How to get your family history book published

Writing your family history and wondering how you go about publishing your story? Andrew Tatham, author of an excellent and unusual book based on his grandfather’s companions in the First World War – A Group Photograph – provides some tried and tested tips on getting published.

Producing a book for other people to read is much easier and less expensive these days than before – it requires some computer knowledge (or knowing someone with that knowledge) and then you can quite quickly have an ebook created or a printed book in your hands.

The difficult thing is getting other people to read your book – for that you need a publisher to take you on or you need to put an enormous amount of effort into doing publicity – and for either of those things to work, the bottom line is that your book needs to stand out as having something original to say and be written in a way that people want to read it.

Top three tips for writing a brilliant book

1.Before starting writing, go through all your research notes and index them – not only will you be able to find things easily later on but as you’re doing it your brain will be working and coming up with ideas of how to write your book

2. Find local societies that are looking for speakers (and most of them are!) and volunteer to talk about the subject of your book. Not only does this give you a deadline and focus the mind on producing something of interest to an audience, but when you get questions you will be able to see what interests them and therefore what you need to address in your book

3. Find and nurture your cheerleaders – people who are interested in reading your writing, who are honest (but kind) in their criticism and who will encourage you to keep going.

To find out more about Andrew Tatham’s WW1 book, A Group Photograph visit www.groupphoto.co.uk (hopefully he will also be posting updates on his forthcoming book there too).

We loved it and you can find our review here.

Thinking about writing your family history?

Click here to read our guide on writing up your family history