Copywriting ~ Marketing ~ Story Productions ~ Publishing

Category: Family Stories (Page 1 of 2)

Tell Your Own Personal Story While You Still Can!

Arch of colorful trees over a ocean inlet with mountains. Tell Your Own Story While You Still Can!

What will people say about you at your memorial?

Will they genuinely know what was important to you?

Or will they make it up?

The time to write and preserve your own personal story is now, while you have your health.

I can help you collect the fragments of your life in words, images, and video.

Then we can assemble into story productions in various formats, such as a personal website, video montage to show at family gatherings, a secure multimedia portal, and/or a printed book.

Most of the Story Productions I have created so far have been personal stories, initiated by the person or by a family member.

Greg Dixon
Shared Visions Unlimited

Capturing and Publishing Family Stories For Fun!

American Thanksgiving and the Holiday Season are coming up soon.

Consider giving your family and loved ones a Story Production to capture personal and family stories as a lasting gift.

We are not getting any younger, and sometimes the opportunity to capture personal stories passes us by.

I have some regrets in that area.

Collaborate with me to capture and preserve the stories, photos, video, and audio in Google Drive folders.

I can conduct interviews and facilitate family storytelling sessions. You never know what will come out of the woodwork!

Then we organize our content into various story productions in different formats. Simple photo and video montages are good for presenting at memorials, weddings, anniversaries, and other special occasions.

A personal or family website is perfect for sharing stories publicly.

It is also possible to have the family update and expand the content over time, making the website a living legacy.

A Life Vault is a multimedia portal that supports multiple levels of access, allowing you to share only certain stories with family and friends.

The stories can also go into books that can be printed or viewed as eBooks and Flipbooks.

Let’s start with identifying and capturing the most important stories.

I am offering a third off the package price with the coupon named 𝗚𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗧𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗸𝘀. Learn more about the offers and see sample 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 at:

https://www.sharedvisionspublishing.com/storyproductions

𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗴 𝗗𝗶𝘅𝗼𝗻
𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗨𝗻𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗱 M𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴

The Four Steps For Publishing Family Stories Book

The Four Steps for Publishing Family Stories Book.

This free Flipbook will help you get started capturing your family stories.

Celebrate Family Legacy with a Family Anthology

Three Sisters at Sunset. Forming a Love Heart with their hands.

Do you and your family members have interesting stories to share?

Did your parents or grandparents have some adventures that few know about?

Want to capture the stories while you still can?

Create a Family Anthology

A Family Anthology is a collection of biographical information, life journeys, and interesting stories from and about your family members.

Family events such as family reunions, weddings, anniversaries, and holiday gatherings provide opportunities to capture information and stories.

A notebook and smartphone are all you need. Zoom and StreamYard are great for conducting interviews and conducting stories.

I can help you with all of that.

Publishing a Family Anthology

I can produce the Family Anthology and publish it in various formats, including a family website, print book, Kindle eBook, flipbook, video, audiobook, and a secure Life Vault.

Choose the formats that work best for your family.

You can start with just one family member and add more later.

Perhaps your personal story?

Want to Capture and Publish Family Stories Yourself?

Capture Family Stories While You Still Can Book

The Capture Your Family Stories While You Still Can! book provides a comprehensive guide to why capturing stories is important, many examples of stories we have captured, strategies for collecting the stories, and ways to share with family and friends.

The digital book is included in the Golden Publishing Kit, along with many videos and tutorials for a wide range publishing projects.

The multimedia portal also includes a comprehensive course on building a Golden Publishing Sales Machine.

The collection will grow over time.

Want to Create a Financial Legacy for Your Family Too?

Would you like to enable your family members to receive thousands of dollars in two years to help them get an education, buy a home, retire, travel, or live a good life?

I have started gifting Crypto Staking Contracts as birthday presents.

Could Be Life Changing

That could work for your family.

Capture Family Stories While You Still Can! ~ Family Story Production Offer

Greg Dixon presents Capture Family Stories While You Still Can!

Greg Dixon offers a wide range of content creation and publishing solutions appropriate for capturing and sharing personal and family stories.

Capturing family stories is important because our loved ones will not always be with us to tell their stories.

Greg Dixon is publishing a book called Capture Family Stories While You Still Can! 

The book and articles to help you do it yourself or with Greg Dixon are in a Golden Nugget Publishing Kit.

This proposal aims to collaborate with individuals and families to capture and publish their stories in formats that best suit their needs.

Some of the uses for Story Productions include:

  • Story montages for showing at memorials, anniversaries, weddings, family reunions, and other family events.
  • Longer video productions that could be more documentary in nature.
  • Family websites.
  • Secure multimedia portal to have a range of content, and also secure legal documents with limited access if needed.
  • Digital and print books, including story collections, memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, family history, and family anthologies.

Sample Story Productions

Here are some examples that show a range of formats and approaches.

See https://sharedvisions.com/storyproductions/

The Story Production Process

Here are the basic steps of working with Greg Dixon.

  1. Preliminary discussion to determine what the family wants to capture and share.
  2. Discussion of possible formats.
  3. Create Google Drive folders to store existing and future story assets, such as photos, videos, clippings, articles, and audio recordings.
  4. Create a story roadmap for collecting and publishing.
  5. Conduct interviews and collect data.
  6. Assemble into story productions.
  7. Review with family.
  8. Publish in the desired formats.

Story Production Costs

The initial discovery process is free.

Most Story Productions will be served by a monthly retainer of $388 per month until completed.

Simple productions can be completed in a month. More elaborate productions can take many months.

Greg Dixon offers a low-cost retainer to maintain access to online story assets such as family websites and secure multimedia content portals.Book a meeting with Greg Dixon at https://www.gregdixon.net/calendar

Comprehensive Publishing and Marketing Special Offer

Greg Dixon's Golden Publishing Retainer

In simple terms, I have a deep set of experiences, tools, and strategies to help people publish and market many things.

If you have something you want to share as an author, speaker, or course creator, I can help you.

Want to share personal and family stories? I can help you with that.

Have a vision for the world to share? I’m your man.

Want to sell tickets to shows and events? I’ve had a lot of success with that.

Do you have products and services to sell? Let’s get the word out and create the systems to make the sales.

I have an affordable and sustainable retainer to work with you to achieve your publishing and marketing goals.

The retainer is $388 for the first month and $88/month until cancelled.

The idea is to launch your project, keep it available online, and build over time. Examples include landing pages, sales funnels, blogging websites for stories and marketing, and more.

Your project may be much bigger than that. We can discuss that as we get the first steps done.

Ready to get started today?

Here are some sample projects for the Golden Publishing Retainer.

Personal and Family Story Productions

One of the things I love to do is capture, preserve, and share family stories. This is why I bought my first still and video cameras.

Over the years, I have created everything from photo montages to books to multimedia collections and websites to share personal and family stories.

I am running a Family Story Challenge: Capture family stories while you can.

I teach people how to plan, collect, assemble, and publish one or more family stories.

Working with me for a story production includes:

  • Planning the stories to capture.
  • Creating a set of Google Drive folders for you and your family to upload and organize photos, documents, and other media to have a safe place for it and for use in story productions.
  • Assembling one or more story productions.
  • Creating some or all of the following to share the information and stories:
    • Blogging website for multimedia content that can grow over time.
    • Print books.
    • Audiobooks.
    • Video presentations.
    • Secure multimedia repository.

In many ways, a website that I provide is the best place to share stories over time.

Book Publishing For Authors and Speakers

Earlier this year, I ran a Writing For Fun challenge, encouraging people to write simply for the sheer joy of it.

There are also many reasons why you may want to publish books, including:

  • Leave a legacy.
  • Share information to make the world better for people or businesses.
  • To be entertaining.
  • Englighten the world.
  • Build your world presence, influence, and authority.
  • Attract clients and customers to your offers.
  • Get speaking gigs.

Why do you want to publish your books?

Whatever the reason, here is how I help authors publish and market books:

  • Help with the planning and assembly.
  • Copyediting. I can recommend some developmental editors and ghostwriters.
  • Preparing the manuscript for submission.
  • Preparing covers for the print and eBook versions.
  • Submit to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and IngramSpark as appropriate. Part of the discussion is whether you want to self-publish or submit to a traditional publishing house. I can help with those decisions and support promotion either way.
  • Help with query letters and social media campaigns to promote the book before, during, and after the launch.

One thing to consider is creating an author website right away to publish excerpts and promote the book before it is published.

Let’s discuss your book goals.

Video For All Occasions

Video has been a huge part of what I have done for the last thirty years and continues to be a large part of the publishing and marketing I do today.

My YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/gregdixon2007 gets around 1.8K views a month organically across hundreds of videos published since 2007.

The channel is something of an archeological dig of everything I have been interested in along with many interviews and client projects.

Many more video projects are not public on the channel.

Video is key to story productions, marketing, training, fun interviews, and more.

I have recently been extracting the audio for a podcast.

Video using in-person and online tools can be part of your Golden Publishing Retainer.

Leverage Your Golden Content With Courses and Membership Programs

If you have book content that teaches helpful things for people and businesses, I encourage you to create an online course and membership program to make a difference in lives and make money.

Maybe you already have a book that would be good for that?

Going the other way, perhaps you have online courses and training programs that would make good books.

Publish Everywhere!

Here are the main elements of my Golden Publishing Sales Machine.

  • Publish a Book
  • Publish a related Online Course and Membership Program
  • Cross-market
  • Use the content for promotion, including webinars.

The main reason I subscribed to Kartra was to create and sell online courses.

I have all of the tools, experience, and strategies to implement a Golden Publishing Sales Machine for you.

Kartra is also great for sales landing pages, email marketing, webinar funnels, payments, and other resources for your success.

Golden Publishing Retainer Offer

Let’s get started for $388 for the first month and $188/month until cancelled.

Storing and Organizing Media for Story Productions

The first thing I do with a client project is create a set of Google Drive folders.

Google drive is great for story productions because all family members can upload the photos, videos, and documents they have.

This is a good idea if only for the purpose of having a safe place to store the digital assets.

I also use an AI tool ClarityScribe to transcribe the video and create various descriptions of the content that can be used in Story Productions.

The folders are also a good place to put scanned images and raw recordings from smartphones, StreamYard Studio, or Zoom recordings.

I suggest organizing the Google Drive folders into subfolders with names that make it easy to find what you need.

The Google Drive folders are also a good place to store the books, videos, and other assets of Story Productions.

Here are ways that I can help:

  • Join the Family Story Challenge and download a copy of The Four Steps For Publishing Family Stories at https://www.sharedvisionspublishing.com/storychallenge
  • Purchase the Shared Visions Golden Publishing Kit using the same link. All of the challenge trainings will go in there to augment publishing resources already there.
  • Retain me to help you with all of the steps of your Story Productions.

The Family Story Challenge ~ Planning

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to capture the stories of your loved ones while you still can.

The Family Story Challenge will take you though all of the steps to capture, preserve, and share your family stories.

Let’s do some planning.

Some Family Story Possibilities

There are many ways to approach family story productions.

Do you want to do a deep dive on one family member?

Do you want to feature your immediate family?

Is there an upcoming event, such as a family reunion, wedding, graduation, anniversary, or celebration of life, at which you want to present the story productions?

Or do you simply want to have fun with the stories?

Ways To Share The Family Stories

The easiest way to share for an event like an anniversary or memorial service is a video montage that presents the milestones of a person’s life.

A website or book can be great for longer and more diverse story collections.

Perhaps an audiobook.

A family magazine with each issue featuring one or two family members and stories could work too,

You can do all of the above over time.

The question is, where to start?

Let’s Start Here

A good place to start is to pick one family member and consider what you would want to present at their celebration of life (even if they are not passing any time soon:-)

From there, we can go deeper into their life or include more family members for a book, family magazine, or website. Or all of these.

I will teach you how to do all of these things yourself over the weeks of the challenge.

I have created a small book called The Four Steps to Publishing Family Stories to help with journey. Register and download the book.

Next, I will suggest ways to store and organize the content to go into your family story productions. It is something all families can do.

Simple Photo Presentations to Refresh Family Memories

Simple Photo Presentations to Refresh Family Memories

One of the easiest story projects you can do yourself or with my help is to create a slide presentation with photos and captions identifying the people and events.

I have created dozens of these presentations for birthday parties, weddings, and memorials.

The most recent was a tribute to Rocket Norton at the recent Rock Beats Cancer benefit concert. The five-minute presentation is mostly photos with some video.

A happier project was to put together family photos for my son’s wedding. He grew up in North Vancouver and his bride grew up in the Maritimes with the wedding and reception in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

The photo slideshow with a music background started with baby photos of each and pictures of activities as they grew up separately (with many interesting parallels).

I included photos of parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins with captions for the names, relationships, and events. It was an excellent way for each family to learn about the other family.

We looped the video on a large TV at an Aunt’s house between the wedding ceremony and the start of the reception. Many people watched and commented on relatives they had not seen recently.

We also projected the video as part of the reception.

We used Google Drive to collect the photos from both families.

I used PhotoShop to crop and restore the photos, though Canva and other photo editors will work for this.

Today, I will use Apple FinalCut Pro to assemble the photos with transitions, captions, and music. Any video editor would work for this.

I can put it together for you. I will need the photos and notes about each photo for the captions sent by email or uploaded to a Google Drive folder.

The finished presentation can be embedded on a web page or played on most modern televisions from a USB Memory Drive.

Memory Refresher for Seniors

A great use of these family presentations is for seniors and others who are experiencing memory loss.

The photos and videos with captions and possibly a voice-over can be a fun way to refresh memories of family members and events.

Digital Photo Frames

There are many ways of presenting these photo presentations, including inexpensive digital photo frames for your loved ones.

Digital Photo and Video Frame

Tabletop Books

The photo presentation could also be adapted to a create a tabletop book.

There are many services to create these including VistaPrint, Walmart, and others.

Creating a book available for your family members to order from Amazon would also work. Publishing books on Amazon is one of my main services.

I am working on a Story Projects book and workshop series for creating Story Productions like these for people who want to do it themselves.

Let me know if you want me to help with your family story productions now.

Why I Want You To Publish Your Amazing Books and Stories

Why I Want You To Publish Your Book and Stories.

My first idea for this article was to ask why you want to publish your books and stories.

Then I realized that many of you are not yet on your publishing journey ~ perhaps this is a new idea for you.

So here are some of the reasons why I want to publish your books and stories.

Sharing Your Gifts

The world needs that special gift that only you have ~ Marie Forleo

As Marie Forleo says, the world needs your insights, knowledge and stories. Books and story productions are a great way to do that.

Clarity and Catharsis

The process of writing and publishing your books and stories can help you crystallize some ideas and provide rewarding insights for yourself.

Sometimes you simply need to get things out of your head onto paper.

Influence and Authority

A book and other media can establish you as the authority and attract people to your offers and open doors for speaking engagements.

Preserve and Share Legacy

Books and story productions are a great way to preserve and share personal and family stories.

I urge you to capture family stories while you still can.

Publishing Options

There are many free and near-free options for you to publish yourself.

Services like BookBaby can help you.

And Greg Dixon can help you with every step of the publishing journey from idea to publishing in many formats to promotion.

Sample Story Productions with Greg Dixon

Magic Stories

Here are some sample Story Productions I have created in the past.

Each one is unique for content and media.

Your family or personal story will also be unique to you.


Ruth Townsend’s Musical Journey

Ruth Townsend asked me to put together her musical story from age five to give to her grandchildren.

Shy prepared a short video introduction and we compiled photos, images, clippings, and video to tell her story.

I created a multimedia PDF that I put onto USB thumb drives in the shape of a piano that she put into a nice gift box for each grandchild.

Some of the grandchildren are now at college and have the story pianos with them.

See tellyourstory.productions/ruth_townsend


Felicity Morgan Family Stories

Felicity Morgan wrote a memoir about growing up in Victoria, British Columbia.

We combined video, photos, text from the memoir, and her daughter Ann reading the memoir as a Story Production website.

See felicitymorgan.ca


Robert Hollender Book

Linda Hollender commissioned us to capture her father’s life story. We usually shot videos, but Robert was reluctant to speak on camera.

Instead, we used a microphone and a smartphone to record his story, which we transcribed and assembled into a book with photos that he gave away to friends for his birthday party that year.

Last year, Linda gave away copies at his memorial service.

See tellyourstory.productions/robert-hollander/


The Rocket Norton Vault

I worked with Vancouver musician and author Rocket Norton for decades on many projects, including concert promotions, publishing his books, selling his How to Coach Baseball to Kids video course, and driving a Lincoln Town Car for his driving service.

Much of that I collected into a multimedia portal called The Rocket Norton Vault.

I also helped promote three cancer benefit concerts related to his battle with cancer. Rocket organized and performed at the first two concerts. The one this year served as a memorial.

I had the honour of creating a memorial video shown at the concert.


Preserve Your Personal and Family Stories

My encouragement is for you to capture the stories of your loved ones while they can still share. Our time on earth is fleeting.

You can start with taking photos, video, and audio with your SmartPhone at family gatherings. I have created videos on the process in the past and am working with new resources to help you.

I am also available to craft new and existing content into story productions.

Please make an appointment to discuss.

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