Huminz
Your Life Story as a Printed Book
A story that exists only on a screen gets read once. A book on a shelf gets picked up by people who were not looking for it — which, for a family story, is the entire point. Huminz lays your story out as a real book and sends it to be printed, with no files for you to handle.
Available now. Anyone with a Huminz story can order a printed copy — open your story, choose Order Book, and you are shown the price and delivery before you commit to anything. Writing, editing and sharing stay free, as they always will, and downloading your story as a PDF or a Word file costs nothing.
What arrives
Not a printout of a web page. A book, laid out the way books are laid out:
- A cover with the name of the person whose story it is.
- A title page and a contents list with real page numbers, so someone can look up the chapter about the move to Leeds and turn to it.
- Chapters in order, each beginning on its own page, with the year and the place it happened.
- The photographs, printed at the size they are meant to be seen, with their captions — which is how a picture keeps the names of the people in it.
- The milestones, so the shape of the life is visible even to a reader who dips in.
Pages are laid out for printing rather than for a screen: generous inner margins so nothing disappears into the binding, nothing cut off at the edges, and the contents page numbers worked out from the finished pagination rather than guessed.
Sizes and binding
Our print partner produces the book, and these are the formats a life story suits best.
| Softcover | A5 (148 × 210 mm), A4 (210 × 297 mm) or square (210 × 210 mm). From 20 up to 300 pages. |
|---|---|
| Hardcover | The same sizes, plus US Letter and a larger 294 mm square. From 24 up to 500 pages — the choice for a long or photograph-heavy story. |
| Paper | Photobook stock rather than novel paper: heavier, and far better for photographs. It also means a 300-page book is a substantial object. |
| Which to choose | A5 reads like a book and posts cheaply. A4 and the squares give photographs room. Hardcover is what gets kept on a shelf and handed on. |
The price depends on the size, the binding and how many pages your story runs to, and you will see it — with delivery — before you commit to anything.
How ordering works
- Open your story and choose Order Book.
- Choose the size and binding.
- Look through the book first. You see the whole thing, laid out, before you decide — including where the chapters fall and how the photographs sit on the page.
- Order it. Payment and delivery are handled by the printing company, which is also who prints it and posts it to you. It arrives as a finished book.
There are no files to download, convert or upload anywhere. That was the whole reason for building this: the step where someone saves a PDF and is then expected to find a print shop is the step where most people stop.
Available today, free: every story can be downloaded as a PDF or a Word document whenever you like — yours to keep, print locally, or take to any printer you choose. The printed book is the only part of Huminz that will ever cost money.
Before you order one
Two things are worth doing first, and both make a noticeable difference to the finished book.
Give every photograph its caption and its names. In a book the caption is printed under the picture, and it is what tells a grandchild who is standing on the left. A photograph without one is the single most common regret in a family archive.
Read it through once in Story view. Chapters that read oddly on screen read oddly in print, and it is far easier to fix a sentence than to reprint a book. Our guide to writing a life story covers the method, and if you are writing about a parent there is a guide for that too.
Common questions
Can I order more than one copy?
Yes — one each for the family is the usual reason anyone orders at all.
What if the story grows after I order?
The book is printed from the story as it stands on the day you order. Keep writing, and order again later; nothing is frozen.
Does it include contributions from other people?
Anything you have accepted into the story is part of it, under the name of whoever wrote it.
Is the newspaper layout printed too?
No — printing covers the book layout. The newspaper, the map and the slideshow are ways of reading the story on a screen, and sharing it.
Where can it be delivered?
That depends on where the printing company ships, which varies by country. You will see whether your address is covered, and what delivery costs, before you pay.
The book needs a story first
Start with one memory. The milestones take an evening, the first chapter takes twenty minutes, and the book is what you have at the end of a season of Sunday evenings.
Start my storyAlready writing? Open your story and choose Order Book. Free to write, edit and share — the printed book is the only part that costs anything.