Comments on: How do I publish a genealogy book?

By: bafflegrinder

bafflegrinder — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:45:50 +0000

OK, a few things. The person who said most genealogy books are self-published is mostly correct. However, there are a few small publishing houses that specialize in genealogy and family and local histories. I suggest Janaway Genealogies or Higginson Books if you want something published.
When you go to submit a book for publishing, keep a copy for yourself. Make sure the book is FINISHED. DO NOT say “I’m working on a book, and I’m about half done, and its about my G-G-G-G-Gfather’s log cabin, which had….”. That email will be deleted instantly.

You should write it yourself if it’s about your family. Having a second party write it for you would be a waste of time, since presumably you know the subject matter a lot better than a non-family member.

By: Adam Zapple

Adam Zapple — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:10:44 +0000

In most good genealogy programs - Roots Magic, for instance - you select a person, then run a report called “Ancestors of”, clicking the boxes to include notes, sources, index, etc. You direct the output to an RTF file instead of the printer.

Many people do four books, one for each grandparent. That way you can give the children of your maternal grandfather’s brother just the data they are interested in.

Once you have the four RTF files, you open them with Word, pretty them up, adjust the margins, create the index and so on.

Then you either upload them to lulu.com or send them to a copy shop. (Kinko’s is my choice there, but they are not nation-wide yet.) Lulu will run off one copy at a time on demand, with a hard cover or soft.

Kinko’s has a range of bindings and covers; the spiral comb is popular. (It is a plastic tube with 24 teeth that go through rectangular holes; same effect as a 3-ring binder, VERY hard to describe with words, everyone has seen them, I hope you know what I mean.)

If your books run over 50 pages or so it would not be unreasonable to ask your cousins, nieces etc. to pay for the copying and postage charges, if they are interested. This helps you and keeps them from all asking for one, then forgetting to even open it, which would happen if you gave them away for free.

By “Other researchers”, I expect you mean distant relatives. Unless your book is full of research tips or has a great deal of history about a certain area, people who are not related aren’t going to be interested. (Unless, you traced all of Elvis’s love children by his groupies and the alien who abducted him.)

Roots Magic V. 3 has another option - you can burn a CD, with pictures, and a read-only version of the software. This lets anyone who has it explore the family tree any way they want to.

FTM lets you “print” to a file too, but it is harder.

By: Riothamus Of Research ;<)

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:34:58 +0000

Nearly all genealogy books such as you described are self published. Sorry. Unless the family you are researching is very large, and goes back to at least the 1700s in this country, your chances of finding a publisher to do it for you are practically non-existent. Even then, they are pretty small.

You would have to be an unusually gifted researcher *and* writer to overcome these odds and find a publisher without first paying them to publish the book. *After* you write it and do *all* the pre-press work, or pay someone else to do so. It is not impossible, but if you want to do this, you need to know *you* are the only one who will be behind the project, unless you can interest relatives in helping out.