The Services Offered by Modern Memoirs Inc
An Interview with Publisher Kitty Axelson-Berry
Sep 1, 2008 Dulcinea Norton-Smith
Publisher Kitty Axelson-Berry has worked in publishing, journalism and editing. Skills which proved invaluable when setting up her business Modern Memoirs Inc to publish memoirs, manuscripts and family histories for private clients.
Kitty also founded the Association of Personal Historians, which brings professionals, academics and hobbyists together to share their knowledge and experiences.
Kitty took some time out to talk to Suite 101 about the unique services offered by Modern Memoirs Inc
Suite 101: Your services are quite unique and offer a full memoir solution for writers and non writers. How did this idea develop to become the company you run today?
Actually, my services were unique in 1994, but I'm hoping that they are no longer unique--because it is so important for our world that people bring memory and responsibility into their vocabulary and hearts. In 1994, my family thought that providing professional assistance to would-be memoirists and family historians was a ridiculous concept and that no one would ever pay for the hours of labor involved in interviewing, writing, editing, compiling, designing, formatting, and custom publishing memoirs and family histories, and of course the cost of materials, technology, and so on. Hundreds of related businesses have now been started to serve the crushing needs of people who feel a compulsion and responsibility to re-order their lives and pass along their accumulated reflections. Also, to honor their mentors (occasionally, they want to dishonor their de-mentors, but at Modern Memoirs, we very strongly discourage that). It's human instinct not to live in a vacuum.
I say hundreds of related personal history businesses because hundreds of businesses or individuals now count themselves members of the Association of Personal Historians. I founded that as a trade association back in 1994-95, in order to gather and share information with colleagues who were neither crazy nor academics (clarification: academics and "oral historians" collect first-person narratives on particular topics for use by other academics and historians in the future). Thus, professional Personal Historians are less and less a rarity.
Suite 101: You have a lovely service called "Little Books". Tell us about that.
People themselves can now go to dozens of websites to have simple books output, usually heavy on the photos, short on the text, like scrapbooks, and even longer books, like unedited diaries. We decided to limit our focus to high quality service and production.
Suite 101: In many of the memoirs you create there is a final section called an "Ethical Will" . What is this and what purpose do you feel that an Ethical Will holds in a memoir?There is wildly popular book called "Last Lecture," in which a young man who is dying (actually, he died last week) shares what he has found to be important in life. It's apparently sold millions of copies, but the author says the only important copies are the first three, which are his wife’s and children's. His book is basically an ethical will in which he hands down his ethical legacy to his family. An ethical will is a statement of what you believe is important and sets the tone for future generations.
Suite 101 also had a chat with Kitty Axelson-Berry about her feelings about memoirs and about her clients.`
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