Write an Autobiography With the Help of AI

With these instructions you will have the courage to write your loved one's book and have fun doing it. Don't wait until it is too late to record your parent or grandparent's story. In our book we attempted to answer the question, "What did Great-Grandma do to get through hard things?"

Computer

Voice recording App

Internet access

Choose a printing company if you plan to print a hard copy book as they will have templates for the size of book you plan to print. I printed a 6" X 9" book using Onpressbookprinting.com. Draft an outline understanding that this is simply your initial roadmap for the project. You will complete the table of contents at the end of the project when you have page numbers for the chapters. I basically followed a chronological order. Now is a good time to start gathering pictures from family also.

Give your loved one some advance notice so they can jot some notes for the interview. "Tomorrow we're going to record highlights of your teen years..." You could type the responses but I found recording audio was both more natural and faster. Use a voice recorder app on your phone or computer to record your interviews. Keep those recordings as you'll want to hear your loved one's voice later. I recorded some interviews on video as well to enjoy in the future. I uploaded the audio recordings to one of many options for transcribing audio to text, https://turboscribe.ai/. Organization is important as you will shortly have many audio files, transcribed files and drafts so make separate folders and label the files well.

Upload your transcribed text to your favorite AI program such as ChatGPT or Claude... with a prompt, "Edit this text for a chapter in an autobiography." Save these edited drafts to another folder on your computer. I did not have good success in putting all of the chapters into an AI program with the prompt, "Make these chapters into an autobiography," as it jumbled details throughout.

Enlist the support of just a couple of others in editing the chapters. Everyone has their own writing style so be prepared for different views on how it should be written. I used Google Docs and shared a folder so we could collaborate. You might find yourself shuffling chapters around or deleting chapters... This is where our question, "What did Great-Grandma do to get through hard things," helped to keep direction to the book. Keep in mind that your editors will expect a hard copy of the book if you print it.

If you are trying to do this cheaply you'll save money by uploading black and white photos. The book company may just change these to black and white or gray scale for you but I wanted to be in control of the quality so I uploaded them in black and white. In your photo editing software you can select different warmths and backgrounds and I normally chose a warm black and white. I also made a digital copy of the book with color photos.

There are actually standards in book printing. The introduction, dedication, acknowledgements, table of contents and the first chapter all start on the right hand page. You'll have several blank pages because of this. The book printing company will likely inform you if these need to be adjusted.

The printing company had a template to use Adobe Acrobat for the cover. I used their template as a guide and designed my cover with Microsoft Publisher. Be careful to choose a font size for the binding which is small enough for the thickness of your book. I used AI with a prompt, "Make me a book front and back cover for a 6" X 9" book without an ISBN with clouds and sunlight." I added a few more prompts like, "more sunlight..." I used this as the background and added my text and photo with the publisher program. Save your cover as a PDF to send to the printer.

Onpress, the company that we used to print our book had a reduction per book at 10 copies and another at 25 copies. We made the mistake of ordering 10 copies and found we needed another 15 as grandchildren (and editors) wanted a copy. Grandma especially enjoyed writing a note in each of the books to the grandchildren and having them over for a visit to give it to them. Now it's time to write your book.