In July 2024 a RootsMagic user posted on the program's community forum that they were "close to completing my family genealogy book in RM Publisher" and wanted several "old school" hard copies to give to their children. Did anyone know a printer?
Inside a day the thread had covered most of what goes wrong at this stage. One reply suggested Amazon's print-on-demand service, remembering that a local printer, years earlier, had come with "a high start up cost to be amortized across a very small production run". Another recommended a UK firm that prints small quantities from a PDF. Then the original poster named the problem nobody solved. They could export the book to Word and fix the layout there, "but then every time I make a change to my data base I would have to remember what changes I made to the .docx file and make those changes again."
Advice on writing a family history tends to stop when the manuscript is done. Ours on how to write a family history does too. This post picks up there, with the printer, the privacy call, and the one copy that has to survive the relatives you gave the others to.
The number of copies picks the printer.
A family book usually runs to a handful of copies, sometimes a few dozen. At that size print-on-demand is the sensible default. You upload a PDF, each copy is printed when someone orders it, and nothing sits in a box in the garage. A traditional printer only recovers its setup cost across a longer run, which is the trade the forum reply described. If a reunion wants a hundred copies in one go, get a quote from a local printer and set it against the on-demand price per copy. Below that, on-demand usually wins on convenience even when each copy costs more.
Whichever route you take, order one proof before the batch. Scanned photos that looked fine on screen often print dark and muddy, and a table of contents can drift a page when fonts change on export. Finding that on one copy is cheap. Finding it on thirty is not.
Freeze the database before you print.
The thread's unsolved problem is the one to plan around. Your tree will keep changing after the book goes to press, and the book should not. Pick a cutoff, state it on the title page ("research current to March 2027"), and generate the final layout from your program in a single pass. If you need a word processor for the last fixes, keep them to changes you can repeat mechanically. The same member who suggested Amazon had the most practical answer: make the export "as nearly camera ready as possible" inside the genealogy program, then use Word for little more than "a few global replaces".
Then archive three files together: the database backup as it stood on the cutoff, the exported manuscript and the final print PDF. A second edition starts from the database, not from the PDF, and the backup tells you what changed in between.
Genealogy software can lay out the book, within limits.
Most desktop programs will assemble a book from your data. RootsMagic has the Publisher the thread was about. Gramps has a Books report that combines several of its reports into one document and can save it as a PDF. Family Tree Maker has a Books feature of its own, and for FTM 2019 and 2024 there is also Family Book Creator, an official plugin sold separately, which writes DOCX, PDF and EPUB among other formats. Our reviews of RootsMagic, Gramps and Family Tree Maker cover the rest of what each program does well.
None of them can decide what belongs in the book. A generated book prints every fact in the file at the same weight, the guesses included, and a guess in print reads as settled. Before the export, walk through everyone in scope and cut or mark anything you could not point to a source for. Our piece on sources you can trust is a quick way to test the shaky ones.
Living people need a decision before the first copy ships.
A book outlives the privacy settings of the tree it came from. Most online trees hide living relatives from other users, while a printed descendant chart shows every one of them with a birth date. Decide now whether living people appear by name only, with birth years, or not at all, and ask the ones who will appear.
The printing route matters here too. On Amazon's KDP, proof copies and author copies are both charged at the printing cost. Only author copies come without a watermark, and KDP describes them as "prints of your live book": the book has to be published and on sale before you can order them. Proof copies can be printed without publishing, but each carries a "Not for Resale" watermark. If the book names living cousins, a public listing is a steep price for clean copies, and a printer that takes private orders from a PDF avoids the listing entirely. You do not need an ISBN for a family edition either. KDP offers one free if you publish there, but that number can only be used on KDP.
The copy that lasts is the one in a library.
Copies given to relatives scatter within a generation. A house gets cleared, a box goes to a charity shop, and the one person who cared about the book is no longer there to rescue it. The copy most likely to be read in fifty years is the one on a library shelf, and two major genealogy collections take privately made family histories.
The FamilySearch Library says it accepts "published, self-published, or privately produced books", family histories among them, and asks donors to get in touch before mailing anything. The Library of Congress takes published genealogies subject to staff review and unpublished ones case by case, and it too asks you to propose a donation first. Unpublished work must be bound, acid-free paper is strongly encouraged, and a PDF or EPUB edition may be accepted, but raw research notes, family group sheets and flash drives are not. The historical society or public library in the town where the family lived deserves an email too, because that is where someone researching the surname will look first.
That second reader changes the book a little. A stranger needs things your children do not: an index of names, places written out in full, and a note on where each fact came from. Add them before the proof goes to the printer. Then order one more copy than the family needs, and offer it to a library.
