Storyboard to print
Now that you’re fully immersed
in your material and have formulated a theme and rough structure for your book,
it’s time to put it together. This is a big undertaking so you need to plan
ahead all the way to how you’re going to get it in book form. Here are your
book creation steps:
- Get a text writing program.
- Storyboard the plot and character development of your
story.
- Decide what form your book will be in when it’s finished.
This will determine how you lay out the book.
- Format the text of your book.
- Write your book.
- Design a book cover.
- Publish your book.
Step 1—Desktop publishing
programs
There are 2 ways to print
books—offset (printing press. . .expensive), and desktop (computer
hooked up to a laser or inkjet printer. . . affordable). Either way, the
text is written via a page layout or word processing program.
Page layout programs: You
have a great deal of control over the layout of your material. Works terrific
with graphics. Very stable. Smooth text justification. Professional publishers
use QuarkXPpress or Adobe InDesign . Both are
expensive and have a steep learning curve. There is a cheaper (free)
alternative, but the learning curve is the same—Scribus . The Scribus website,
however, has a great tutorial for beginners.
Word processing programs: Along with the internet, these are the meat and potatoes of most computers. Microsoft Word and Corel’s Word Perfect both do a fine job with
text layout. WordPerfect creates PDF files, whereas MS Word doesn’t. Microsoft has terrific
tutorials and templates. Take a look at their MSWord office manual template. It would work nicely for a family history book, and the formatting is
already done for you.
Another good program is OpenOffice . It’s free, and it looks and works much like MS Word.
And, you can use it to make PDF files. I use MS Word on my PCs and OpenOffice
on my MACs.
Step 2—Storyboarding
You need a way to visualize the
plot and flow of your story. Some people post plot and character cards on a
cork board. Then it’s easy to move them around should you change story
direction. I like to arrange my plot cards and then make an outline, using them
as a guide. I then paper clip grouped cards together, arrange them in order and put the cards away to un-clutter my work area. I can always
lay the cards out again and rearrange.
A plot card for family history
has a brief description of an event, or stage of an event. A series of plot
cards go through the stages of an event from the beginning to the end. It has
very little detail.
Hopefully, you’ve already
categorized your research cards (scroll to Index the research material). You
will use these to fill in the details of your story. Keep them in their sorted
piles. Each card may have small details that can be used in different parts of
your story. Be sure to include details from an historic
matrix search.
1|2|3|4|5 Next> Book-binding styles
Step 3—Choose a book-binding
style
Step 4—Build a story frame
Steps 5 & 6—Writing the book
Step
7—Publish your book
Back to Write a book main page
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Copyright September 2009 Family History Coach. All rights reserved Last update April 27, 2010
