If you want to remember the life of a family-member but don't feel you have the skill to write about them yourself, what can you do? Rosita Bolandreports on the growing trend in privately produced memoirs

It's a truism, but when people die, their stories and personal history often die with them. "My father died very suddenly in 2004. He was a great storyteller and our family were all taken aback at how suddenly family history disappears when someone dies." Journalist Louise Millar is explaining how she first started thinking about her British-based company, Memoir Publishing.

Privately produced memoirs, a publishing form which is relatively new to this side of the Atlantic, is now well-established in the US. Even the briefest of searches on the internet shows scores of companies offering memoir publishing. While the process of interviewing varies, the basic premise is that ordinary people pay a professional writer, often a journalist, to write their memoir for them. Its length depends on the size of the fee.

"Privately published" are two words which are often synonymous with the underbelly of the publishing world. Above all, they are associated with vanity publishing: that expensive process whereby writers who cannot get accepted by a mainstream company decide to put up the money to do it themselves. Instead of being paid for your book, you pay for your book to be published, and it's then also up to you to publicise, distribute, and sell that book.

Very occasionally, for various reasons, professional writers deliberately choose to self-publish. However, vanity publishing generally occurs when the writing is not of a high enough quality, the potential readership is very low, or the subject-matter is not of a broad enough interest to merit a commercial publisher investing in the manuscript.

Where private memoir publishing differs is that these books are never intended to be sold to the general public or to have a commercial value. They are usually very small editions, to be given free to family and close friends.

Millar started out as a journalist working as a sub-editor on Caravan magazine. She then worked on NME, Kerrang!, and Smash Hits, and wrote for Red and Glamour. Prior to setting up Memoir Publishing, she worked for five years as a senior commissioning editor at Marie Claire.

Based in London, she explains: "There are other people in Britain doing this now. But I wasn't aware of them when I set up. I had a friend whose mother had come from a small village in Gujarat in India and then she had lived as a teacher in East Africa before she moved to England. Her mother's life was so far removed from her daughter's, that she wanted to tell her story for her grandchildren." Knowing that Millar was a journalist, she asked her if she would consider taking on the project.

That title, about Shanta Shan's life, was the first one she published last year, and via the website, advertising and word of mouth, several more memoirs are now in production. She works with a designer, Sarah Habershon, who also has extensive experience in print media.

So how does it work? It's a kind of ghost-writing, and according to Millar, "An area of potentially huge growth." Most people who click on her website are American or Canadian, but the British traffic is gradually increasing. Famous people - and Z-list celebrities - often use ghost writers to tell their story to. Some, like Sharon Osborne's Extreme, sell by the truck load: two million copies and still selling. Others flop. There are three options on offer from Millar's company: the full memoir, the half memoir and the surprise memoir.

"Most people so far have gone for the full memoir," Millar says. This costs £4,500 (€6,630). For this, you get between 18-28 hours of face to face interview time in your own home, and a 30,000- word memoir which goes from childhood to present day. The half memoir, at £2,650 (€3,903) and 15,000 words, focuses on a particular area of someone's life, whether it is childhood, career, travels or something else of particular relevance to that person.

The surprrise memoir at £2,500 (€3,682) is a kind of This-is-Your-Life format, with a 10,000-word collection of interviews with friends, family and colleagues of the person it is intended for, to mark retirement or a significant anniversary. All the books include photographs, are hardback, and the production values are good. Clients get 25 copies, and more are available at a sum that covers the extra printing costs.

Someone from Memoir Publishing first talks to the person whose life-story is going to be ghost-written. This is followed up by the person completing a questionnaire about key events in their life, to give the writer an idea on where to focus the interviews.

Sample questions include: what was the most important day in your life; what is the biggest obstacle you've overcome in life; who are the most significant people in your life. Then Millar travels to meet the interviewee and does face-to-face interviews, usually two three-hour sessions over two days, with return visits at monthly intervals. The whole process takes between six and eight months. She hopes to publish 15 titles a year, and if the concept is successful, to commission other writers to do more.

So what kind of people have so far been interested in having their memoirs written? "There's been a lady of 91, who used to be a nurse and had lived in tribal communities all over the world. Lots of high up London City people, who are now very successful but who started out in slums. There's an adventurer who's been a bounty hunter, and a tea-planter. Everybody has a story to tell."

There are also those people who have contacted Millar to have their memoirs written, and whom she has turned down on moral grounds. Like the "very cheerful woman who rang up and told me that her husband had had a mistress for 20 years and he had just left her, his wife, for the mistress. She thought her story would make a hilarious book. I wasn't sure about her motivation, and I did feel a sense of moral obligation . . . her children were going to read it. So I said no."

Millar also said no to the man whose wife had been unfaithful to him, which had led to their marriage breaking down. Their children had never been aware of her infidelity and he wanted his memoir to put the facts on record, with the intention that they wouldn't read it until his death. "I said I couldn't do that, and I asked him if he really wanted to be remembered by his children for that act."

Millar says there tend to be two types of people who commission memoirs. Retired people, who want to leave a more formal record of their background to children and grandchildren; and children, who club together to commission one for a parent. Having published the memoir of one man, Tom Forsyth, Millar is now working on his wife's memoir, since she also wants to tell her story. So far, nobody has had delusions of thinking they want to publish hundreds or thousands of copies of their life story to sell them to the public: intended for family and friends, that's where these memoirs are staying.

"Men are a bit more reticent in talking about their personal life," Millar notes. "They tend to focus more on their careers, but they do get going after a while. Interviewing people is a little like being their therapist sometimes. They'll say to me, 'I'm telling you things I've never told anyone else'. I do end up getting quite close to them."

www.memoirpublishing.com