How I helped my uncle George publish the Martin-Buckner Family History series

In a way, I owe my entire career to my uncle George. I have always loved reading and writing, although the writing has appeared in different forms over time.

In the summer of 1997, my grandfather (“Lolo Dado”), brother, and I spent a month in Chicago, where my uncle George, aunt (Tita) Agnes, and cousins lived. It was an experience I still remember today, as it was the first time I’d seen a Missy Elliott video, South Park, and Daria on TV. We drove to where Michael Jordan’s house was (proof is in the photo below), which was at least a 30-minute drive, and we dined at his restaurant when it was still open.

My cousin from Montreal and extended cousins from Louisiana even came through, and we all took a side trip to Wisconsin where my aunt’s cousin’s wife is from. That was the first time I remember being stared at when we went into a fast-food restaurant. We must have been the only Asians they’d ever seen.

After that trip, my mom encouraged me to submit a few photos and writeups to The Philippine Journal newspaper because she was friends with the publisher. So I did (it was not a feature article or anything) and my mom sent a couple of copies back to my uncle and aunt.

George said I was a good writer and that I should do more, which turned into planting the seed in college (where I graduated with an English Literature degree) that would later become the heirloom book we got printed about my paternal grandfather in 2014 after he passed.

George and I have been Facebook “friends” for many years, so when he saw my post about taking some book editing courses (which I had time for during the pandemic), he reached out about a three-volume series he had been writing and sharing with his hobby geneaology group.

I remember when George shared the information he’d found with me on another trip to Chicago in 2008. He was pretty series about his ancestry, something I would only be curious about many years later about my own.

He became my first paying client in 2020, and these books were a great way to test out the process that I later refined with clients.

George self-published a book back in 2011, An Outsider’s Campaign Diary, which he had guidance on from another publishing consulting company. This was a compilation of his blogs about Obama’s 2008 campaign, a great insight into American politics in that era.

After I finished editing the books, I didn’t know how we would get his book online and printed, so we enlisted the help of a book consultant/coach in the US, Susie Schaefer, recommended to me by an author/publishing colleague.

George needed help with getting the book files in order for IngramSpark: fonts, pagination, headers, etc. so I helped with that, which I would later learn is called interior formatting, typesetting, or interior design.

There were a lot of things regarding formatting I didn’t know how to do in Microsoft Word, so later I took a course on Udemy and learned how to do simple book formatting for future clients and ebook formatting. Thanks again for building my skills, George!

I didn’t know how to create EPUB files then either, so Susie brought on her colleague, Michelle White, to do those files, as well as the covers for each book.

I like how the covers have a weathered leather look to them and are consistent in look but with three different colours.

It was gratifying to see these live on Amazon and more so to receive signed copies from George when I saw him in person three years later.

They work best as hardcovers because after the paperback versions get read, the cover flaps up. I thought I formatted the books for 6×9″, but when I got them, the width was way wider.

Not sure how that happened, but the books still look great.

Another cool fact about what’s in Martin-Buckner Family History: Observations, Memories, and Interviews (Volume Three) vs. the information in Volume 1 about his father’s ancestry and information in Volume 2 about his mother’s ancestry) is there’s a transcript of an interview that George did with Lolo Dado in 1997 (either before or after we had taken the trip to Chicago).

All of us got VHS tape copies of the interview, but had I not been motivated by my oral literature class to transcribe the entire interview (roughly two hours) into a Word document, we would not have been able to create the book about Lolo Dado nor include it in George’s Volume 3. I don’t know what happened to our family’s VHS tape of it, but I think we all lost our copies of that raw video!

I had a chat with Michelle last month and she shared she was working with George to re-format the 3 books into one, so stay tuned for that!

Whether you want to document your family’s ancestry or have another hobby, these books are a great example of how you can turn your passion—like George’s for geneaology—into a book or even a series.

Need a book coach, ghostwriter, or editor to help you publish your book so you can get it in the hands of readers? Read more about my author services here and contact me if you’re ready to begin. Or sign-up to my email list to get monthly whispers in your inbox.

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