Kitty Axelson-Berry: Hi! My name is Kitty Axelson-Berry and I am the Founder of the Association of Personal Historians. I am going to be showing you how to write and publish your memoir.

So what is a memoir? It's a personal account of your life or some aspect of it. It's from your own point of view, your own reflections, and it can be very eclectic. An autobiography on the other hand, is meant to be a document about the facts of your life. It's more of an official record, more formal and complete in tone and structure. In this video, I'll discuss what to write about in your memoirs out of all the possible stories, and if you can't remember enough stories, how to get those memories rolling. Then, I'll talk about how to approach the actual writing of your memoir, such as, whether you write your stories in sequence as they come to you, or writing them as if they were literary masterpieces.

Next, I'll show you how to improve your manuscript after you've written your stories down, so that you have a perfect final copy, and then I'll show you how to use supplementary materials so that your readers will know and understand you better. You'll want to add photographs, genealogy charts, perhaps old letters, recipes, documents. I'll also be talking about the importance of design and formatting your stories. You'll want an attractive readable book or eBook, and that means making good design choices and formatting decisions. And finally, I'll show you how you can print and bind your books. Once you've done all of the work and have several hundred pages of text and images you just won't want to staple the pages or put them in a three ring binder. To get started you will need a Word Processor, which could be a pen and paper, a typewriter, a voice recorder or a computer. Before we begin though, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am the Founder of the Association of Personal Historians, a trade association, and Modern Memoirs Inc.

, one of the first memoir publishing services in the country. With White Poppy Press, our new self-publishing imprint, we have written and published hundreds of memoirs for people like you, over the last 16 years. So let's get started with writing your memoir.