual costs and charge other people a higher price. The choice is yours, based on your resources and desires.

No matter what format you choose or how you distribute your memoir or family history, you have created a legacy that will last—not only for your children and your grandchildren, but also for generations to come.

I hope you have found this series on writing memoirs and family histories helpful and wish you joy and success in your personal and family story writing.

Memoir and Family History: Part 5—Writing

Memoirists and family historians are not necessarily experienced writers, and they often don’t realize how many drafts it takes to achieve a finished product. The first draft will be “pure green dreck.” Start writing, and expect that you will re-write … and re-write … and re-write. But get the first draft written first.

Here are a few things to consider:

• Write in a natural style. You’re not writing an academic paper; you’re writing a story that you want people to read and enjoy. Write the way you talk, not the way you think will impress people. Readers shouldn’t pay attention to the writing; they should be wrapped up in the story and not thinking about what a great writer you are.
• In family history, you may consider it important to include facts such as birth and death dates. If you put these facts in the story itself, weave the facts into the narrative. If you find it difficult to fit in all the facts you want without interrupting the flow of the story, include these details in an appendix rather than in the story itself.
• You may be writing history, but you’re also telling a story. The facts are the basis of the story, but the people—their thoughts and emotions— make the story real and meaningful to the reader. Details and everyday occurrences turn dry history into exciting story. The story doesn’t have to start at the beginning. Open the book with a hook, action or dialogue that will immediately catch the readers’ attention and make them want to keep reading.
• Although you aren’t preaching or teaching, you can certainly share your and your family’s beliefs and values. Your story is about people and what is important to them; spiritual, social, and political beliefs and activities are important to most people. Let your readers know which beliefs and activities are integral parts of your life or your family’s history.
• Choose appropriate photographs whenever possible to make ancestors more real and memories more vivid to readers. How many pictures you include and how you arrange them will depend in part on the format you choose.

Every writer has her own way of writing. There is no formula or set of steps that you must follow in order to write your book. Use the following as guidelines, and adapt them to your own working style.

• Get the words on paper in the way you prefer—longhand, typing, recording—see Part 4: Getting Started.
• Write in an organized fashion—chronologically or categorically—if that works for you. Otherwise, write stories or chapters or scenes as you think of them.
• Correct spelling and punctuation errors as Spell and Grammar Check point them out to you, but ignore grammar errors because they are often wrong.
• Don’t edit or revise until you’ve finished the first draft unless you realize you got something wrong or you change your mind about what you want to say.
• If you have written piecemeal, assemble the stories into one document. You may organize your book into chapters or sections either by date (chronological order) or by topic, depending on your personal preference and the nature of your story.
• Edit the manuscript—see my series of posts on editing.  Check first for content and continuity. Did you leave out something important? Did you spend too many words on a particular topic? Does the order makes sense or does the story seem disjointed? Do you need to add any information to make another part of the story understandable? You may need to add, delete, or re-write material.
• Edit again for consistency. Are there any inconsistencies in names, places, character traits, and spellings? If you have fictionalized the story, do the characters demonstrate consistent values or behaviors, or if not, is the reason for any change clear?
• Edit again for factual and grammar errors. Especially in a family history, verify events and dates—anything that can be checked.
• Repeat editing the manuscript until you are satisfied that it is the best you can reasonably make it, realizing that you will never have a perfect book and that too much editing can wipe the life and passion out of your story.
• Get input from other readers. Ask one or more people to read your manuscript and give you feedback. For family histories, other family members familiar with some or all of the history can be very helpful. Someone without knowledge of your family or personal story may be in the best position to tell you if they understand what you’ve written. A professional editor will not only catch grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors but can also improve clarity and readability.
• Evaluate the feedback and use what you find helpful and ignore what you don’t. Note, however, that if several people mention the same thing, you probably need to revise it even if you are happy with what you have written.
• Read the manuscript again to ensure that no errors have crept in and continuity and flow haven’t been disrupted during revisions.

Note that a memoir or family history doesn’t have to be written on paper. In this digital age, video is becoming a popular way to record memories. I am not qualified to give any advice about creating a video of your personal or family story. However, you can use many of the tips in this series to gather and prepare the information for your video.

In the final installment of the series, we will cover publishing and distribution.

Memoir and Family History: Part 4—Getting Started

You’ve decided whether you’re going to write a memoir or a family history, the scope of the story (some aspect of your own life or a certain group of ancestors), and the genre (nonfiction or fiction).

Now you need to determine your audience.

In Leaving a Legacy, I said that most memoirs and family histories don’t have a wide appeal in the mass market. However, if there’s something out of the ordinary in your story, you may believe thousands of people would be willing to pay money to read it.

If you are like most memoirists and family historians, though, your audience will be narrower. For memoirs, people close to you—family, friends, business associates, fellow members of your church and organizations—will be the prime audience.

Depending on the aspect of your life you are writing about, you may have an audience related to that. For example, if you write about dealing with a disease or overcoming a tragedy (such as a violent crime), organizations for people suffering with the disease or people impacted by the tragedy may be interested in your story.

The audience for a family history includes the descendants of the people in the story, both those living today and future generations. Museums, libraries, and historical societies in the areas where the book is set may also be interested, especially if you include historical facts about the area along with your own family story. Individuals and organizations with similar interests to you or your ancestors might also be interested, such as a church that your ancestors founded or a professional or trade association related to a craft, hobby, or business important in the story.

Next, create a plan.

• Research—Most family historians will have already done much of their research before they decide to start writing, but you may need to do additional specific research.
• Interview—Decide who (if anyone) you would like to interview and how you will do it (video, audio recording, or handwritten notes); contact them to schedule; prepare your questions. Be sure to save the recordings if you videotape or audiotape the interviews so your family have the opportunity to see the person and/or hear their voice.
• Get organized—Some writers like to prepare detailed outlines before they start writing, and others prefer to just start writing. If you don’t outline, you probably want a notebook or a computer file to record ideas as they occur to you and to keep track of research and interviews. There’s no rule that says you have to start writing at the beginning and finish at the end. See William Zinsser’s advice in the installment on memoir.
• Decide how you will write—You can type in a word processor; write in longhand and have someone type the manuscript; talk into a tape recorder and have someone transcribe the tape; arrange for someone else to interview you and write up the interview.

 Although I expect my blog readers will do their own writing, some people who want their personal or family story written prefer to hire a ghostwriter. This is a viable option—just keep the following in mind:

• You are telling your or your family’s story, and it should sound like you. Each person has a distinctive voice, word choices and the way the words are put together. If you hire someone else to write your story, find someone who will become familiar with and use your voice.
• Ghostwriters are skilled and well-paid professionals; reputable ghostwriters typically do not write for a percentage of the income from the book because there is no guarantee the book will ever be published much less produce any income. You can expect to pay a significant fee upfront for the services of a qualified ghostwriter.
• As I wrote about in my series on copyright, written work is protected by copyright when it is put into fixed form. Be sure that any agreement you make with a ghostwriter specifies that the writing is work-for-hire and the copyright belongs to you.

 If you’re having a hard time thinking of things to write about, try some memory triggers:

• Re-read old journals or diaries—even old calendars with notes of your activities.
• Pull out and read those old letters that you stored away years ago (if you’re old enough to remember written letters)
• Review e-mails, forum and blog posts, and other electronic/online writings. Many people have documented experiences and thoughts online or in e-mails rather than hand-written letters.
• Look through scrapbooks and photo albums—do this with other family members and share memories of the people and events you see.
• Visit places and buildings from your past—your hometown, your college, businesses where you’ve worked.
• Read your hometown newspaper from years past—especially you lived in a small town. 
• Hold family heirlooms and personal treasures in your hands—remember the stories you’ve heard or the emotions you’ve felt.

Next, we’ll talk about the writing process.

Memoir and Family History: Part 2—Memoir

As mentioned in Part 1, the term memoir can cover many types of writing. Usually a memoir is focused on one aspect of the author’s life. Perhaps you lived through an important historical event, and you want to share how that event affected your life. Maybe you overcame a problem, such as illness or abuse or addiction, and you want to help others through your own experiences. You might want to focus on the joys and challenges of raising a large family or tell readers about your spiritual journey. You can write about how the experiences of a certain phase of your life—childhood, college, marriage—helped form you into the person you are or about your vocation or avocation.

Reviewing your memories and choosing a focus can be an exercise in introspection as well as the starting point for your memoir. The book Thinking About Memoir may help you in this process.

William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction and Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past, points out that you don’t have to include all the “important” events of your life but you do need to include the small things that stick in your memory. In How to Write a Memoir, he says:

Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory. What you write doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. Tuesday’s episode doesn’t have to be related to Monday’s episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past.

Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months. Don’t be impatient to start writing your “memoir,” the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day, take all your entries out of their folder and spread them on the floor. (The floor is often a writer’s best friend.) Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about and what it’s not about. They will tell you what’s primary and what’s secondary, what’s interesting and what’s not, what’s emotional, what’s important, what’s funny, what’s unusual, what’s worth pursing and expanding. You’ll begin to glimpse your story’s narrative shape and the road you want to take.

A memoir is highly personal—it’s all about you. You decide which aspect(s) of your life to focus on and which specific incidents to include. You also decide the perspective you will write from. You can write from the perspective of the person you were at the time you’re writing about. For example, if you’re writing about your childhood, you can express the emotions and thoughts that you experienced as a child. Or you can write from the perspective of an adult looking back and evaluating the thoughts and beliefs you had as a child. It’s entirely up to you—but you will probably want to be consistent throughout the book rather than jumping back and forth.

Your memoir should be true (unless you write your story as fiction). However, the truth will depend on your perspective. We seldom see the absolute truth—our impressions are colored by our maturity, knowledge, and experiences. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable because ten people can witness the same event and each see something different.

It’s like the old story of blind men describing an elephant: each touched a different part of the animal and described an elephant as being like what they touched. Since each touched something different—a tusk, a leg, the trunk, the side—their descriptions are totally different.

You may describe an incident as you remember it, and others may describe it differently.
However, several recent incidents of false memoirs demonstrate you shouldn’t make up your memoirs. Don’t write about spending time in jail if you were never arrested. Don’t say you won a medal for valor in the military if it never happened. When writing facts, stick to the truth. When writing emotions, you may rely on your memory.

For more about memoir writing, check out these resources:

• Discover the History Within Your Memoir
• Memory Writers Network
• The Story of Me: Tips on Memoir Writing
• Writer’s Digest Memoir and Life Story

The next installment, which will appear after Easter, will cover family history.

Memoir and Family History: Part 1—Leaving a Legacy

This is the first installment in a series about writing memoirs and family histories. A couple of months ago, I asked readers to take a short survey on what they would like to see on this blog. Most of the responses were split about 50-50; half of the respondents liked something, and the other half didn’t. Memoir/family history writing was the only subject with a consensus: 100% of the respondents said they would like to read a series on the subject. I am passionate about preserving personal and family memories—I encourage clients thinking about writing their personal or family story to do so, and I have written an e-book: Preserving Memories: How to Write a Family History.

I’ll start the series by talking about what memoirs and family histories are and why you might want to write one. The next two posts will focus on each genre individually, as there are distinct differences between them. Then the rest of the series will cover the process you can use to write and publish (no matter how limited) your personal or family story.

You may be wondering why you should consider writing a memoir or family history. The answer, in a word: legacy. If the one-word answer doesn’t motivate you, read  10 reasons anyone should write a memoir or 15 reasons to write a family history.

I’m not suggesting that you should necessarily write a memoir or family history with the expectation of having it published by a large publisher who will pay you a lot of money and distribute the book widely in bookstores. Unless your family is rich and famous or you have been involved in a major public scandal, the odds of your book appealing to a large publisher—or to a large mass market—are small. But just because you won’t be appearing on Oprah or seeing your book listed as #1 on the USA Today bestseller list doesn’t mean your memoir or family history isn’t important.

Ask yourself if you would like to read first-hand accounts of your great grandparents’ lives or the memoir of one of your ancestors. Then realize that your descendants will feel the same way. Genealogy has become one of the most popular hobbies in the US because people want to know about their roots. They want to know the answer to the question: Where did I come from? Your memoir or family history can help your descendants answer that question generations from now.

Writing your personal or family story can be beneficial for you and the current generation as well. When major events occur in our lives, we all think we couldn’t possibly forget any detail … but we do. By writing about them, you can experience the joy or learn the lesson all over again.

On the other hand, some things we take so much for granted that we don’t explain them to our children or our family members. How did cherished family traditions start? What event in your past changed the course of your life? Do your children or grandchildren know how you met your spouse or why you chose the career you did? Do they understand how the good and bad things that have happened to you have shaped the person you are today?

My own family has experienced firsthand both losing the legacy and passing it on.

My grandfather, who died when I was 12, was a cowboy in his early years and a marvelous storyteller in later years. Grandpa was always telling stories; no one ever bothered to write them down because they were so familiar. His children had heard the stories so many times they were convinced they would never forget them. But forget them they did, and now those fabulous cowboy tales are lost forever.

Memories of my mother haven’t been lost. She was depressed and lethargic after my father died. She couldn’t seem to get interested in anything until we convinced her to write her memories. To describe her “little stories,” as she called them, as a memoir would seem presumptuous to her. They weren’t written as a book—just as individual stories when she thought about something, in no order and with no theme. However, each Christmas, she gave copies of the latest stories to family members, who collected them in loose-leaf binders. Even the teenagers would put aside their games and cool stuff to read Grandma’s stories under the Christmas tree.

My mother-in-law wasn’t willing to write, but she dictated her life story into a tape recorder. I transcribed the recording and added photos, and she gave notebooks with her memories to family members.

Those simple loose-leaf binders have become precious to our family now that my mother and my mother-in-law are no longer with us. Family members can read the words in these binders, and it’s almost like hearing their voices once again—the words and style so familiar and so dear.

You can leave a similar legacy for your loved ones by writing your own memoir or family history.

What is a memoir or a family history? There are many definitions and many forms of each genre. Because they are so personal and individual, definitions can be elusive.

In general, a memoir is a form of autobiography, written by the person it’s about. Autobiography is often the preferred word in describing a chronological story of the author’s entire life, while memoir can focus on a specific time period or reflect on a particular topic. In trying to answer the question Memoir: What Is It, the nonprofit literary journal Memoir (and) says

We cannot confidently erect a fence and say this belongs inside, this is definitely outside.

Memoir can encompass prose or poetry, gravitas or humor, text or graphics. It is usually written in first person, and it always about the person who is writing it.

A family history is the story of a family rather than an individual. It often is written about one line of descent of a family and can cover one or many generations. Family history can be written as nonfiction or as fiction. People reading fictional family histories should be able to tell what is real history and what is fiction.

In Part 2, we’ll discuss memoirs in more detail.

Some Monument to Last: Free E-book with Print Book Pre-Order

I’m putting the finishing touches on the formatting of Some Monument to Last: Memoir of TV Journalist James Muñoz with Family Poems and Letters. I’m tweaking some of the many color photos that had to be transformed to grayscale for print. The manuscript will be going to the printer soon.

In the meantime, author James Michael Doughty is offering an incentive for pre-orders. If you pre-order the print book, you can download a free e-book immediately. You don’t have to wait to read this compelling story, and you can see the photos in color. Then when the paperback edition is ready, you’ll receive a copy autographed by James.

People watch James on the local TV news and see his success. What most don’t know is the journey he has taken to achieve his dreams – the dream of being of TV journalist and the dream of finding his father’s family. Although he will never meet his father or his grandmother in person – not in this life, anyway, he has come to know them through his father’s letters and his grandmother’s poems.

Today James uses the name Muñoz (his mother’s maiden name) on the air to honor his maternal family and Hispanic heritage and the name Doughty (his surname) in private life to honor his father and his paternal family’s legacy. I’m sure both sides of James’ family are extremely proud of him. His own life experiences lead him to seek justice for those who don’t have power and give him empathy and understanding for the people involved in the news stories he covers.

James hopes to inspire and motivate young people, especially minority and disadvantaged youth. I believe his story will inspire anyone who reads it. I’m glad to be part of it.

[tags]Some Monument to Last, James Muñoz, James Michael Doughty[/tags]