As a LifeStory author, you’ll find our staff and editors to be unfailing kind and helpful. They can’t do your work of research and writing for you, but they can help you find the right direction, and get you pointed back on the path if the work goes astray.
Some tips:
- Invest in a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style or sign up for an online version. The book is pricey but it has the answers to just about any writing or book question you might have.
- Determine your focus. For many, it is more about a specific event, time period, or special subject, and the life story is sort of woven in. For others, they want to document their entire lives, and that’s OK too.
- Don’t start at the beginning! So many memoirists want to start with the day they were born and move forward chronologically. You have to slog through half the book to find the most interesting story, which could have started the book.
- Be realistic about book industry sales. How many of you regularly buy memoirs of total strangers you’ve never heard of? Instead they buy one by Barbara Walters or a pilot that landed on the Hudson River or someone who gave birth to eight babies at one sitting. A finely crafted memoir with the right elements CAN make it, but realistically the world will not line up at Borders to get your book.
- Be meticulous with your organization of research materials, especially in noting where you got something. In the beginning, it doesn’t seem that you’ll forget, but as the project progresses, you’ll be surprised how much data you collect.
- Bring in national or world affairs to help the reader put your story into context. For example, if a big event happened in your life at the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis, this can help both you and the reader remember the era in which this happened. Can’t remember the exact year something happened? Google what was happening at the same time and bingo, you’ll have your dates.
- Don’t obsess over exact dates unless you know them. You can say, “when I was seven . . .” or “around 1912 to 1913, my parents . . . ” and that will work. But readers will want some idea of the time period.
- Having possession of an image, and have the rights to publish it are two different things. While personal photos of your own or borrowed from family and friends are fine, commercial photos, even very old ones, may have rights attached that prevent their publication without payment. Estates such as Elvis or another famous person whose image is licensed will require payment (if you have a snapshot of you and Elvis, that is your personal image and fine to use, but if you have a commercial image to which they own full rights, it is not). Likewise, some museums and historical societies may happily let you publish an image you borrow from them while others will require payment. You need to determine this at the time of acquisition and we will require a copy of your permission documentation.
- If you decide to pursue publication, start early getting instructions on how images should be scanned. The technical details make a difference and we’ve seen plenty of instances of improperly prepared image files that cannot be used and very disappointed authors. Photocopies are next to useless. You cannot borrow freely from someone’s web site images, nor are those images technically usable for book production. You can either provide scans or we can scan the images for you.
- Be sure to set up a workable file naming system for your images and create some kind of log that matches the file name to the information you have for the photo — the source, the caption, and any credits needed such as “Used with permission, Johnson Family Archive”, or “Photo courtesy John Deere Company”.