Old documents often present a problem for family historians. People often come to us with diaries, journals or books written by ancestors that they hope to re-publish in whole or part. The question all of them pose is how to do it without having to retype the whole document.
Optical character recognition (OCR) is one possible answer. OCR is a process for translating text from paper into electronic files that can be manipulated on a computer using a word processing program.
This post tells you everything you need to know about OCR.
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Great covers sell books. If you want to sell books, yours had better have one. Here's why.
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Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons who worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway , and Thomas Wolfe, told authors, "Just get it down on paper, and then we will see what to do with it.”
The same advice applies to an indie self-publishing author as it did to the classics Perkins edited. Good editing is what takes a manuscript from draft to market ready. As Miral Sattar CEO of BiblioCrunch observed on MediaShift, “Not having an editor go through your book is like sending an untested drug out to market.”
So, how do you find the right editor to bring out the best in your book? Here are five questions that will help you as you conduct your search.
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“Whatever is worth doing at all it is worth doing well,” said 17th century British statesman Phillip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield. That’s an excellent piece of advice for writers, and one that they too often ignore. One does not achieve success as an author by chance. Here’s a blueprint to guide you every step of the way and you use it to stay on track.
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Book World, the nation’s fourth largest bookstore chain, announced yesterday that it is closing all 45 of its stores. There’s an important lesson here for authors, particular indie authors who are self-publishing their books. Trying to get your independently published book into bookstores may not be the best use of your time and resources.
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October is Family History Month. That makes it a time when many people feel disappointed that they haven’t gotten their family’s history written yet. No matter how diligent the genealogy researcher, writing a family history is a real challenge. Here are five ideas that will help you get yours finished.
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A list of great reads for your book discussion group!
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Have people told you, “You should write a book?” It’s time to start listening to them.
Consultants, public speakers and other professionals have long understood that writing a book both helps establish their credibility as experts and sells well to readers interested in their area of expertise. But you don’t have to be a lawyer, financial advisor, or talking head to write a book targeted to a niche audience.
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Anne Lamott in her wonderful book on writing, Bird by Bird, has a chapter on “Shitty First Drafts.” She advises, “All good writers write them. That’s how they wind up with good second drafts and wonderful third drafts.”
One of the best ways to create that wonderful draft is to get feedback on what you have written. Here are three ways to do it.
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The first step in preparing your independently self-published book to compete with traditionally published books is to make sure that its publication matches their level of professionalism. The Independent Book Publishers Association (of which Stories To Tell is a member) has created a tool, The IBPA Industry Checklist for a Professionally Published Book (DOWNLOAD THE CHECKLIST), to help you do just that.
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Are you trying to figure out how to sell your genealogy or family history book? It’s not just a matter of putting your book up on Amazon. Books of this sort are not generally of mass market interest. They are classic examples of niche books whose market consists of genealogy libraries, professional genealogists, and family researchers interested in the details your book can provide about your lineage. How can you sell books in such a specific and limited market?
Connecting with specialized booksellers can offer a way to reach potential readers. How do you find these genealogy booksellers? Here are some places to look for booksellers who might be interested in your book.
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As authors grow close to finishing the writing of their book they are also often anxious to get it into print as soon as they can. The impulse is easily understandable, however rushing to publication can not only result in a book of lesser quality than the author hoped for, it may actually result in higher costs, and cause the process to take longer than it needed to. Successful self-publishing is not a process of doing multiple things simultaneously; it is a process of following a simple plan one step at a time.
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Most authors in today’s marketplace don’t know how to write books that will sell, nor do they know how to effectively promote. Profitable Authors Institute was created to change that. We are profitable authors. We want to show you how to be one, too (without wasting time spinning your wheels and still not selling books.)
12 industry professionals, including Stories To Tell founder Nancy Barnes, offer forty-eight video courses online in three tracks:
- Writing
- Publishing
- Book Promotion
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There are a lot of template based publishing sites on the net that offer one-stop shopping where you can lay out your book’s interior, create a cover, and print your book. Should you use one?
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An author phoned us recently with good news. We had worked with him last year to self-publish his book. Now, he was very excited to tell us, a New York publishing house (not one of the big 5, but a New York publisher, nevertheless) had offered him a contract to purchase the rights to his book and publish it. He wanted to know if it was a good deal.
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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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I have recently read two excellent pieces of historical fiction. They raise some interesting questions for those of us want to write about history or family history. The first is Graham Moore’s The Last Days of Night. The second is Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon’s Moonglow.
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There are a lot of template based publishing sites on the net that offer one-stop shopping where you can lay out your book’s interior, create a cover, and print your book. Should you use one?
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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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Who should publish your book? Every author faces the same choice. Increasingly the choice is between “assisted self-publishing” and becoming an “indie” who truly self-publishes.
Before you sign up for an all-inclusive package with a heavily advertised giant like Author House, Xlibris, or Outskirts Press it’s important to understand that when you choose one of them you will pay an inflated price for every book they print for you.
Let's see how it works.
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