There are a number of different methods that you can use to publish your research and each of these offers distinct advantages and disadvantages. There is no one right answer for any particular situation and it’s simply a matter of preference as to which you choose. Some options can be quite costly in time and money but may, in time, actually earn you some money whereas others are simpler to put in place and much quicker too
When deciding to publish you'll need to determine if you're going to publish the data file itself or use it as a starting point for a family history presentation. If you're going to publish the data as is, you can publish your Gedcom data file to the Web, distribute it on a CD or DVD or publish it in a printed form. If you decide to go a step further and use the data as the foundation for a more robust family history, you can write a short book or assemble a series of information and pictures into a multimedia presentation complete with music and narration. You can print and publish your book or make the multimedia file on the Web, or even distribute it on a DVD or CD. Let's look at how each of these options works and some of the reasons why you may choose one method rather than another.
Your name in print
To many of us there’s nothing quite so satisfying as holding a book in our hand, and its very feel gives an impression of careful research and considered conclusions. A book is also a great way to create an illustrated history of your family and can be a handy premium item at a family reunion, for example. It's also accessible to almost anyone and doesn’t require a computer or Internet connection to be viewed.
The cost of printing a book is, however, quite high and will require an upfront investment. This is because, regardless of how interesting we think our families are, it's unlikely that our family history will be of such monumental or scholarly interest that
a publishing house will take on the financial burden of printing it. Instead, you will be looking at what used to be called ‘vanity publishing’ but what is increasingly being referred to as ‘small run publishing’. This will require you to pay upfront for the cost of typesetting or layout and printing of the book. You will generally be responsible for its marketing and you make your money back by selling copies of it to interested people.
There are a number of publishing houses that specialise in short-run printing and two of these to consider are The Copy Press (www.copypress.co.nz) and Write Buzz (www.writebuzz.com). Overall, expect the process to take some time as you will need to not only write the book but also you will be involved, at the very least, with proofing the manuscript. You’ll need to make choices about the format of the book, the type of paper, and whether you will provide camera-ready copy to the printer. Being able to do this can result in a significant savings in cost but, on the flip side, it will require that you put in quite a bit of effort in laying out the book in its final format. If you can’t do this or decide not to, then you'll have to pay someone else to do it.
Another option for publishing a book is to use what is called ‘publishing on demand’, which is a service where the book is developed up to the point of publication and, from there, only the copies that you actually require to be printed are physically printed. Additional copies are printed on demand, as they are ordered. This reduces some of the cost in printing a book, but the work that you need to put into getting it print-ready remains the same.
Publishing on demand offers the advantage that changes and updates can be made to the book without needing to destroy old copies and to reprint new ones. In fact, the problem of updating a book is probably the second biggest disadvantage of printing a family history next only to the cost. As soon as the book is published, and perhaps even before then, you will have located additional research or perhaps confirmed or disproved some of your earlier theories, with the result that the manuscript is out of date.
Marketing – the process of spreading the word about the book to family members - is also a requirement of publishing. The commercial success or otherwise of the book will be dependent solely on how many people you can get to purchase the book.
So far as actual expertise required, it will help if you have some computer skills, such as the ability to make high-quality scans of images, and some skills at laying out documents to print-ready format. Even the most dedicated writer and researcher will find that the timeline for moving from finished manuscript to final printed book can be as much as six to nine months, if not longer.
Preparing your data
Regardless of which format you choose to publish your family history, your starting point will be with the data that you have on hand. No matter how careful you are in making research notes and annotating your files, you should begin by going through your data file very carefully, ensuring that all your notes are up to date and that any information that is uncorroborated is noted as such. Once your family history is in print it is a public document, and you can be sure that individual or whose family line that has been misrepresented in any way will be very quick to tell you this.
Ensuring that you protect yourself, by indicating the sources for your data and also indicating where data is not confirmed, will help establish your credibility as a researcher. You should also consider what elements of your research are potentially subject to copyright. While copyright is a topic beyond the scope of this article, you must make sure that anything you have copied from another source is quoted, and that you indicate the source of the text or image. If you are in doubt, obtain permission to use any documents, images, maps or other information that could potentially be copyright information. If it is not possible to do this, consider not including this research in your publication, or remove the actual content and make a note as to where this additional data or resource can be found.
Make a decision, too, as to whether you will include information about people who are living. The general consensus amongst genealogists is that data on living people should be kept private and should be omitted from published research. If you decide to include information about living people, you will need to determine just what information will be included. You might, for example, include information that is in the public record, such as dates and places of birth, marriage and divorce dates, but other data that you have in your records might not be appropriate for publication. Also consider that some information may be embarrassing to some people and should perhaps be omitted. This might include things that reflect badly on a person. Once you have checked your data file and determined what you plan to publish, you’re ready to proceed to the next step.
Book and self-publishing
The first step in publishing a book is to determine who your market is and how many books you think you can sell. You should also have a rough estimate of the number of words or charts in the book, so that a potential publisher can make an estimate of the number of pages it will contain. Locate a handful of publishers working in the smal-run printing or print-on-demand area, and obtain prices from them for your publication. Be sure to obtain a detailed list of all the costs, including the cost of typesetting if you do not plan to do this yourself. Also include the cost of scanning images, as this can add considerably to the final price. Armed with three or four quotes you can make a better decision as to which publisher would be the best to employ. In the process of asking for quotes you will get some idea as to which publishers are speedy in their responses and professional in their approach.
Once you have decided on your publisher, it's time to get your manuscript in order. In most cases you will need a document without any fancy formatting, so it's best to create it as a plain text document and use a single font and size throughout. Ask your publisher for detailed specifications on how to deliver the manuscript and take care to meet the exact requirements, as you'll incur additional costs if the publisher has to fix it for you. If you're at all unsure, prepare two or three pages and send them to the publisher in the final format to check that you're producing what they require. Remember too that your book will require other elements than the pages themselves, such as introductory pages, author biography, notes and an index. Indexes are extremely important and, while there are a number of indexing programs around, you may find it worthwhile to employ a professional indexer to index the manuscript.
Changes to your manuscript after it has been sent to the publisher will incur additional costs, so make sure that you check and double-check everything before delivering it to the publisher. The proofreading you do from there on should be for layout and minor spelling issues, not fact checking.
Once the book is complete and printed you must market it and sell the number of copies you need to recoup the cost of publication. Try to limit strictly the number of copies you give away (eg: for review).
Publishing to the Web
Publishing your family history to the Web opens up an entire world of potential visitors who can access your data online. The Web offers a unique opportunity to put your data where anyone with a computer and Internet connection can access it or at least discover that it exists. One benefit of publishing to the Web and making your data available so widely is that you are likely to receive information about your research, either confirming information that you had, or disputing it, from others who are doing parallel research.
In addition, by publishing your data there is a better chance that others who are searching in a similar area will make contact with you. You can increase the breadth of your research this way by adding their Gedcom data to your file. On the flip side, publishing the data to the Internet makes it available to everyone, so inadequacies in your research will be there for all the world to see.
The amount of expertise required to publish your data to the Web depends on how you intend to publish it. A Gedcom file can be published to a Web site with no more than a few clicks of the mouse from most genealogy software, and this makes it a very simple way to distribute information. If your program doesn't include this feature, there are plenty of Gedcom-to-HTML programs around that will take a Gedcom file and publish it in HTML (the language that is used for Web pages). One site that is a particularly popular place to publish Gedcom files is WorldConnect at worldconnect.rootsweb.com and a popular program you can use to convert your file is GedHTree V2.30 GEDCOM to HTML converter (www.gedhtree.com/revfix.htm).
If, however, you plan to create a family history Web site rich in narrative detail, your genealogy software probably won't assist very much and you'll need some Web site creation software instead. There are also some Web sites like tribalpages.com that can display your family history for you. Some of these will take Gedcom data (you can send your Gedcom file to TribalPages), but others will require you to enter the information manually.
One of the benefits of publishing to the Internet is that, in most cases, the data can be updated fairly easily. When publishing, for example, a Gedcom data file to the Internet, check to make sure that the site you use allows you to replace and update your Gedcom file from time to time as changes are made to the original data. Unlike printing on paper, immediately you make changes to a Web site, anyone who accesses the site after the changes have been made will be seeing the new data. It’s just not possible to get the same level of instant update in a printed format. Of course, it goes without saying that you should write down and keep in a safe place your login ID and password, and a note of each location where you have uploaded your Gedcom file and the date of the last update. It's easy to forget this information and find yourself unable to access your own file to update it.
In many cases the cost of publishing your data on the Web is little or nothing at all in dollar terms. There are many free Web sites like WorldConnect that will accept your Gedcom data file, and other Web sites that allow you to publish your family history in some format or another free of charge. Of course if you plan to go the whole hog and create your own Web site you’ll be up for the hosting fees, the software costs of any professional software that you plan to use to create the site, and the domain name if you plan to have a site with its own domain name. Many people hang their family history sites off their own personal Web sites and this can be very successful but, in time, you may want a site that has a URL like www.bradleyfamily.co.nz.
Depending on the software you are using and how much it automates the task of producing a Web site, coupled with your own skill and experience, you can produce a site with little or no Web design experience at all.
Web how to
Before publishing your data to the Web you’ll need to determine exactly how you want it to be presented. One benefit of publishing to the Internet is that you can use hyperlinks to link, for example, a person’s name with other information about them including photographs and scanned documents. Programs like our cover program RootsMagic let you publish data from your data file to the Web very easily. To do this from inside the full version of RootsMagic (this feature is disabled in the trial version although you can step through the Wizard to see how easy it is to perform), choose Internet>Create a Web site and type a name up to eight characters for the project. Set the name of the home page to use – use the default name if you're unsure what to call it and then choose the type of site to create. You can create a Family group sheets site, Pedigree charts for a selected number of generations, Pedigree charts with group sheets for each family, or one of three narrative books – either Ancestors, Descendants or Alphabetical.
As a final step with any Web site creation software you must upload the HTML files and all the other documents such as images and other files – they aren't embedded in the actual HTML code – to your Web site and then test the site to make sure it works. To test it fully, do this on a computer other than the computer you used to create the site and that stores your family history data – this will let you check that the site works perfectly when the files and images it uses are not available on the local computer.
Making a family scrapbook
Scrapbooking is an immensely popular hobby which has its origins in the large paper scrapbooks and albums into which people would paste newspaper clippings, cards, photos and other items of memorabilia. Scrapbooking is now a billion-dollar worldwide industry and many crafters use scrapbooking as a vehicle for recording family histories.
While the histories recorded in a scrapbook do not take what is traditionally understood to be a genealogical approach to the recording of information, these scrapbooks are a graphic and textural record of our lives.
Scrapbooking is particularly appropriate for illustrating photos of your family and the every day events in your life. A scrapbook page generally includes photos or items of memorabilia, some journaling and a descriptive page title. If you’re a crafts enthusiast you can create either handmade scrapbook pages or use computer software to record the day-to-day history of your family. In next month’s NetGuide we look at some of the range of computer scrapbooking software available that you can use to document your family history.
Publish to CD or DVD
CD and DVD discs have the potential to hold a vast amount of information and this can be accessed either as data files or as a movie or slideshow which can be played using a DVD player and watched on a television set. Publishing your family history to DVD or CD is a useful way to distribute information in a fairly inexpensive format – blank CDs and DVDs can be obtained very cheaply and you can burn the discs yourself on your computer’s DVD burner.
There is plenty of software around to help you burn a disk of either your Gedcom file or a richer family history, including photos and other documents. If you want to create a more narrative family history, then you can create a slideshow of your data and images, and compile this in a format that will play on a DVD player. The level of expertise required to do this depends on the complexity of the software you use and your familiarity with it, as well as the amount and nature of the data that you plan to publish. If you have experience in scanning and resizing images and if you are competent at using the computer for typical file management and word processing tasks, you should find the process fairly straightforward.
Another method for publishing to a CD or DVD is to publishing the contents of what would be a regular Web site on a disc. When you copy the HTML files and images and other documents which you would typically publish on the Web to a CD or DVD, the site can be accessed using an Internet browser when the disc is placed in a computer DVD or CD drive. This gives you the benefits of a universally accepted format for viewing the files and one which can be read by any computer - Mac, PC or otherwise - using just an Internet browser. It also offers a level of privacy in that you can publish the data to CD or DVD instead of the Internet, so the data can only be accessed by somebody in possession of the CD or DVD. This is also a useful way to make sure that precious family history documents that you have in your possession, or have found elsewhere are scanned, and distributed to other members of the family who may be interested in them. It creates a form of backup of your data so that if your original data is lost, there are other copies of it available.
Of course CDs and DVDs have the same updating problem that you will have with print publishing, in that once the CD or DVD is distributed and if changes need to be made, you will need to burn a new disc and send a second copy to replace the original.
How to make a CD
Before publishing data to a CD, determine exactly what it is that you want to publish. If you are publishing the equivalent of a Web site on the CD or DVD, then all you need do is to follow the steps that you would do to create a Web site and, instead of uploading it to the Web, copy the files to a CD or DVD.
Alternatively, if you plan to create a slideshow of family history documents, consider using a program like the free Microsoft Photo Story or Windows Movie Maker to collate a slideshow of information and photos – if you use Windows Movie Maker you can include short movies in your presentation.
To write your Gedcom file to a CD, you can use a registered version of the RootsMagic software on the cover disc. It contains a feature for writing your Gedcom file to a CD and to do this, choose Tools>Create a Shareable CD (the trial version lets you step through this process to see how easy it is but it won't actually finish the process). Note the warning that the program will publish all the data in the file. If you don’t want this to happen, you should export your file and strip out data you don't want included in the CD, create a new database and import the data into that before creating the CD. The recipient of your CD will get not only the data that you have amassed, but they will also get a read only version of RootsMagic that they can use it to view the file.
Tips
The National Genealogical Society publishes some Guidelines For Publishing Web Pages On The Internet relevant to family history web sites. Visit this page to see what the society recommends: www.ngsgenealogy.org/comstandweb.cfm.
Free hosting
The RootsWeb site offers free hosting for family history sites. This is not space for a regular wweb site and there are limits to what you can display there but, for family history sites it's a good place to start: searches.rootsweb.com/share.html
Local software
A good and very fast program for importing and exporting Gedcom files is the shareware program Fzip (members.ozemail.com.au/~acroft). It makes a handy Gedcom file browser and it's something you can consider recommending to family who receive your Gedcom file on disk but have no program to view it in. For more links to genealogy software, see www.gencom.org.nz/software.htm
Jargon
Gedcom - (GEnealogical Data COMmunications) a file format for sharing genealogical data between programs. Most reputable genealogical software has the ability to import Gedcom format files and can export the data from your file in this format too.
Writing your family history
When planning to publish your family history, consider the benefit of writing a narrative family history rather than simply publishing the data from your Gedcom file. If your audience is not other genealogists but rather family members, and particularly if you are publishing in book form for a family reunion, for example, a narrative story will make more interesting reading than a list of facts. To write an interesting story based on the historical data that you have researched will require a lot of work, but the end result can be very valuable. You may find one or more family members are willing to help out and write a chapter or two about their branch of the family. Even populating a book of hard facts with narrative elements can help boost its appeal, so consider interviewing some of your family members and adding these interviews to the book. If you're planning to write a narrative history, there are many books and Web sites that can help you learn how to write a compelling story that retains a factual base.