Biography, autobiography, or memoir — what is the difference? What do transcription, typesetting, print on demand, and legal deposit actually mean? This glossary explains the terms you meet while making a book of your own life or your family's story, in plain language and without the trade jargon.
Most of the confusion in this field comes from three neighbouring words. These entries separate them.
A biography is a book that tells one person's life, usually written by someone other than its subject. It is also the umbrella name for the whole genre. When the subject writes their own life, the book is an autobiography; when they cover only a chosen part of it, it is a memoir.
A biography of a living person is normally built from interviews: you record the conversations and write the book from what was said.
Read more: Writing a biography · Making a book for someone else
An autobiography is the story of a life written by the person who lived it. It aims at the whole picture — childhood to the present — and usually runs in chronological order. The difference from a memoir is scope: an autobiography covers the whole life, a memoir picks one part of it.
Read more: Writing an autobiography
A memoir is a book in which the author tells their own life selectively: one period, one theme, or one role. A wartime childhood, a working life, parenthood, one town. A memoir does not try to tell everything, which is exactly why it is usually easier to start than a full autobiography.
Read more: Writing memoirs
Life story is the everyday, non-technical name for the same material a biography, autobiography, or memoir is made of: the events, people, and turning points of one life, told in the teller's own words. It carries no formal rules about scope or structure, which makes it a good working title before you decide the form.
Read more: Writing a book about your life · How to structure a life story
A family history book tells where a family came from, what life was like in each generation, and what has been passed down by word of mouth. It is not the same as genealogy, which establishes names, dates, and the family tree. A family history book tells what the records cannot.
Read more: Writing family history · Family reunion stories
Local history tells the story of one village, neighbourhood, parish, or island: who lived there, how they made a living, and how the place changed. The sources look much like a family history's — recollections, photographs, documents — but the subject is defined geographically rather than by family or organisation.
Read more: Writing local history
An anniversary history book records the history of an organisation — a club, association, society, or company — and is usually published for a milestone year. It draws on minutes, photographs, and members' memories. Commissioning an outside writer for one typically costs €4,000–8,000.
Read more: Making a club's anniversary history book · Writing association history
Tacit knowledge is expertise that has never been written down: skill built from experience that its holder assumes is obvious. It is hard to write as a manual but easy to explain out loud, which is why an expert approaching retirement should speak it into a record before the last working day.
Read more: Capturing tacit knowledge before retirement · From hobby to non-fiction book
A ghostwriter is a professional writer who writes a book in someone else's name and from their telling; the credited author is the client, not the writer. It is months of work and priced accordingly — for comparison, an outside writer for a club history typically charges €4,000–8,000.
The working method — interview, record, write from what was said — is the same one you can now follow yourself. The difference is who writes the text, and what it costs.
Read more: How much does it cost to make your own book?
These terms name the stages a book passes through before it becomes a finished object.
Transcription means turning speech into text. It used to be handwork: you played a recording back in short bursts and typed it out, and an hour of talk took several hours of work. Speech recognition now does the same automatically in minutes, leaving a human only the proofreading.
In Vellu, transcription costs one credit per recorded minute; recording itself is free.
Read more: Speak your book into being · Credit costs per operation
Speech recognition is the technology that identifies spoken language and writes it out as text. Modern models handle accents and regional speech well, though individual words still go wrong now and then. They do not separate speakers, so in an interview it helps to say each person's name aloud.
Read more: Recording elders' stories
A manuscript is the text of a book at the stage where the content is finished but the book has not been typeset or printed. It holds the chapters in their final order; the page layout, page numbers, and cover all come afterwards.
A book's structure is the order its chapters run in. For a life story the two common choices are chronological (childhood to the present) and thematic (work, family, interests as separate parts). It is worth deciding before you write the chapters, though it can still be changed later.
Read more: How to structure a life story
Proofreading corrects spelling and punctuation; copy-editing smooths sentences and makes the style consistent. In a book built from speech the job is lighter than usual, because the repetitions and filler words of spoken language have already been cleared away when the chapters were assembled.
In Vellu, an AI proofreading pass over one chapter costs 7 credits.
Typesetting is the arrangement of text on the pages of a book: margins, line spacing, page numbers, headings, and the table of contents. It traditionally required its own software and the skill to use it. In Vellu the layout is generated from your chapters at the trim size you choose, and you can preview it before ordering.
Read more: How do I create my own printed book?
A book cover is one continuous piece: front cover, spine, and back cover with its blurb. The spine's width depends on the page count, so it can only be calculated once the book's length is known. Vellu's cover designer computes the spine for you and shows the full wraparound spread.
Once the manuscript is done, a set of practical questions follows: who publishes it, what identifiers it needs, and in what form it is finally read.
Self-publishing means the author publishes the book themselves, without a publishing house. The author decides the content, the design, and the print run and keeps the rights to the work, but also carries the cost and the work. Most memoirs and family books are made this way — they were never meant for commercial distribution.
Read more: How do I create my own printed book?
Print on demand means a book is printed only once it is ordered. No warehouse, no minimum run, so a single copy is possible. This is what made family books financially sensible: printing used to mean committing to hundreds of copies at once.
Vellu's printed books work this way. Paperback starts at €49.95 and hardcover at €69.95, with delivery across the EU/EEA.
Read more: How much does it cost to make your own book?
An ISBN is a book's international identifier, needed when a book is sold in bookshops or catalogued by libraries. It is issued by a national ISBN agency — free of charge in some countries, for a fee in others. A book printed for your family or your association needs no ISBN, and Vellu's printed books carry none.
Legal deposit is the legal requirement to give copies of a published work to a national library for preservation. It applies to works made available to the public. A book printed for family members or an association's members is not usually publishing in that sense, so no deposit copy is required.
An ebook is the electronic version of a book, read on a phone, tablet, or e-reader. EPUB is its most common file format: the text reflows to fit the screen and the reader can change the type size. A PDF instead keeps the pages fixed, matching the printed book.
Vellu exports a finished book as EPUB, PDF, and Word.
An audiobook is a book read aloud to be listened to rather than read. It is a different thing from making a book by speaking, where speech is the raw material rather than the end product. An audiobook read in your own voice is coming to Vellu later; today a finished book comes as print and ebook.
Terms you meet inside Vellu, and in AI-assisted writing more generally.
A credit is Vellu's unit of metering for AI operations. Transcription costs one credit per recorded minute and generating a chapter costs 15; recording, editing by hand, and reading your book are free. Every new account starts with 100 credits at no charge.
What a credit costs in euros depends on the pack or plan you buy, so credit prices are quoted in credits rather than converted to cents.
Read more: Credit costs per operation
The storyline is Vellu's view that gathers a book's raw material in one place: the AI extracts story elements from your recordings — characters, events, settings, and themes — and places the events on a timeline. It shows at a glance what has been told and where the story still has a gap.
A large language model is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text to produce and reshape language. In Vellu the model does not invent your book's content; it organises and phrases what you told it. The chapters are written from your recordings, not from the model's memory.
Read more: Can you write a book with ChatGPT? · Copyright of an AI-written book