The blog automatically archives my older posts but I'm guessing in 30 years that won't still be there! And since I've abandoned scrapbooking all together, I've been intending to at least print the pages and put them in a three ring binder and/or electronically print them and save them to PDF files.
But I got to thinking....wouldn't it be cool if I had a book, kind of like the pictures books I've made in the past from Shutterfly, that had all my blog posts in it? So I Googled "Turn My Blog in to a Book" and interestingly enough a couple different options popped up. Apparently there's all kind of demand out there for people who write blogs to have them printed as books. The tool I ended up using, called Blurb, even has a mechanism for selling your book! It's really too bad that I'm not a good writer and that I have no subject matter to write about except my kids. I could quit my job, self publish my book and earn pennies on the dollar of my investment!
So it took me about 6 weeks to work on "my book" and after a week of (not so patient) waiting, it's finally here!!
I'm so proud of it!
I spent the first several weeks working on the blog posts and getting them placed in the book. I had started blogging in July 2012 so it was only going to cover part of the year. Well then I got to thinking that it would be a shame to have a book that is only half the year. So I started importing pictures from January - June and created pages for those as well - some have comments and some are just pictures. So now I have a full yearbook for 2012! I had two printed so that I have one for each kid.
It's pretty simple to do and as I used it more, I learned more tricks and got a little more creative with it. It doesn't give you the kind of flexibility you have with pictures books from Shutterfly or Snapfish so I did have to play with it a bit to make some of the pages look good. My only other complaint is that in the printed book, the pictures are a little grainy. But I'm going to look in the settings, the paper choices and so forth and see if there's a way to enhance the photo quality for future books since the website claims amazing quality on photos. Maybe I didn't do something quite right. The binding quality is better, I think, on this book than the Shutterfly ones. My book has over 160 pages so it's important for the binding to be durable! It cost me about $150 total for both books including the shipping. At first that sounded like a lot of money to me. $75 a book!! But then I rationalized it by thinking that this is actually probably a pretty significant cost (and time) savings over what I would have invested in a hand made scrapbook. So, there.
I. Love. It.
Now I need to start on 2013's book. And I have visions of creating a couple other books like going back and doing a 2011 one for the first year of Lily's life and doing one that is a 'story of us' kind of thing about Joel and I getting together, engagement, wedding, etc. But one step at time. I haven't been doing anything else since I picked up this book making hobby and I miss my knitting! Joel has a sock hat that is partially knitted and now it's 70 degrees outside. Whoopsie!
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