Family history books are complicated. They often contain not only text, but endnotes, appendices, a bibliography of sources, charts, and images. Family historians who want to self-publish often find this complexity overwhelming. We get it.
The problem is that many people try to do too many things at once. Let's look at how to do it one step at a time.
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Acquiring just the right images to illustrate your family history book or memoir can be tricky. Completing the detective work to find a photo that’s perfect is just the beginning of the process. There are two hurdles to get over before you’re ready to use it. The first is to make sure that you have an image of appropriate quality to use in book printing. The second is making sure that you have the right to use the image. Let’s take a look at how to do both.
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Every genealogist I know is always looking for a better way to organize family information, photos, documents and stories, and for easy ways to use them to create genealogy presentations.
Today we’re at the National Genealogical Society Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Philipp Mayer of Group National Publishing is launching a new cloud-based product, ProStamm, which does just that.
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When you set out to self-publish a family history book you need a variety of skill sets. These skills include research and writing, but there is another there is another type of expertise that many family historians overlook – technological skill.
Let's take a look at what it takes to create a beautiful heirloom quality book.
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The old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” is only valid if the picture is the right one. This post addresses some of the options an author may consider in choosing and acquiring the right images to illustrate her book. Which one best fits your situation?
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Have you ever watched the way a child explores a new book? She might pick it up an examine the cover image, then flip through the pages, stopping occasionally, usually on a picture or photograph. She often has a fully formed opinion of the book before she begins to read it.
I have watched adults examine books and seen the same thing. They peruse the books images before going back to examine the text.
As you create a family history book, consider making yours an illustrated book.
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Would this classic Depression-era photo, Dorthea Lange’s Migrant Mother look better in color? Go to Flickr to see Asif Naqvi of Living Design’s Migrant Mother Colorized Version
Fast Company staff writer Joe Berkowitz highlighted the current interest in coloring historical photos in a recent article See the Whole World in a New Light With Classic Black and White Photos, Now In Living Color .
Image specialist Jordan Lloyd told Berkowitz, “I have one goal with colorizing. “I try and make it so realistic that the final image becomes unremarkable…”
Some people suggest that’s not what happens when you colorize a historical photo...
What do you think? Should historical images be colorized? Are there any rules?
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Family historians love the idea of including photographs in their family history books. They see images of ancestors as completing the sketch of a person which emerges from research in the factual record. Their books will help them preserve the family photo albums, so they focus on identifying the people in the pictures. But many family historians overlook the value of photos as storytelling tools.
Think about the elements of a good story. Characterization is at the top of the list. What kind of a person was great-great-grandfather? What motivated your parent’s family to do something? Thoughtful use of photographs can help you get beyond the who, what, when, and where aspects of an ancestor’s story to the why which is often more interesting.
See how the choice of photographs might have a big impact on the story you want to tell.
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One of the great things the digital age has done for book publishing is make it easy than ever before to create an illustrated book. One of the keys to producing a beautiful illustrated book is having high quality images to work with. That means good scanning is essential. Here are five tips to help you make sure you have well scanned images to illustrate your book:
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Digital printing has dramatically changed the look of family history books. Twenty years ago family history books were almost exclusively text, either prose written by their authors or charts and documents they had collected. Digital printing has made it possible to include photos and illustrations of all kinds and to do so in full color at a reasonable price. When you look at a newly published family history it is almost always an illustrated book. Creating illustrated books has raised some new issues for family historians. The most important are:
Choosing which illustrations to include
Finding quality images for those illustrations
Let’s look at some ways to deal with both questions.
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Genealogists and family historians might well agree to paraphrase political pundit James Carville, “It’s the sources.” Finding the right sources is the key to unlocking ancestor stories.
It’s day three today at the National Genealogical Society Conference in Las Vegas. We’ve been on the lookout for tips on new sources.
Ed Zapletal and Rick Cree of Family Chronicle Books showed us two newly released additions to their Tracing Ancestors series: Tracing Your Colonial Ancestors and Tracing Your Female Ancestors...
Gary Clark of PhotoTree.com released the third book in his Kwik Guide Series, Real Photo Postcards at the conference.
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Holiday gatherings are often a time for family historians to gather and share treasured photographs. Unfortunately some of the photos come without identification of the people pictured. So you might have gotten a picture of great-great-great-grandfather or somebody to whom you have no relationship at all. How do you figure out which? Here are some suggestions.
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Finding high quality illustrations for your book can be a real challenge. Many of the images on the internet are low resolution which will not work well for book printing. This video, the first on our new Stories To Tell Books YouTube Channel, will show you how to solve the problem.
This tutorial takes you through the process of using Google Image Search to locate better, higher resolution images to replace low-quality photos in your collection. Nancy Barnes explains how to locate better, higher resolution duplicates of your images to meet the requirements for commercial book printing. These methods work for all photo searches in Google Images, but they are especially helpful for people who wish to upgrade an existing photo.
Learn how to use advanced settings to locate images by size, by type, and for free use, as well as sorting them by usage rights, so that you can publish the photos in your commercial book without violating copyrights.
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You saw a photo on the internet that would work perfectly to illustrate your book. Can you legally use it? This post explores copyright, fair use and creative Commons licensing as they apply to internet images."
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The general rule in scanning photos for inclusion in a print book is that they be scanned at a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. What’s important to understand is that means that the quality of the scan will be acceptable if it is printed at exactly the same size as the original. A 4”x6” photo scanned at 300dpi can be printed at 4”x 6” or smaller in the book. But that’s only part of the story. If you want to enlarge the photo size in the book the original must be scanned at a much higher resolution. The Scantips.com website gives a good summary of the basics of the relationship of scanning dpi and print size in an article Pixels, Printers and Video – What’s With That?
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Self publishing authors who are working on manuscripts often try to mix two steps of the process of creating a book – writing and book design. This is unfortunate, not to mention often frustrating. What happens is that these authors try to format their books in Microsoft Word and place their photos as they create their manuscript. When they edit text the photos move from the spot they were originally placed. Word 2010 is better than previous versions, but the reality is that it’s not a tool for book design. A printer will ultimately require a manuscript designed in Adobe Creative Suite’s InDesign software. So let’s look at a better way to manage your photos as you create your book.
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Getting your book printed may seem like a long way off. But if you plan ahead now, as you’re working on your book, you can save time and expense when it comes time to design and print your book. Here are steps you can take to stay organized as you plan, write, and complete your manuscript.
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Writing a children’s book is a unique challenge for an author. Children’s books are illustrated books. So the author, from almost the moment she gets an idea for a children’s book, thinks about the illustrations which will accompany her words.
For the first time children’s book author this usually raises the question, where do I find an illustrator for my book? The answer is less simple than the question. It begins with another question, where do you want to publish your book? Do you hope to sell it to a traditional children’s book publisher in exchange for an advance and a share of any earnings the book might have? Or do you plan to self publish your book and undertake the work of marketing and distributing it yourself?
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It’s hard to sort through all your wonderful pictures and limit your possibilities. You want to, and you should, put many pictures in. Making your memoir or family history a fully illustrated book will give an additional dimension to your reader’s experience.
A lot of people have been led to believe there is a limit on the number of photos commercial printers will include. Many big self publishing companies offer packages that limit the number of photographs. Xlibris’ Basic Package sets the limit at 25 images. The Author House Portfolio Package allows 50 images. Why? It’s easier and cheaper for them. When you choose to work with your own book designer, like Stories To Tell, to prepare your book you face no such limitation.
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One of the ways digital printing has changed family history and memoir is by making illustrated books easier to create and less expensive to produce.
A few well chosen images can make your book both more visually attractive and more reflective of the world you are trying to reflect in the text. If you are fortunate, you may have photos in your own collection or that of your family. But for many times and places images may not be readily available. Here are three sources of images that may provide what you are looking for.
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