About this course
There is nothing more upsetting than receiving a finished book back from the printers only to find a spelling mistake, grammar problems, or errors.
An easily-skipped-due-to-excitement step is Proofing.
Do your Preflighting Step first, making sure you've resolved or skipped all the issues that your page layout software is highlighting.
Then export a PDF for both the inside pages and the cover document. In the PDF export settings select export all pages , not all spreads.)
Get your PDF printed using either your own home printer (not recommended due to ink consumption) or uploading it to Staples, Office Depot or any other local print shop.
Another option is to have Blurb or your book printing company print a "proof copy". It's the same as the final book would be except that you know you might have errors in your first proof copy book. This way although somewhat more expensive has the advantage of giving you an exact sense of what the final book will look like and what need adjusting.
Give your PDF to someone you trust is reliable, detail-oriented, and willing to help. You might even try to assess whether they are somewhat like the people who are the intended audience of your book.
Ask them to read your book very carefully and circle anything they think is a mistake or a problem with the red pen. Give them a deadline. Get the proof copy back and thank them profusely!
Review their suggestions and re-edit your book accordingly. It's suggested you Save As your last version to make a new version called Draft2 before you start changing things.
Don't take personally anything your proofreader notes. Rather use their their feedback to decide if the things they've noted will resonate with your intended audience or not.
Here's some things to have your Proofer look for:
So your goal is to write your book, you say!
And now it's time to get started.
This first week of the course Write & Publish Your Family History Book is all about setting into place the motivation and method for getting those words flowing. Make sure your writing space is set up, your computer is ready to go, and add several writing dates with yourself each week on your calendar. You might need to temporarily pass on some other activities to claim your writing time. Then put your phone on mute and close all apps that will pop up notifications. Get writing!
Full disclosure: The sheer number of initial systems you need to set up and tweak to be an efficient author is something that you'll always be working on. We'll be covering all this stuff in class but get started going through the list, downloading to your own drive the documents and software. You're about to have so much fun!
PS: Start a list of Questions for our Q&A Sessions.
PPS: Google is your friend. If you're stuck or wondering about something just type it into www.google.com and you'd be surprised how fast you can find an answer.
Write and store your history book text Manuscript in a Google Doc that is continuously backed and accessible on all your devices.
To write your book you need to be dedicated.
Planning Your Book & Organizing Your Story
How do you eat an elephant? One forkfull at a time.
Your family history book project is much the same.
The way you’ll get some version of it done is by creating a plan and executing the plan.
Go in stages. It’s recommended that you don’t try to write in one go a book longer than La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust which, according to The Guinness Book of World Records is a 13-volume work with 9,609,000 characters. Why? Cuz it's hard to get done something like that. Instead, you’re future audience is going to be so impressed that you put together a handful of inspiring stories about their family....adequately. This lesson is all about sketching out the bones of your book.
Planning Your Book & Organizing Your Story
How do you eat an elephant? One forkfull at a time.
Your family history book project is much the same.
The simple way to edit typos.
The only way you're going to write your book is by writing a book and the more words you can get onto your Manuscript the prouder you'll be!
Every book has a page called "About the author"...that's you!
Once Upon A Time there was a well-meaning ancestor who in spite of themself set out to write a book. Things seemed to be going well but then … you’ll never guess what happened!
Gotcha! Our job as storytellers is to sweep the audience off their feet and take them on a journey to entertain, teach, and inspire. Here’s a couple of tried and tested storytelling strategies.
Once Upon A Time there was a well-meaning ancestor who in spite of themself set out to write a book. Things seemed to be going well but then …
"To get to the other side!" Huh?
Got your attention, right? This old storytelling mechanism uses interesting confusion to hold attention to create curiosity and investment.
The Seinfeld sitcom was a big hit because it was simple. And it was about nothing. We'll it was about something. The way they told the story about nothing is the secret. This tool could be a useful tool for your history book.
Generate some words about someone, something, anything.
Each spread and page in your book is an adventure, a journey, and little world unto itself. Images ignite the imagination and bring depth to stories and people. Acquiring, developing, and safely storing your images in an organized way is crucial to creating an amazing book and maintaining your sanity.
Depending on which scanner you have your steps may be different. Search your scanner model number in YouTube. Somebody's already made a video showing you how to use yours.
Several different ways you can adjust the brightness, contrast, blackpoint, hue, and saturation of raster images either using Affinity Photo or from inside Affinity Publisher. The video lesson also includes a demonstration of Overlays in Affinity Photo which are fabulous tools for developing specific areas of a photo, rather than the whole thing.
Adjusting colour, exposure, brightness, sharpness of scanned photos.
Grab a photo and write specifically about what's happening in that shot.
Ancestors are interesting after your family audience knows how they are connected. A visual graphic of your family tree will engage them immediately.
Asking questions that lead to a tellable story is the goal. Then retell the story and quote them.
We'll walk through interview methods and even show you a free way to get audio voices churned out as editable text for your manuscript.
Cory shows you the value of a free family tree from Ancestry.com. There's lots of great online genealogy websites to create family trees, do research, get matched to relatives with DNA and collaborate with family.
You'll see how to make a basic tree and put an image of it into your history book or video.
As you work on behalf of the audience of your book or film you'll perhaps need to get more information and stories from others who might know. Interviewing is a process that is both an art and a science.
On one hand you need to be organized with questions and topics and have your technology sorted. On the other you need to help the subject feel comfortable, safe, and encouraged to say anything they want!
This lesson is about interviewing.
Generating starting text for your chapters and characters is made easy using your basic family tree.
Putting together your text and pictures tastefully is fun and rewarding.
For designing your book there are two programs which you might consider: Affinity Publisher & Blurb BookWright.
Suggest finding a book you love and examining its typefaces, spacing, graphical treatment, size and then apply some of those decisions to your book.
At the price of free is a program called BookWright from Blurb.com.
How to setup your book design document using BookWright from Blurb.com
A full-featured and professional level design layout program to a consider is Affinity Publisher. It has lots of features that at first you might not appreciate but later on you'll be thrilled they are there.
Setting up your design document in Affinity Publisher using Blurb.com margins, bleeds, and PDF export specs.
Note that to print a book a you need two design documents: one for the smaller inside pages and one for the larger cover jacket or image wrap.
Setting up Character and Paragraph Text Styles in Affinity Publisher will save you time and help you create a professional looking family history book.
How do you know what colors go together when you're designing your family history book? Check out this video on complimentary color theory and a free application you can use to get exactly the right colors.
Write a few paragraphs about the scene, place, and time for one of your characters. Perhaps what was going on in the news in the town where your mom was a kid. Or the political environment during your dad's career.
Post it in the Facebook Group.
Check your design document carefully to make sure everything is right: fonts, spellings, grammar, bleeds, image resolution.
Get some fresh eyes on your book!
Using Preflighting in Affinity Publisher
Some simple and extra ways you can make your book accessible to those who might want to read it.
Using Screen Quality PDFs for sharing your book.