Looking to Write a Book About Your Family’s Travels? What Are Your Publishing Options?

Do you and your family plan to visit Canada to see the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia? 

Are you interested in taking your little ones to Disney World to fulfill their lifelong dreams of meeting Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, and any of the other characters of the Disney universe? 

Is the plan to eventually take your dream vacation to Rome where you can see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, check out the Vatican, explore different places of worship, and more?

According to one report last fall, almost nine in 10 families were likely to travel sometime over the coming year. Is your family in the majority? If so, where do you plan to visit? While COVID-19 isn’t over yet, the travel industry is rebounding. So, if you’ve been laying low and waiting for things to get better, now might be the time for a family vacation.

Traveling with the entire family should be an exciting time–so why not preserve the memories? One way you can do so is by writing about your travel experiences. You’ll want to ensure that you get participation from the adults and the children in the family since everyone’s perspective is worth documenting. But how do you go about producing a book about your family’s travels?

If you want to learn how to create a keepsake book, keep reading for the details.

Get Everybody Onboard

The first thing you’ll want to do is get everyone on board. Before the vacation, explain that one of the goals is to create a keepsake book that highlights the family’s adventures. Discuss the format the book will take. Will it be primarily a picture book? Will it be a book with a lot of text and some pictures? Enlist feedback from everyone who’ll be on the trip. The last thing you want is for some of your loved ones to be disengaged and uninvolved. Let them know that everyone’s participation is essential. And offer plenty of guidance for the younger children.

Ensure Everyone Has the Tools They Need

If the goal is to create a vacation keepsake book, ensure that your family members have the tools they need to document what they do and experience. That might mean equipping everyone with a digital camera to take pictures and a tablet or a notebook to write things down.

Document Key Moments

When on vacation, you and your family will want to document the key moments. Now’s the time for everyone to use the tools they brought along. As you might imagine, your kids will probably have different highlights than you do. For the younger ones, give more guidance. But allow them to do as much as they can. If you’re at Disney World and they want pictures taken with some of the characters from the Disney universe, include them in your family’s vacation keepsake book. Let their creativity will run wild – it’ll make for a better book.

Food and Dining

Have you ever marveled at some of the pictures of food that people post on social media? When an aesthetically pleasing meal is plated in an attractive way and photographed, it can get lots of likes. You may want to snap some pics of you and your family enjoying food on your vacation. Whether a continental breakfast enjoyed in your hotel room, ethnic street food enjoyed on a tour of the city, or dinner in a fancy restaurant, you and yours can enjoy the mouth-watering fare. But snap some pics before diving in–they’ll be great additions to your keepsake book. 

Travel Itinerary

It’s also good to include your travel itinerary in the keepsake book. Years down the road, it might be hard to remember everywhere you visit on vacation. So, including the complete travel itinerary in the vacation keepsake book is a good idea. When you and your family flip through the book in the weeks and years following the vacation, it’ll be helpful to see where you visited on any particular day of your holiday. Otherwise, it can be easy to forget these types of details. You might enter something like the following on the vacation itinerary page of the keepsake book: 

Day #3: Boarded tour bus and visited the Colosseum in Rome, and later in the day visited Vatican City before heading to the hotel for dinner in the hotel restaurant.

The goal is to include a section in the book where you detail what you did every day on your trip. On the vacation, you might want to assign one person to handle the itinerary log.

Decide How You’re Going to Produce it

After your trip, you’ll have plenty of material to sort through. You and yours can divvy up responsibilities as per getting the book ready. The chances are that you have suitable software on your computer to do the pagination so that the book is print-ready. Once you have everything pretty much the way you and yours want it, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to print it.

You can go the self-publishing route, which probably makes the most sense. After all, the goal of creating a vacation keepsake book isn’t to make a profit. It’s to document the memories and experiences of you and your family. It’ll be the sort of book you might want on the coffee table so that you, yours, and visitors who come to your home can enjoy it. And, likely, you will only need a handful of copies printed.

You must find the right publisher to help you take what you have on your computer and turn it into a book that you’ll proudly display in your home. Before choosing a publisher, carefully weigh the various publishing options to choose the right one for you. A reputable publisher will answer all your questions, provide a wide range of services, and make the entire process pain-free. The end result will be a great vacation keepsake book.