Editing: our method
Out of your words...
How to write a book?
In the beginning are our clients’ words. It is up to your private biographer, member of a large network, to enhance them properly and faithfully. Blending our writing into impeccable narrative provides us with the sense of art and pleasure expected of memoir-writing professionals.
Assembling memories into compelling pages takes concentration. In the light of this effort, and to avoid repetition, we collect digital recordings of our clients’ stories. This audio source enables us to catch some rich or moving expressions which come from their lips during the powerful evoking of a relived past. Then, after this listening time, our writing work begins...
" Thoughts fly and words go on foot " (Julien Green)
You need a ghostwriter for your book!
Our difference with traditional street-corner letter-writers is that we produce books, instead of short texts.
In the writing of these records, the mission of your personal biographer is that your readers recognize your favorite expressions, the pace of your speech, your points of view, laughter, and the language that is uniquely yours. This loyalty to tone is facilitated by the audio-recording of our interviews. By listening over and over to them, our ears pick up expressions giving a lot of content - or strong images - which better represent your story or your ideas.
Step by step, with the craftsmanship and knowledge passed down from ancient scribes, but using contemporary technical resources, we will record your words in lines. Usually, we need to rebuild the chronology, that our conversations disrupt by jumping from one subject to another. We also offer you different structures: for example, by using a fictional technique to dramatize the story, starting with a flash-back on a major event which gave a direction to your life.
Once the accepted text of your book, after the successive deliveries for which the number and the frequency vary according to the deadline you have defined for your book project, we reach the ready for press stage. This final draft,meticulously edited by your personal writer in pages mixed with your photographs, can be modified as much as necessary. You need to be completely happy with the final draft that is going to be printed.
Then, after a last proofreading, usually comes the time of a print-on-demand self-publication. All that you will have to do is to tell your scribe how many books you need, pay a deposit, and wait for your books to arrive. Chances are, your story may succeed in catching the attention of a mainstream publisher. If so, it may be found, one day, in bookshop windows. If you wish to market your book to a larger audience, please let your Scribe know early in the process, as this will affect the size of the manuscript and how much additional research is needed to make it commercially attractive.
Whatever the number of copies distributed, these books will bring you even closer to your loved-ones. Because, like you, they will have a better understanding of the path of your life and your values; and they will share, with emotion, the messages that you have left for them.
This interview on the Marc de Vincent’s channel "The Life Writer" was an opportunity, for our French founder Pierre Nozières, to present the spirit and the means of biography writing within our international network:
