Publish Your Family History. Susan Yates

you’re creating a website, pay close attention to how you structure your information. It does no good to have pages and pages of text (or worse—one page crammed with too much information and no paragraph breaks!) if you don’t give your reader a quick and easy way to find what he or she is looking for. Break your information into short chunks and organize it into logical categories. For example, if one branch of your family immigrated to Canada and another stayed in Tanzania, it might make sense to use geography to organize the site. If your research dates back to the 15th century, you could structure your information in chronological order.

      A good principle is that a user should never have to visit more than three pages after the home page of a site to get the information that he or she wants. After more than that, the reader tends to lose interest or get frustrated.

      A wiki:A “wiki” is a type of online document that is collectively created and maintained.Anyone can edit it, even someone with no knowledge of HTML.The design is kept as simple and easy-to-use as possible.The wiki format can also work well, particularly if your relatives want to participate in keeping the information up-to-date. This means that if Aunt Edna unexpectedly discovers a shoebox in the attic full of the letters great-uncle James wrote during World War II, she can add that content to the family history without sending it to you first.

       Who Will Want the Book?

      Because you are publishing the book yourself, you aren’t constrained by the need to sell a huge number of copies, but you do need to think through how many copies you are likely to distribute, who you want to have the book and how to reach that readership. Chapter 11 looks at these questions.

       Can You Write?

      You’re probably the wrong person to ask. Many wonderful writers are too aware of their shortcomings, and many awful writers are unaware that they have any shortcomings.

      But the writing quality of the original manuscript is a factor in any publishing project.You probably should budget for some editing help, even if you’re a good writer.

       How Risky is It?

      The classic failed home-publishing venture costs far more than the publisher expected. Often the net result is a thinner bank account and a basement full of books.We’ll try to lead you to ways to save money and keep a lid on costs. Many home-publishing ventures bring in only a small fraction of the publisher’s most pessimistic income projection. Uncle Ignatz may never come through with the $5,000 contribution to the costs that he keeps promising.To be safe, when you calculate your projected revenues, assume the worst—and be honest with yourself.Then, when you are doing a final budget, use half of that worst-case income projection. If the project is still affordable, go ahead!

       So Why Would Anyone of Sound Mind Consider Home Publishing?

      The traditional publishers will pay you for your manuscript and promote it professionally. Do it yourself and you get all of the costs and potentially huge hassles.Why bother? For all sorts of good reasons.

      Control.Talk to many writers, and they’ll tell you: “People thought my book was a Harlequin with that cover they put on it”; “Why did they change the name of my family history to Attack of the Aardvark Lizards?”; and “The page design is so confusing I can’t even find the page numbers.”

      Low overhead and lower break-even point. Many perfectly wonderful home-publishing projects just aren’t financially viable for book publishing firms.A family history that will sell only 200 copies will not appeal to even the smallest small press (unless it came with a grant of some sort to publish it), but can make a worthwhile home-publishing venture, because the home publisher doesn’t have to carry all of the overhead of trying to produce and distribute a full list of books. Printing 200 copies of that family history book and distributing them to the members of the clan can make considerable financial sense.

      Flexibility.Want to produce a book that can be printed in tiny quantities on archival-quality paper with lots of photos? Traditional publishing doesn’t want to know you exist.

      Creativity.Want your book to have a hand-embossed cover, handmade paper pages, and a creatively stitched binding? You may well have the time available to invest in producing such a labour of love. Sometimes you are the only person who can give a project the love and care it deserves.

      Publish it yourself and it will come out the way you wanted it to (give or take your own abilities and budget, and if the printers are willing!).

CHAPTER 2

       PUBLISHING BASICS

      Knowing how traditional publishing works will help guide your home-publishing project. Because most home-publishing projects involve most of the steps used in traditional publishing, this chapter will give a quick overview of the traditional publishing process.

      PRINTERS, PUBLISHERS, VANITY PRESSES, CONTRACT PUBLISHERS AND PACKAGERS

      Many people confuse publishers and printers, and get even more confused when you mention vanity presses, contract publishers and packagers. Here is how to tell them apart:

      • A printer prints books. If you take your publishing project to a printer, the printer will (for a fee) print up the number of copies you specify and deliver them to you.

      • A publisher, as you might guess, publishes books. Publishers buy the rights to the book from the author (usually paying a royalty, which is an amount paid to the author for every copy sold); arrange to have the book edited, designed and printed; advertise the book; and distribute it (which means getting it into bookstores, book clubs and so on).

      • A vanity press is sort of like a publisher, with one major difference: the author pays the publisher, rather than the publisher paying the author. If a publisher offers to publish your book for a fee, be careful. Vanity presses have a well-earned poor reputation, which they built by overcharging authors, printing shoddy books, printing very few copies, spending nothing on advertising or promotion and having little or no ability to distribute the book.

      • A contract publisher will also publish your book for you for a fee. Unlike vanity presses, contract publishers will specify the editing, design and printing charges in advance, and will not normally offer to advertise the book or distribute it for you. A contract publisher might be a good choice if you really don’t want to do it yourself. You can find them listed in the Yellow Pages under Publishers’ Services.

      • Print on demand (POD) is the new kid on the block, and is perfect for many family history books. How print on demand works is simple: you send the computer files for your book to the POD company, along with a relatively modest cheque. For the fee, the POD company sends you a small number of copies of the book, and advertises your book on their website. Whenever someone orders a copy of the book (at a price you specify) the POD company collects their payment, prints a copy of the book and mails it to the buyer. Every so often the POD company sends you a cheque for your share of the money collected. No muss, little fuss, no cartons of books mouldering in your attic.

      • A packager prepares books for book publishers. The packager usually pays for the writing, editing, design and printing. The publisher pays the packager a per-book rate for the books, and advertises and distributes them. Packagers usually come up with the book ideas and sell them to publishers, so packagers are unlikely to be interested in your book idea. It may, in certain circumstances, be possible to sell your book to a publisher as a package—which is how this book was produced.

      COPYRIGHT

      Copyright means exactly what it says: whoever owns the copyright on a publication has the sole right to make copies of it. If you own the copyright on material, no one else can use it in any form, whether print, electronic or otherwise, without your permission.

      Likewise, you cannot publish copyrighted material