A couple of days ago, I taught one of my regular classes at Macedon Ranges Further Education in Gisborne: Self-Publish Your Memoir or Family History.
As usual, it was a small, intimate class — just four students over three hours — which is one of the things I particularly enjoy about teaching there. Everyone gets the chance to ask questions, and we can actually stop and look at the things that matter to each person rather than racing through a presentation.
We also had the luxury of an enormous screen, which might sound like a small thing until you've tried demonstrating publishing dashboards in a room where half the class can't quite make out the tiny writing!
All four students had arrived ready to get their teeth into either starting or progressing their work-in-progress.
And they had questions.
Lots of them.
That, for me, is always one of the most useful parts of teaching.
Because the questions people ask tell me where the real difficulties lie.
Writing the story is only part of the journey
We began, naturally enough, with the book itself.
What should go into a memoir or family history?
How do you decide what to leave out?
How do you organise decades of memories, photographs, documents and family anecdotes into something another person will actually enjoy reading?
Should you write chronologically?
How much historical background should you include?
Should you interview other family members?
And what happens if their memories are different from yours?
Then we moved on to the practical side.
Editing.
Formatting.
Covers.
Whether you can do these things yourself or whether you're better off outsourcing them.
And, of course, what all of this is likely to cost.
But eventually we reached the moment where I shared my screen and showed the class what actually happens when you publish a book.
Not theoretically.
Actually.
We went into the publishing platforms and looked at the process of uploading the files needed for a paperback or ebook to places such as Amazon and IngramSpark, and at the sort of information other retailers and distributors require.
For many first-time authors, this is where self-publishing suddenly becomes rather more complicated than:
Upload manuscript. Upload cover. Press Publish.
Because before you get anywhere near that final button, you meet something called metadata.
What on earth is metadata?
One of my students asked exactly that.
And it's a very good question.
Metadata is simply the information that describes your book to the systems that sell, distribute and catalogue it.
That includes obvious things such as:
- your title and subtitle
- author name
- ISBN
- publication date
- price
- book description
But it also includes things that may be completely unfamiliar to a first-time publisher:
- categories
- BISAC subjects
- Thema subjects
- keywords
- audience
- edition information
- contributor information
- short and long descriptions
And these aren't boxes you should simply fill in with the first thing that comes into your head because you desperately want to reach the Publish button.
They help determine where your book is placed and how easily it can be found.
If you've written a family history, for example, is it primarily genealogy? Memoir? Biography? Creative writing? Local history?
What phrases might a reader type if they were looking for a book like yours?
And what happens when IngramSpark suddenly asks you for a Thema subject when you've never even heard the word Thema before?
This is exactly the sort of thing that can make an enthusiastic new author think:
I only wanted to turn Mum's story into a book!
Categories, BISACs, Thema… and why they matter
Different parts of the publishing industry classify books in different ways.
Amazon has its own browsing categories.
BISAC is a standard subject-classification system widely used in the book trade, particularly in North America.
Thema is an international subject-classification system and is particularly useful when books are being distributed across different countries and markets.
Then there are keywords — the words and phrases that help retailers and search systems understand what your book is about and connect it with people looking for that subject.
A memoir about growing up on a farm in rural Australia, for example, might need quite different metadata from a family history concentrating on ancestry and genealogical research.
Getting this right doesn't magically turn a book into a bestseller.
But getting it wrong can certainly make a book harder to find.
And then came the ISBN question
Another very common question surfaced:
Do I need to buy an ISBN, or can I use a free one?
Again, the answer isn't simply yes or no.
For somebody publishing only through one platform, a free ISBN can be perfectly adequate.
But an ISBN supplied free by a publishing platform may identify that platform or its nominated imprint as the publisher of record rather than your own publishing business or imprint.
If you're building your own publishing identity, distributing widely, or want greater control over your book's bibliographic record, buying your own ISBN may be worth considering.
And remember: different formats and editions generally need their own identifiers. Your paperback and your ebook are not simply interchangeable versions of the same publishing record.
These are exactly the decisions I want first-time authors to understand before they are confronted by a screen asking them to make one.
My students made me rethink my own book
I came home after the class thinking about the questions I'd been asked.
This happens quite often.
I've been writing and publishing books for many years, and because I work with this material all the time, it's very easy to forget which things seemed baffling when I first encountered them.
My students remind me.
They also remind me that the publishing world doesn't stand still.
So I decided that my previous book, Self-Publish Your Family History or Memoir, needed more than a cosmetic update.
It needed to reflect what people are actually asking me now.
And that has led to the substantially updated 2026 edition:
The Family History & Memoir Workbook
Step-by-Step Prompts and Practical Guidance to Record Your Memories, Write Your Story and Publish a Beautiful Book
The change from guide to workbook is important.
Because I don't want somebody merely to read about writing their family history.
I want them to start doing it while they're working through the book.
A guide — but also a book you work in
The new edition includes prompts, exercises, planning sections and spaces designed to help readers actually develop their project.
It takes you through the journey from:
“I've always wanted to write our family story.”
to:
“I have a manuscript.”
and eventually:
“I know how to turn this into a real book.”
That includes help with:
- identifying the story you actually want to tell
- gathering memories, photographs, letters and documents
- interviewing parents, grandparents and other relatives
- dealing with conflicting memories
- deciding on structure
- turning recollections into readable scenes
- organising chapters
- editing and revising
- deciding what you can do yourself and what you might outsource
- formatting for ebook and print
- understanding publishing platforms
- ISBNs
- metadata
- BISAC and Thema subjects
- categories
- keywords
- writing book descriptions
- preparing files for publication
- and making the finished book easier for readers to discover
I've also expanded the sections dealing with discoverability, because that landscape is changing too.
Books now need to be discoverable beyond the bookstore
Not so long ago, when we talked about people finding books online, we mostly meant Amazon or Google.
Now people also ask AI tools questions such as:
“Can you recommend a workbook to help me write my mother's life story?”
or:
“How do I turn my family history into a published book?”
That doesn't mean authors need some mysterious new set of “AI keywords”.
But it does make clear, accurate and consistent information about a book even more important.
Your website, book description, categories, subject classifications and other public information all help digital systems understand what your book is actually about.
And that brings us straight back to metadata.
Something that looks like a tedious collection of boxes on a publishing dashboard is really part of answering a much more important question:
How will the person who needs this book ever find it?
The most important lesson from the classroom
My four students arrived with four different projects.
That's always the case with memoir and family history.
No two families have the same story.
One person may want to record an extraordinary life.
Another may simply want grandchildren who never knew their great-grandparents to know who they were.
Someone else may have inherited boxes of photographs and letters and realised, perhaps rather suddenly, that unless they do something with them, the stories attached to them could disappear.
You don't have to be famous to write a memoir.
Your family doesn't need to have changed history for its history to matter.
Sometimes the most precious stories are the ordinary ones:
Where people lived.
How they met.
What they did for work.
What frightened them.
What made them laugh.
What Christmas was like.
What the house looked like.
What was served for Sunday lunch.
The expressions Grandma always used.
The things nobody thought to write down because everybody assumed somebody would always remember.
And that, ultimately, is why I teach these classes — and why I've rewritten the book.
The technology matters.
The metadata matters.
The ISBN matters.
But they are only tools.
The real purpose is to make sure the story survives.
A practical guide + workbook for preserving your family story by Beverley Eikli
The Family History & Memoir Workbook — Updated 2026 Edition is designed for complete beginners as well as writers who have already started their memoir or family-history project and need help moving it forward.
It combines guided prompts and practical writing exercises with clear, current advice on editing, formatting, ISBNs, metadata, self-publishing and getting a finished book into readers' hands.
Because every family has a story worth saving.
Get it direct in eBook or paperback HERE.
Or at all retailers HERE.
PS.
I teach classes at MRFEC and the Centre of Adult Education on an ongoing basis when a minimum of 4 people enroll.
Call MRFEC on (03) 5428 3799 or visit their website
Or visit the CAE website or call (03) 9652 0611.