Читать книгу Start & Run a Personal History Business - Jennifer Campbell - Страница 5

This is a “hot” profession: a young industry with vast potential for income and growth. When I started Heritage Memoirs in 2002, I just wanted a creative outlet for my interviewing, writing, and editing skills. Through my father’s death and my mother’s dementia, I had lost my own family stories and thought there could possibly be a business helping other people avoid that loss. I never dreamed that, five years later, the Financial Post would name what I was doing one of the top ten business opportunities, to “serve the needs of luxury-seeking, time-pressed and suddenly health-conscious Canadians.” It said: “Personal Memoirs. Create a record of peoples’ parents or ancestors as a memorialist and put it in a handsome bound book. Must be able to write.”

Interest in the field has caught on like wildfire. Personal historians and their clients have been featured in hundreds of major news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Toronto Star, AARP: The Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Money, Worth, Real Simple, O Magazine and on television programs like The Oprah Show. It’s no surprise the media loves stories about personal history projects. They have all the elements of a feel-good feature article: human interest, history, connecting generations, celebrating the “ordinary” person, family values. And there is the unique nature of the product itself: beautiful, one-of-a-kind books that will last for generations. It’s history — living history — in the making!

With a growing fascination in memoirs and genealogy, it was only a matter of time before entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to help people with their projects, but the term “personal historian” didn’t come into the mainstream until after 1995 when an enterprising group met in an eighteenth-century inn in New England. Mainly writers, they had carved out a niche market, getting paid to help people tell their life stories, and wanted a supportive network to discuss advances in the field, interviewing and recording techniques, resources, pricing, and to otherwise build a business doing what they were doing. But what should they call themselves? They tossed around the phrases “memoir writer,” “historian,” “biography writer,” and others, and finally settled on personal historian. It did the best job of capturing what we do: help tell and preserve the history of a person. That group formed the Association of Personal Historians (APH), and it remains the premier group for “entrepreneur story-savers.”