The Process

We’ll get together a few times so you can tell me your story, which I’ll record. These interviews are usually a couple of hours long and we’ll need four or five to capture your story. My role is to listen and to direct your thoughts and memories in directions that will yield insights and humour and showcase your essential humanity.

We’ll look though your photo albums, certificates and memorabilia together so that I can choose the most appropriate images and items for inclusion in the book. I’ll borrow these which I’ll scan to create electronic copies, and as an added benefit, I’ll provide you with the digital copies of all photos that I scan, so that you can store them on your computer or pass them on to loved ones as a digital archive.

I’ll transcribe the audio record and build up a lucid narrative from it, joining portions in your voice, utilising your style, vocabulary and rhythm of speech. When complete, this will form the first draft which I’ll ask you to review for scope, style, content and accuracy. Once you’ve reviewed it, I’ll then incorporate your comments into the draft.

Once you’re happy with the text, we now move to the actual book stage, in which I migrate the text and images over to a dedicated desktop publishing program. This is the really exciting phase as you begin to see your individual book emerge from the shadows, especially when you read the captions for the photos that I’ll suggest. When completed this combination of image and text will form the second draft which I’ll again ask you to review.

We’ll provide you with template layouts for the front cover of the book, which will be in the style of a photo montage. Once you’ve chosen a template, Memoirs For You Publishing will customise it to suit your specific needs. An essential—and fun!—part of the cover design is deciding on a title for the book. We’ll brainstorm together to arrive at a title for your book, but through experience we’ve found that our clients are often better at coming up with a zinger of a title than we are!

When we’re both satisfied with the text, images, captions and cover, I’ll prepare the book for printing, making sure the colour balance is correct for the photos and that the final pdf suits the particular printer’s require-ments. Then we wait a couple of weeks for the books to be printed and….voila! Your life’s story has become a beautiful book that you’ll want to share with family and friends.