My Dad began writing his memoir in February of last year and over the weekend the published book went live on Amazon.
Bethlehem … to Seagrove begins in 1933 on a farm in rural Alexander County, North Carolina, during the Great Depression.
It ends 493 pages and over 103,000 words later around his 90th birthday party in 2023 at the Luck, Comer, Lail Center (the former Luck’s Cannery) in Seagrove, North Carolina.
Available on Amazon
It is available in paperback and Kindle versions.
He has startlingly clear memories of his life on the farm, his grade school teachers and friends, his time in the Navy, and the people that touched his life along the way.
(I can barely keep track of what day it is.)
A healthy chunk of the book is the history of Mid-State Plastics in Seagrove which he co-founded in the early 1970s and sold in 1994.
But it also includes details about his years on the boards of Randolph Community College and Wingate University.
While it’s Dad’s book, the project leader was Sandra Lail, who wrangled his draft dictation into written words and fact checked and added context to the narrative.
She and Dad did the heavy lifting.
Sandra pulled me into the project to edit the audio of the raw recordings (which we have made available as a complement to the book), and to help with prepping, formatting and processing the manuscript for Amazon’s publishing platform.
Creating the book
It is the first book either of us had published on Amazon so there was a lot of learning along the way.
The task of creating the book was made easier using a credt card sized recorder called Plaud Note, which not only records the audio, but uses artificial intelligence to transcribe the audio.
AI was only used as an aid. The book is my Dad’s recollections, thoughts and words and is not AI generated.
The manuscript was created in Microsoft Word and formatted and finished in Amazon’s free Kindle Create software before being uploaded onto Kindle Digital Publishing, or KDP.
The paperback and Kindle book covers were created in Canva.
The cover illustration is a photo of a painting Mom did of the farmhouse where my Dad grew up.
One of my tasks was to create a simple website for the book. I put bethlehemtoseagrove.com up on GitHub pages.