Why The Story Project?
QUALITY: We create exceptional books, artistic in design and literary in content.
FAMILY: We recognize the importance of family to our clients and our work reflects the love and legacy they aim to pass on to future generations.
PARTNERSHIP: We deeply engage with our clients from the start and throughout the process, delivering the individualized, boutique service they ask for and deserve.
CONFIDENTIALITY: We scrupulously respect our client’s privacy.
RELIABILITY: We know, as journalists, how to work to a deadline and understand the importance of completing a job on time.
What makes The Story Project different from similar services?
The Story Project founders bring decades of journalistic and design experience to the job. We offer the skills and creative talents of both an international journalist with 25 years experience reporting and writing stories and a photographer and book designer who has exhibited his work in museums and galleries in the U.S. and abroad. As a result, our production values are substantially higher for our products than those of our competitors.
The Story Project offers a variety of products, creating boutique commissioned books on a range of subjects beyond our personal memoir service. From chronicling a business or foundation to documenting a beloved place, The Story Project will work with you to create an artistically designed and professionally written book that reflects your outlook and aesthetic sensibilities.
How many books must a client order?
That’s up to the client. We provide a single copy and the client can order as many as they like, from two to 200 or more.
How is the cost of a book determined?
We work closely with our clients, discussing and defining the scope of their Story Project to ensure we meet their desires and expectations. Costs for the project are presented once the scope has been mutually agreed.
Personal and institutional histories require extensive interviewing and research and can take up to a full year to produce. Clients are also responsible for the associated costs, which include travel and lodging to conduct personal interviews, and the services of a professional transcriptionist to convert audio interview files to Word documents. We believe in creating exceptional heirloom volumes that reflect our clients’ high standards and expectations of quality. Our costs represent the sophistication of our service and product.
The boutique nature of our company allows us to respond to the precise needs of our clients and we pride ourselves on a meticulous and multifaceted approach to every project. Once the scope of your Story Project is defined and the work commissioned, we continue to involve you fully in the process to ensure your book is based on thorough interviews, rigorous research and includes the highest level of graphic sophistication.
We apply the same quality of focus and resolve to our Short Takes as we do with our Legacy Books, with prices dependent upon the product and scope of work.
What is distinctive about The Story Project’s photography and design process?
Peter is responsible for all of The Story Project’s photography work, from on-location portrait sessions to architectural studies to the scanning and digital restoration of a client’s archival images. Similarly, our design services are conducted entirely in-house, in close consultation with our clients. We present them with a range of options — with Legacy projects as well as Short Takes — when laying out a book. Our design choices ultimately reflect their aesthetic preferences.
How long does it take?
That depends on the service we are contracted for and can run from a few months to a year. For bigger projects — personal and institutional histories — we prefer to work on a book for a full 12 months. Good work takes time. As experienced journalists, our standards demand that we conduct a full range of interviews with multiple sources and a high level of in-depth research — all guided by our clients’ vision of the final manuscript. Our Short Takes are more focused and take considerably less time — from three weeks to three months.