Two years ago, we started a business with one big goal in mind: Empower people to create meaningful stories.
From the very beginning, we viewed it as two audiences.
Authors - Could be first-time authors or someone working on their 10th book. All genres welcome. Novels. Non-fiction. Poetry. Our plan was to help any author who was looking for help with editing, book design, cover design, or navigating through the confusing publishing world.
Family - People who want to record their parents or grandparents' stories. Or maybe for a loved one who passed away, telling stories about that person. The goal isn't to publish these works but have a few copies for friends and families.
Here on our website, as well as our Facebook page, we tried to create content for both audiences. But over time we realized these are actually two very different groups. And what we found is when you try to create content for both, it ends up being 50% effective. The novelist isn't usually looking for tips on recording family stories. The person interested in recording family stories isn't looking for advice on how to start writing a novel.
We wrestled with this dilemma for awhile and have finally decided to change the name on our website as well as our Facebook page to "Family Stories."
Here's why we're excited about this switch:
Better focus - Content will be exclusively focused on telling/recording Family Stories
Different forms of storytelling - We're no longer attached to the book idea as the main route. Some people like to write, some people like to tell stories over the phone. Some families want to create a book, others might want to have the audio. Maybe some family the grandkid turns their grandma's stories into a TikTok. Who knows! But we're here to help and inspire creative projects.
Community - Building a community of welcoming people who can help each other out. Someone new may follow our Facebook page at the very beginning of their Famil Stories journey. This person knows they want to record a family members' stories in some way, but don't know where to start. Another member may have already done hours of interviews. So they can help the new member out. We can't wait to see all the collaborations and watch this community grow.
For any authors, editors, artists who followed this page originally for the book creating aspect, we have good news there as well. The site Long Overdue Books will now be entirely dedicated to you. Same with the Long Overdue Instagram page and LinkedIn page. The same way Family Stories will benefit from 100% focused content, we are equally excited about growing the Long Overdue Books brand and diving deeper into the publishing world.
But most importantly, thank you for supporting us. We're still a new business and having the support of all of you, both audiences, while we've changed things around, tested things out, made new brand decisions, we couldn't have done it without you. Greatly appreciate your patience and joining us for the ride.
Thank you!
Sincerely,
Chris O'Brien
Founder