How Much Does It Cost to Create a Memoir Book?

By Rafi Moshe, founder of StoriedLife. Prices in this article were last checked in October 2026.

A memoir book cost’s nothing but your time if you write and assemble it yourself, or thousands of dollars if you hire a professional to interview the storyteller, write the manuscript, edit it, and oversee printing. The price depends on how much of the work you handle and how much you pay someone else to do.

StoriedLife offers a different starting point, with annual plans at $59 for a digital PDF book, $98 for a PDF and colour softcover book, and $118 for a PDF and colour hardcover book, with the book included in each plan’s price, not added on afterwards.

The range between the two ends of this market is wider than most people expect. A guided tool like StoriedLife runs $59 to $118 for the first year. Sitting with a professional biographer or memoir service commonly runs $3,000 to $8,000, and a private ghostwriter can take the total to $25,000 to $50,000 or more.

The final cost depends on the type of help you need and the book you want to produce. Comparing the total cost, the work involved, and what you receive makes it easier to choose an approach that fits your family and your budget.

If StoriedLife didn’t exist, Rafi Moshe says he’d probably have done what a lot of sons and daughters do. He’d have recorded his dad on his phone. Some audio, some video, whenever a good story came up at the table.

“They would have sat on my phone or in the cloud,” he says, “and they would have gotten lost in the infinite number of photos and video clips in my gallery.”

No book. No chapters. Just clips he’d have to go hunting for, mixed in with everything else a phone collects over a few years. The Library of Congress runs a whole personal archiving program around exactly this problem, because personal digital files, photos and recordings included, are surprisingly easy to lose and surprisingly hard to organise after the fact. That’s worth keeping in mind when you look at memoir prices, because the cheapest option on paper (do it yourself, it costs nothing) has a failure mode nobody puts in their brochure. The recording isn’t the memoir. It’s raw material, and raw material piles up.

Roughly what each route costs

Most families reading this will end up in one of the first three rows. The last two rows are for people who want a professional writer on the project and know why they want one. Both are legitimate purchases. They’re just very different purchases from a $99 platform, and comparing them on price alone gets people into trouble.

Where the money actually goes

Strip a memoir down and there are a handful of jobs in it. Somebody has to get the stories out of the person. Somebody has to turn hours of talking, or pages of written answers, into chapters that read well. Somebody checks names and dates, lays out the photos, designs a cover, deals with the printer.

With a ghostwriter you’re paying a professional rate for nearly all of that. With a platform, software and templates carry most of it, which is why the price drops by a factor of fifty or more. With DIY you’re not avoiding those jobs. You’re taking them on yourself, unpaid, in your spare time. Whether that’s a good trade depends entirely on your household.

Printing, by the way, is rarely the big number. One colour hardcover from a print on demand service like Blurb might cost you somewhere in the mid $20s for a small book and can get up toward $80 for a larger, premium one, before shipping. Noticeable, sure. It’s just not what’s driving a $25,000 quote. The writing is.

Doing it yourself: cheap, and harder than it looks

“DIY seems deceptively easy,” Rafi says. “Just open a document or push record. But it’s hard to know where to start, where to go, and when it’s finished and ready to print. Most people get stuck. Many people find it hard speaking or recording into the void. And it takes much longer, because no one asks questions and moves the process forward.”

That matches what families tell us, and it matches what the professionals say about interviewing, too. The Smithsonian’s oral history interviewing guide makes the same point from the other side of the microphone: the good material comes from follow up questions, from asking “can you give me an example?” and “how did that happen?”, and from giving the person time to think instead of filling the silence. A recorder on its own does none of that.

The document gets to 30 or 40 pages. Life gets busy. The storyteller loses steam, partly because talking to a blank page, or a voice recorder with nobody on the other end of it, is a lonely way to tell your life. Six months later the folder is still there and now it comes with guilt attached.

None of which means don’t do it. If your parent writes for pleasure, or you’ve always wanted to be the one to interview your mum yourself, DIY can be the most meaningful route of the lot and it costs next to nothing. Just go in honest about the timeline. You’re looking at months of evenings, plus printing at roughly the Blurb type prices above, plus an editor if you want one. For reference, the Editorial Freelancers Association’s rate survey puts professional writing and editing work in the tens of dollars an hour and up, so even a light edit of a full manuscript isn’t a small line item.

Prompt platforms: roughly $59 to $125

These are the services most people have heard of. Your parent gets a question every week, answers it in writing or by dictation, and at the end the answers become a book.

Remento charges $99 for a year, and that includes one colour hardcover up to 200 pages. Extra copies are $69, and stretching the book to 380 pages costs another $30. StoryWorth’s pricing is harder to pin to one number because its own pages describe it a few different ways. It starts at $59 for a black and white interior, its colour book is usually listed at $99, and extra colour copies are $79. Check the actual plan page the week you buy. These companies adjust what’s included fairly often.

What you’re buying here is discipline. A question lands every week whether inspiration shows up or not, and for a parent who likes writing, that rhythm works. The catch is built into the model. Somebody still has to write the answers, and a written answer to a question tends to be shorter and flatter than the same story told out loud to someone who keeps asking “and then what happened?” Families sometimes find themselves quietly helping with the writing by month four. That’s not a failure. Just budget for the possibility if your parent has never been a writer.

StoriedLife: $59 to $118 in the first year

Full disclosure, since this is our own service and you’re reading this on our site. StoriedLife works differently from the prompt platforms in one specific way. Your parent doesn’t write answers and doesn’t work down a question list. They have conversations with Eva, our AI biographer. Eva follows up in the moment, the way an interviewer would, and the book is built out of those conversations. If you want the walkthrough before the numbers, here is how StoriedLife works, from conversation to printed book.

It’s one membership, not three different products, and every plan’s price includes the finished book. Nothing is added on at the printing stage. The only choice is which form that included book takes:

• Digital, $59 in the first year, includes your book as a PDF.
• Storyteller, $98 in the first year, includes the PDF book plus one printed colour softcover book.
• Keepsake, $118 in the first year, includes the PDF book plus one printed colour hardcover book.

The printed book runs up to 300 pages, in full colour, with your family photos and a custom cover, and it ships in about 7 business days, globally. Extra copies for the family are a set price rather than a quote: $39 for a softcover and $59 for a hardcover.

If you carry on into a second year, renewal is $89, whichever option you started with. And you don’t have to pay anything to find out if your parent will actually do this, which in our experience is the real unknown. The first stories are free, no card needed.

On the softcover versus hardcover question, Rafi’s observation from watching families order is worth passing on because it’s not what people expect. At signup, it’s mostly budget. A big family working to a budget will often plan on one hardcover for Mum and softcovers for the kids. But the book takes months of someone’s life to make, and by ordering time the arithmetic has changed. “Because so much heart is poured into the book,” Rafi says, “by the time people order, they want the nicest colour hardcover, with good quality printing.” Plan for that conversation with your siblings early, including who is paying for the extra copies. It comes up in nearly every family.

What StoriedLife won’t give you: a professional human writer spending months shaping your parent’s manuscript. If that’s what you want, keep reading, because the next two routes are exactly that and there’s no point pretending a $118 platform is the same product.

See What Your Memoir Could Cost

Hiring the writing out: $3,000 and up, sometimes way up

Here’s where the numbers get serious, and where Rafi’s own market watching is probably the most useful evidence in this whole article. “I have seen people charge $3,000 to $8,000,” he says of memoir services and writers, “and some literally charge $1 a word. And editing, and layout of photos, and design might even be extra.”

Do the maths on $1 a word. An ordinary life story runs somewhere around 40,000 to 60,000 words. At a dollar a word you’re looking at $40,000 to $60,000 for the writing alone. Most writers don’t charge that, but the example shows why quotes in this market are all over the place. The Editorial Freelancers Association’s rate survey is a calmer reference point. It puts memoir ghostwriting at a median of about 17 to 20 cents a word, or $75 to $100 an hour. On a 50,000 word book, that’s $8,350 to $10,000 just for the writing, at the median, before editing, design or a single printed copy. Established writers with published books charge above the median, sometimes far above it. That’s how complete projects land at $25,000 to $50,000 without anybody ripping anybody off.

In between sits the managed memoir service, where a company matches you with a writer, runs the interviews and hands you finished books. StoryTerrace is the name most people run into. Reporting on its packages puts its Classic option from around $3,250 for a shorter book of roughly 60 to 120 pages, built from four to ten hours of interviews. It quotes by package rather than a public price list, so get the current number, the page count and the number of printed copies in writing before you sign anything. That advice goes for every company in this section, us excluded only because our price fits in one paragraph above.

A shorter, professionally written keepsake at $3,000 to $8,000 suits some families very well, particularly when nobody in the family has the time to drive the project. Just read what’s included line by line. Interview hours, revision rounds, photo work and extra copies are where a reasonable quote becomes an expensive one.

The extras that catch people out

Ask these before you pay anybody, including us:

Extra copies, priced at your actual page count and in colour. One book is included in most offers and one book is never enough for a whole family.

Page limits. Some platform prices cover 200 pages. A good talker can blow past that. StoriedLife includes up to 300 pages, and a longer book can run to 800 pages at $15 for each extra 100 pages.

Year two. What’s the renewal if the story isn’t finished, and do you still have access to the stories and any recordings if you stop paying? People forget to ask this until they need the answer.

What’s included, exactly. With writer led services, editing, photo layout and design may be quoted separately, per Rafi’s point above. With platforms, check whether colour is included or is itself the upgrade.

Shipping. Free US shipping is no use to a family in Toronto or London whose books are going to three different countries.

Related reading: How to Create a Family History Book, step by step

So which one should you pick?

Start with the person, not the price. Really. If your dad writes happily, a prompt platform or a DIY project will serve him well and you’ll spend the least. If he’ll talk for an hour but won’t type a paragraph (that’s most parents, in our experience) then you need a route built around conversation, and the choice is between doing the interviewing yourself, consistently, for months, or paying a platform or a writer to keep it moving.

Rafi puts the deciding question like this:

“If you look at what you get, stories that connect you to your roots, they are priceless, and can last for generations. The comparable platforms are similar in price. The important question is which platform will give you the most interesting stories, and which platform will present the content in a way that generations of family will want to engage with.”

His argument, and obviously he has a dog in this fight, is that the interesting stories come from a real back and forth. An interviewer who knows what you’ve already told them and asks a contextual follow up gets a different quality of story than a question answered once, in writing, on a Tuesday. That’s the bet StoriedLife is built on. It’s also why he’s pushing the finished product past the printed page, toward a story gallery the grandkids can wander through, chapter by chapter, hearing the person’s own voice in each one, and a book they can ask questions of and get answers drawn from the person’s stories. That part is direction he’s building toward, not a feature to buy today, and we’ve left it in here because it tells you where he thinks this is all going. Judge today’s product on today’s product.

When we asked Rafi where the wasted money is in all this, he more or less rejected the premise, at least at platform prices. There isn’t much to waste at $59 to $118. The waste, if you want to call it that, is paying for anything, at any price, that your parent doesn’t finish. A $25,000 ghostwritten book they loved making beats a $59 subscription abandoned in week three, and the reverse is also true. Finished is the whole game.

See What Your Memoir Could Cost

Questions people actually ask us about cost

Is printing the expensive part?
Not usually. It’s a real cost (see the Blurb ranges above) and it adds up across copies, but interviewing, writing and editing are what separate a $100 book from a $10,000 one.

What does a ghostwriter charge for a memoir?
At EFA survey medians, figure on roughly $8,350 to $10,000 for the writing on a 50,000 word book. Rafi has seen market quotes from $3,000 to $8,000 for memoir services at the lower end, and $1 a word at the top end. Get the scope in writing, because those numbers may or may not include editing and design.

What’s the cheapest way to do this properly?
Do it yourself and pay only for printing. Cheapest way that reliably ends with a book, for most families, is a platform somewhere between $59 and $125. The gap between those two answers is the gap between “possible” and “will actually happen in our family,” and only you know which side of it you’re on.

Do we need a ghostwriter to get a good book?
You need a ghostwriter to get a ghostwritten book, by which we mean a professionally shaped, literary manuscript. Most families aren’t after that. They’re after their mum’s stories, complete, organised, in her voice, in a book the family can hold and pass down. A good platform gets you that. Different goal, not a lesser one.

How much do extra copies cost?
It depends on the route, and it adds up faster than people expect. At StoriedLife, extra copies are priced on the pricing page at $39 for a softcover and $59 for a hardcover. On the other platforms we checked, extra colour copies run about $69 to $79 each. Print on demand copies at Blurb type prices can run from the mid $20s to around $80 a copy depending on size and finish. A family of five siblings should price the copies before choosing the route, not after the book is done.

How long does all this take?
Prompt platforms are usually set up around a year of weekly answers, though plenty of people move faster. A book built from conversations grows at the storyteller’s pace, over weeks or months. A writer led project typically runs four to six months or more, most of it interviews, drafting and your family finding time to review things.

How we priced this article

We did not take any figure in this article from another blog’s roundup if we could check it at the source. If a price has changed since you last looked, that is normal for this market, and it is why we date the check instead of presenting these numbers as permanent.

Sources, all checked in October 2026:

• Ghostwriting and editing rates: Editorial Freelancers Association, Editorial Rates chart
• Interviewing method: Smithsonian Institution Archives, How to Do Oral History
• Preserving personal recordings: Library of Congress, Personal Digital Archiving
• Printing ranges: Blurb, photo and trade book pricing
• Remento pricing: Remento Pricing Guide, Remento Help Center
• StoryWorth pricing: StoryWorth, The Best Memory Book for Family Stories
• StoriedLife pricing, how it works and membership terms: StoriedLife pricing page and StoriedLife Terms of Use
• Founder quotes: Rafi Moshe, recorded for this article in October 2026. Managed service package figures (StoryTerrace) come from published package reporting, flagged in the text, because that company does not publish a full price list.