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.
Over the decades, I have helped many people and companies achieve their project goals.
Often, it started with a request for help doing something I may not have done before. Many of the tools and skills I have now came from figuring out how to help people.
Past Adventures
Here are some of the adventures that came from saying yes.
Selling How to Coach Baseball to Kids VHS tapes and CDs.
Cancer Benefit Concerts.
Many websites across niches, including botanical gardens, choirs, concerts, theatre productions, bands, real estate investors, natural health companies, and dozens of my own projects.
Project Management stints during the Smoke and Mirrors Venture Capital boom of the last millennium. One took me to Hong Kong with a company that wanted to do online trading.
Some Technical Writing gigs.
Software development for a large consulting company and my own clients.
A singer in a band I was in was a PhD candidate for Applied Psychology. A request to help compile a BASIC program led to over twenty years of developing and supporting psychometric assessment systems for hiring and development. At one time, every person who applied to work at TELUS took a Values In Action assessment we designed for them. Ka Ching! Our most comprehensive system was a Management Assessment for senior managers and CEO candidates. The owners aged out and resisted succession, or we would still be running the service today.
Some quirky music videos with musicians I played with.
Videos for concerts, theatre productions, food recovery, urban farming, botanical gardens, family events, weddings, and much much more.
Sizzle reels for speakers.
Promotional and training videos on many topics.
Many online interviews with people who have interesting stories and offers.
A wide range of personal and family story productions.
Video interviews with pioneers of the Natural Health industry.
Comprehensive marketing, including landing pages, social media, blogging, and email.
Formatting and publishing books in print and other formats.
Online courses.
Live events such as concerts and coffeehouses.
At one choir concert, I engineered the sound, used three video cameras, and sang in the choir. I could control the mixer with my phone and popped out from time to time to check the balance.
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.
Want to Capture and Publish Family Stories Yourself?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can create folders on Google Drive to start organizing the media for sharing and using for Story Productions
You can name the folders something that makes sense to you.
Here is a sample:
Aunt Martha Miles
Notes
Videos
Early Days
Wedding
Adventures
…
Photos
Category 1
Category 2
Audio Recordings
Document
Story Productions
When you are ready, you can assemble the photos, video, audio, and notes into media for sharing.
I have created presentations in the following forms:
Print Book
eBook
FlipBook
Video clips
Audio
Slide presentations for weddings, anniversaries, and memmorials.
Multimedia Digital Experience Edition
Website
Blog post
Social media posts.
…
Story Production Tools
I use a lot of tools, including PhotoShop (images), FinalCut Pro (video), ClarityScribe (transcription, AI writing), Atticus (writing, print and eBook formatting), Heyzine (flipbooks), Kartra (membership portals, email, video hosting), WordPress (websites), and others to create Multimedia Story Productions.
Greg Dixon Is Available to Help
I am available to help coach you through the collection of the stories and crafting them into story productions.
Greg Dixon talked with Richard Lepinsky about his story for MerrittStories.ca.
The video collection is at https://www.merrittstories.ca/RichardLepinsk
Richard and his wife Aline moved to Victoria, British Columbia from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Then made their way to Merritt, British Columbia with a stop in Mission, BC.
Richard played drums professionally in various bands in Winnipeg.
He founded the Merritt Ukelele Circle (MUC), which plays at events and care facilities around Merritt.
He is also writing and publishing songs regularly, aiming for a song a month.
Merritt is a town of around seven thousand people three hours north-east of Vancouver that was the home of a large county-music festival. There are murals of county stars on buildings downtown.
The town has many families with a long history in Merritt including a family from the Basque region of Spain who arrived over fifty years ago.
There are also many First Nations groups doing amazing things with health and friendship centres.
Greg and his Doug drive elders from remote communities to meetings, medical appointments, and dental appointments in facilities that they created. The also help drive children to the library, pool, and other evens in the region.
Greg will conduct video and audio interviews and assemble photos to tell the stories.
