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Product Options—Any Way You Like It
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Every project is as uniqueas our client list.
We tailor products and services
to meet your needs and budgets.
Primary Services:
- Oral history interviews
- Creative writing
- Historical research
- Genealogical studies and validations
- Custom-made genealogical charting
- Creative illustrations
- Photo scans, restoration and artistic rendering
- Customized layouts
- Archive quality digital color printing
- Project management and broker services for large-volume printing
- Quality binding
- Computer-related, business-to-business services, such as research, design and publishing for other business associates
Click on the magnifying glasses in
the left column to
see actual product samples.
Right: Paula Slavens showing some
book projects and wall charts
of family genealogy and timelines.
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Audio
Recording your stories is the first step to creating a book project; but it can also be an end product.
The advantage of audio and video is the preservation of your voice and expressions. Books alone cannot
do that.
It also is the least costly approach with the quickest turnaround. After recording the interview, your words are transferred onto a CD and indexed. If a book project is desired at some later date, the CD can be transcribed and added to photos and memorabilia.
Audio also offers major cost advantages. With fewer steps, expenses and labor, a finished product takes less time from start to finish and is roughly 8% of the cost of a finished book.
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Books
From taped interviews and approved transcripts, words can be added to photographs, letters, documents and other memorabilia to create books.
The variables for book generation are limited only by budgets and content availability. They can be:
• As large or as small as you like
• In black and white or full color
• Bound like library hardback books, lower-cost paperbacks or even less expensive applied bindings like
wire or plastic combs.
The best starting point for making these determinations is to hold our sample books in your hands, see and feel what you like, determine the approximate scope of the project and identify budget requirements.
Each book is customized to fit your wishes and your budget.
Go to BOOK PAGES to review different sizes, shapes and binding configurations.
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Ethical Wills
An ethical will is a legacy-type document that you write to your loved ones at a significant point in your life.
A will is used to distribute properties; an ethical will is a personal, more spiritual message that expresses:
• Your thoughts and feelings about life
• The lessons you’ve learned
• Important messages you want to pass on to family, friends and future generations.
• Your values in life
• Asking and providing forgiveness
• An understanding that may be easier to say in print than in person.
• Your final summation of the life you have lived and the people who made it worthwhile.
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Creative Writing
Recorded interviews can be left in an oral history format with questions and answers, or they can be transformed into a narrative.
The narrative completely removes the interviewer and can be written either in third person or in your first-person voice. If the finished product is auto-biographical, the latter applies quite effectively.
If the work is compiled from multiple contributors, is laden with historical references and genealogical research, writing in the third person is a must. Interviewees words are then handled as quotes. This approach sets the stage for adding creative vinettes about ancestors whose words are lost, but can be brought to life with a little creative writing that is supported by factual historical and social research.
Go to WRITING SAMPLES to review creative writing style written in first perrson.
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Research
In addition to recording and publishing your words in the interviews, we have the ability to enhance your stories by adding in factual data in the form of news reports and summary data that reflects the social and perhaps political climate. We also can pull materials from our own library of memorabilia to enhance storylines with artifacts, pictures, charts and drawings so that future generations can actually see items that you reference in your story.
We believe that if you supply the words, we can help package them in a way that is a delight to you as well as other readers.
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Publishing
We create book projects from start to finish, secure and set up ISBN numbers and generally publish them in-house on a digital printer.
We also work with authors who have written their own material but don’t have the artistic and technical skills necessary to format it into a book. Our specialty is not only creative design and custom formatting; but also high-end color work. If you have drawings, paintings and other artwork that you want preserved, we can photograph or scan them and recreate them to match their original colors.
If your book will eventually be reprinted in large runs on an offset printer, we have the skills and technology to create color separations that conform to industry print standards. Then we will work with the printer to ensure that galley copies and final output are in compliance.
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