Use Technology to Fast-Track Your Family History

Course Summary

Did You Know…?

1. Professional print-on-demand publishing is often cheaper than local printing.
2. Full-colour paperbacks or hardcovers are more affordable than you think.
3. Making changes after publishing your print proof costs nothing.
4. Subsequent copies of your published book cost roughly as much as a movie ticket.

In this workshop you will discover:

• A curated selection of free and inexpensive Apps to digitise text, translate and digitise hand-written letters, and edit, ‘fix’ and colourise photographs.
• You will also learn the step-by-step process of self-publishing your family memorabilia into a perfect bound paperback, or hardcover book, quickly and inexpensively.
• By using Ingram Spark, which has printing facilities worldwide, your family history book can be printed and shipped locally, reducing shipping costs and encouraging collaboration among family members.
• In addition, you will receive:
  • Handouts of interview questions to ask family members.
  • Prompts for writing a compelling memoir that captures the challenges and triumphs of your life story.
  • Strategies for involving multiple generations in your project, bridging the gap between you and your ancestral roots.
  • Various ways to structure and present your family history.
  • Tips for identifying the best genealogy sites for researching your specific cultural background and country of origin.
  • An overview of family tree options and print-on-demand publishing, ensuring your story is preserved and shared.

The course will take place in a computer room, so our teacher can help you through the process of creating and uploading files, to enable you to create a print-on-demand copy of your book in class. If you have a completed manuscript, our teacher will show you how to format and upload to the internet. Or, if you’re at the beginning, she can show you various apps to digitise into a single file, and you can be ready for when the book is ready to upload. We will show you how to use free Apps to create the interior and exterior PDFs required to upload to Ingram Spark printer/publisher which is used worldwide by traditional and self-publishers.

Your guide is Beverley Eikli, a journalist and feature writer for newspapers and magazines in Adelaide, Sydney and Perth before she began to write fiction and non-fiction under three pen names. Beverley is the author of more than 30 novels written under three pen names. Born in the African mountain kingdom of Lesotho, Beverley married the adventurous Norwegian bush pilot she met while managing a safari lodge in Botswana’s beautiful Okavango Delta—located in the same area her grandfather had mapped the Tsetse Fly belt that causes ‘sleeping sickness’ nearly 80 years before. Inspired by her own family history, she edited her father’s four-volume memoir and has written several non-fiction books on the craft of writing genre fiction, genealogy, and family history.