Honestly
You have other options, and some of them are better.
Here is the whole landscape, written accurately, including the three situations in which you should hire somebody who is not me.
| Option | Roughly | What you actually get | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself with a recorder | Free | Hours of audio nobody transcribes. This is not cynicism — it is simply what happens to almost every recording ever made of a grandparent. | You are disciplined, and you genuinely will do the writing. |
| A weekly-prompt subscription service | Around $99 a year | Emailed questions, the subject types answers, a bound book of those answers at the end. The book is a questionnaire, not a narrative — but it exists, which beats most alternatives. | The subject writes willingly, is well, and you have a year. |
| A large memoir company | From about $3,250, often five figures | Professional project management, a house template, and a writer you did not choose. Quality varies considerably with which writer you draw. | You want a managed process and a predictable object. |
| A local videographer | $500–$2,500 | A filmed interview, edited. Excellent for voice, face and gesture — genuinely irreplaceable. Not searchable, not readable, and dependent on a file format surviving. | You want the person themselves, not the account. Do this as well, not instead. |
| A professional genealogist | Hourly | Records, lines, documents, brick walls broken. Research, not prose. | Your problem is a missing ancestor, not a missing book. |
| This | Quoted in writing, per project — between a prompt service and a memoir firm | Interviews, then a continuous narrative written by hand in your family’s voice. Nothing invented, gaps left visible, written and edited by Mark, print-ready PDF and Word. | You want something read rather than stored. |
Three times you should hire somebody else
- Your real problem is research. If you do not know where the family came from, hire a genealogist. I write; I do not find. Paying me to write around a hole is a waste of your money.
- What you want is the person, not the account. If the point is your father’s face and voice and the way he laughs before the end of his own joke, hire a videographer this month. Prose cannot do that and I will not pretend otherwise.
- Somebody in the family can already write. If your sister is a decent writer with time and the family trusts her, she will produce something better than a stranger will, because she knows which silences mean something. Send her the 250 words page and let her start.
And one where I am the obvious choice
Somebody is ninety, or ill, or about to move into care; nobody in the family has time or distance to write it; and what you want at the end is a book your grandchildren will actually read rather than a folder they will inherit and never open. That is the whole job, and I am good at it.
Where to start
Send me 250 words about one person.
No fee, no obligation. I will shape what you send into a finished passage, return it, and tell you honestly what your material could become. If the answer is that you do not need me, I will say that too.
A budget idea before we speak
You should know the neighbourhood, even before I know the exact house.
I do not give a firm quotation until I have heard what you want. But I also do not want you wondering whether this means hundreds of dollars or tens of thousands.
Legacy Interview
One 60-minute interview, audio, a finished narrative of about 1,200–1,500 words, photographs and one round of corrections.
Short family narrative
A small number of interviews shaped into a substantial family story, with photographs and document checking.
Fuller family history
Multiple people, generations, documents and a longer continuous narrative.
These are planning ranges only. After our first conversation and your Story Mixer, I normally send a written scope and fixed quotation within 24 hours. Nothing begins until you approve it.