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The point of your life isn't that it ends—it's that it even happened. You are made from 37 trillion cells. Your heart beats 100,000 times a day. Your eyes can distinguish between 7.5 million colours. If all the DNA in your body were uncoiled, it would stretch for ten billion miles. There's only one you in all the billions of people who have lived and will ever live on this planet. No one will ever replace you. So, you should tell the world you were here and about the life you've lived.

Think of how many things in the course of the Universe had to be just right to lead to your birth. If a caveman from 50,000 years ago ran right instead of left to get away from a sabre-toothed tiger, he might not have met the cavewoman who gave birth to your ancient grandmother. You made it. You are here. Discover why—and leave your legacy for others to learn about and add value to their lives.  

We all end up as the dash on a tombstone between our year of birth and our year of death. Understand what that dash will mean for you.

As people age, it becomes increasingly important for them to leave their legacy as a lasting imprint of their time. They want to understand what their life has meant and review all the different chapters that have made them who they are.

The vast majority of people will never be the subject of a book, documentary, or TED Talk. So, what happens to their life stories when they're gone? Well, some of it lives on in the next generation, but it fades quickly and is forgotten to time. Capturing someone's life in a book helps solidify and structure a life lived, enabling that person to benefit from a reflective and healing process. And, at the end of this, there's something tangible to document their personal history as a gift to friends, children, grandchildren, and countless future generations.

Read about the benefits of life review here.

If writing your life story was easy, everybody would do it. The truth is, most people don't, and their legacies are lost over time. Those who attempt to write their life story often struggle with organizing memories and how to transition from one chapter of life to the next.

Many people believe that you have to be famous to write a book about your life. Yet, the so-called normal life is more valuable to everyday people than the celebrity one because it's relatable.

Family members who are not professional writers may try to write a life story for a loved one. Sometimes this works, but there is usually too much emotional proximity to get the real story. The content of someone's life is not easily shared directly with family members in an interview-style setting.

Seniors are in the best position to tell their life stories because they've lived whole lives. When people are younger, raising a family, building a career, generating wealth, worrying about day-to-day life—they don't have time to reflect on their lives. They're too busy living them. When people are in their golden years, they typically have more time to reflect, look back at their lives, examine their journey, and make sense of it all. In my experience, having interviewed hundreds of seniors about their lives, I have found this to be an enjoyable and rewarding experience for them.

I've written and edited autobiographies about younger people, whose motivations and rationales are different. Sometimes, they do this for career progression or to capture a significant milestone. But this is not a life review because they are still developing their lives.

Seniors, or older adults 60 plus, are not typically in this stage of life. They have lived most of their lives, and this process is about reviewing life, reflecting on their experiences, making sense of it, healing, understanding their life journey, and leaving a legacy. I personally believe that I can make a greater difference and have a more significant impact by working with seniors. Being a senior is an achievement because not everyone reaches this milestone. I want to celebrate this by extending the benefits of a longer life across countless generations.

Telling senior live stories is where most of my experience as a journalist resides, and, ultimately, this is what I enjoy doing the most. My legacy is to help seniors leave theirs.

A Senior Legacy Book is not designed for sale. The point is not to sell your life story but to review it, document it, and give it away for others to learn from your life journey.

You can submit the final manuscript for publication with traditional publishers. However, the stark reality is that traditional publishing is highly competitive and hard to access. If you wish to self-publish on platforms like KDP or IngramSpark, you will receive the print-ready PDF and cover of your book to do this.

Senior Legacy Books is a ghostwriting service for seniors that uses a tested interview method. Memories work by association, and once you start talking and recalling certain things, this leads to a treasure chest of interconnected memories that you may not have thought about in years, or perhaps never.

Some of the best content is obtained when people are free to explore memories in a safe and comfortable conversation. My interview model enables and encourages you to freely tap into your memories, spanning decades, without obeying a timeline, sequence, or chronology of events. I will make sense of all of this afterwards by organizing and editing your answers into a narrative with sequential chapters that make a book about your life.

Interview sessions will be rewarding, poignant, joyful, and sometimes challenging and emotional. But, above all, I guarantee that you will reflect upon your life in ways you haven't thought about in decades, or ever. Any life lived is a collection of ups and downs, victories and disappointments; and these can be explored and examined from the comfort of your home.

I handle your life story with the greatest care, respect, consideration, and integrity, and listen with patience as you recount memories from your past. I help guide you through thoughts and memories to get more depth and clarity from your recollections. This approach of gentle coaching helps you tell your story in the most comfortable and relaxed way, designed to get the best content for your book. 

Yes. However, keep in mind that having someone else present during interviews can change the way you express yourself and how you respond to questions. You may consciously or unconsciously edit yourself for the sake of the other person. For the best results, this process is best suited to an interviewer-interviewee approach.

You are the author of your book, and I am the ghostwriter. As such, I work for you. Any editing suggestions I make are drawn from my experience, and I'll explain each one if necessary. But, ultimately, the decision about the content of your book is yours to make, and you have the final say. Always.

During the interview process, memories and thoughts will act as a bridge to others, so it is important not to actively edit yourself in your responses. Memories can sometimes come out raw and disjointed, which is a normal part of the process. If you mention something that you don't want to appear in the book, please let me know at the time. You can also change your mind and request that the content be removed from your book manuscript.

If you've already started writing your life story and find yourself stuck, I may be able to use some of what you have as a foundation for your Senior Legacy Book.

The photos should reflect key moments in your life as they appear in your book. For instance, your early life with parents and siblings, school years, postsecondary education, marriage and children, career, notable travel experiences, and so on, should be presented in a chronological sequence, leading up to the present day. I will help you select suitable photographs and feature them as a photo essay over four pages, accompanied by captions.

If your photos are old and of poor quality, there may be a way I can restore them using software. If the photographs are in colour, I desaturate them for black and white to appear in the book. The photography on the cover can be either black and white or colour.

Senior Legacy Books mirrors the style and quality of a celebrity autobiography or memoir. As a general rule, these books do not contain copies of letters and other documents throughout. What I do is take the content of these documents and sequence them into the narrative of your book. This is a seamless process that I've done many times before. I can use your diary entries, emails, letters, and other documents to supplement our interviews. I'll also use your photos as the basis for conversation.

I only write books about and for seniors because this is where most of my experience as a journalist resides. It's what I enjoy doing the most and where I can make the biggest impact.

Senior Legacy Books are designed to be the type of memoir or autobiography you would see on the shelf in a bookstore. Many other services offer something different, which I would describe as more photo books with accompanying text.

Some services use a combination of people—an account manager, interviewer, ghostwriter, editor—to work on your project. They sometimes utilize a bank of hundreds of writers to achieve a global reach. I want to be as close to your book as possible, so I oversee the whole process as a white-glove service from start to finish.

Other models drip-feed customers with a series of emailed questions for them to complete and submit. The common feedback I see in online forums is that this feels like homework. My primary focus is not to force you to do homework on your own, but to offer you an enjoyable and rewarding life review experience. Together, we can create something that neither of us could create on our own. You share your thoughts and memories, and I'll uncover the relationship between seemingly unrelated events and weave them into a book about your life.

Your book will be of paperback bookstore quality, featuring a gloss cover design, typeset pages, black and white photo pages with captions, a back cover synopsis, and your name on the front cover as the credited author. Most private autobiography and memoir writing services produce books that resemble coffee table photo albums with words in them. Senior Legacy Books creates the types of celebrity autobiographies and memoirs you would find in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore.

For the front cover, you can opt for photography or illustration, in a variety of colours. I will offer suggestions on the book cover design and will have this produced for you to review before it's printed. Your finished book will be 8” x 5”, approx. 150 pages, and trade paper quality.

Unless you already have a title for your book, I will suggest several options along with stylized fonts.

See a book sample.

You will receive 50 copies of your book, delivered to your door, and can order more whenever you want them. You will also receive the PDF eBook and book cover design file, so you can print it yourself, elsewhere, if you wish.

There are some AI platforms that use robot software to try to simulate the same process using stock questions and a generic formula to create a book narrative.

AI edits and manicures your natural speech to auto "correct" it for exact grammar and punctuation rules. That's not what a Senior Legacy Book is about. It's about capturing your voice, personality, and the unique turn of phrase in how you speak. Correcting the way you communicate for textbook English is a misrepresentation of who you are.

Talking to AI about your life story is very different from talking to a real person with empathy, journalistic experience, and emotional intelligence. I react to your mood and emotion, and know where and how to lead you to mine the best responses. 

I listen carefully and direct the conversation with follow-up questions on the fly to expand and deepen your answers. My process is based on instinct and real-world journalistic experience, gained from interviewing hundreds of seniors. AI cannot replace a human interaction where you feel comfortable sharing your memories, thoughts, and decisions. Another concern is that no one truly knows what AI will do with your information after you've shared it. 

How each person speaks and communicates is indicative of who they are. I take great care to capture the unique essence and characteristics of the way a person talks and their cadences of speech. Nobody talks in grammatically manicured sentences—or even complete sentences for that matter—and rarely speaks in a way that transitions smoothly from one thought to another. Quite often, we jump to related or unrelated thoughts and memories midway through a sentence.

We all use words and phrases specific to where and when we grew up, our education, our jobs, and numerous other factors. I use my experience and judgment to make informed and creative decisions, organize words, and edit content so that the narrative accurately represents the author, while also being an enhanced representation of them. When someone reads your book, it should be as if you're talking directly to them, even if you've never met them.

I transcribe interviews and organize all this content so that it connects in a logical, natural, and engaging narrative that flows seamlessly from one chapter to another, forming a complete book. I listen carefully during interviews because it's not just about what someone says but how they say it. I reorder thoughts and ideas on the page for impact and balance. I have years of experience in this field, having worked with hundreds of people. You can review my bio page to gain a sense of my expertise in this area.

If you would like to do all the interviews close together, the process to a first draft will be faster. Generally, the time to completion from the first draft depends on your feedback and any requests for revisions.

You can expect to receive your printed book in a few months, depending on the scheduling of your interviews and your response with feedback. Ultimately, your book will take as long or as short as you need it to take. I aim to get a first draft completed within one month of the final interview.

Absolutely. After I complete all the interviews and any other necessary research, I will produce a first draft that you can review and provide feedback on. If you prefer to listen to this draft, Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader both have features that allow you to read the content aloud at a pace you can set, with the option to pause and replay. Both of these applications, along with others, enable you to write notes for feedback directly on the documents.

You can also ask a friend or family member to read the book to you. However, because the book is written in your own voice, it is better to read the book yourself if you're able to do this.

There are several ways to do this. You can write notes directly on the document, type your feedback in a separate document and email it to me, or provide your input verbally during a phone call or video call. Feedback and editing requests have to come from the author of the book in most circumstances.

The payment scale consists of three instalments: a deposit, after the first draft is submitted, and the submission of the final draft. If you no longer wish to continue before the first draft, no further payments are required. If you change your mind before the interview process has begun, I will refund your deposit.

I do everything I can to keep my prices as low as possible. I intend to help as many people as possible leave their legacy while they can. The return on your investment is that you will have reviewed your life and created a book about it to leave as a lasting legacy. Think of this as an additional part of your children’s inheritance.

See Book packages and pricing page.

There is no "buy now" button on my website for a deliberate reason. I want to talk to you first to ensure you understand what you're getting and that this product and service meet your expectations. I would like to do this before any financial commitment is made on your part. I'm willing to invest my time for free to do this. I also want to understand your story and how I can help structure it into a book. All of this should happen before any financial transaction takes place.

I record all interview sessions and transcribe them to develop content for your book. I do not routinely delete your information, as I may need it in the future should you request additional printed copies of your book.

If you wish to have your information deleted at the end of the project, you can request this in writing.

You own the full copyright in all cases and circumstances.

You can. However, Senior Legacy Books does not specialize in this because you would need to record an audiobook in a sound studio to get broadcast quality. If you're not too concerned with the audio quality, online resources can record you reading your book and output an audio file. Please be aware that recording an audiobook typically involves multiple takes and requires subsequent editing.

As part of your book package with Senior Legacy Books, you will receive a USB drive containing an hour of footage from your interviews. Many years after losing a loved one, people often say that they can't remember their voice or how they would laugh. I added this extra service to address this, and select the best parts of your interviews to offer as a simple audio file that you can copy and distribute with friends and family.

Senior Legacy Books are written in English only. You can, of course, arrange to have it translated yourself. If you wish to do this and have it printed or kept as an e-book, I can assist you.

If you refer someone to Senior Legacy Books, and they commit to our service, you will receive a 5% discount or reimbursement if you've paid in full.