I have ordered the rough draft copy of my blog book. It is 244 pages so I didn't want to edit it on the computer. I prefer to have a hard copy to edit. I am excited to get it and see how I like it. Once I get it edited I will make it available to the public if anyone wants a copy. It will not be cheap, unfortunately. But I made it a nice book that will serve as a record of this life changing year for our family.
I decided to use Blurb and then just put my book in their bookstore. When I first slurped my blog over to their site it gave me an error message that said, and here I quote: "Whoa! That's some blog you've got there! Unfortunately Blurb can only publish a maximum of 440 pages one book." Then it asked me if I wanted to continue with what it could fit from my blog or if I wanted to start over.
I thought that was a funny message. Kudos to whoever wrote the programing on that. So I had to whittle down my blog to fit. It was easy to take out some posts about So You Think You Can Dance parties etc... It was harder to decide whether or not to leave in the doctrinal posts that answered questions about Mormonism. I don't feel my family needs the information because they either know or are being taught the doctrine. Still I did share some personal stories in some of those posts that I thought I might want in my family history.
For now I have taken those posts out. I was trying to take out everything non-essential to keep costs down. I was afraid the book would cost me $200 because it was so long and has lots of color photos. In the end, this first draft in paperback ran me about $60. I was excited to see it was so inexpensive. But it is still more than I would normally ever pay for a regular book.
So I am not sure how interested people will be in paying for a copy of this book but I am excited to have the first version of it on its way to me. It has been an emotional journey putting it together and my heart is ready to hand it off to someone else to read through it and edit it. I hope to have it edited and in final form before the end of the year. I'll let you know when it is finished.
6 comments:
I've done each year of my blog in a book through blurb since 2006 & LOVE them. They are so worth the money. It's essentially a family journal/scrapbook & such a great heritage to have. Love it. Congrats on getting yours done!
Congrats on your book! What a fun thing to have for generations to come!
Diana
I bet if they knew how many people would want a copy, they could offer a significantly discounted price. You could ask them for a table of what price they could offer for x amount of books (showing the amount per book for each bulk amount of books). Does that make sense? Then you could do a poll to see how many people want to buy it at each price. If you have enough people want to buy it at a particular price, then you could order them in bulk (after of course collecting from those who want to buy it). Anyway, just an idea. Maybe that's too complicated and too much work for you to make it worth it.
How Wonderful...do keep us posted as to when we can order one. I would love a copy. I so enjoy reading your blog!
I got the same message about my blog book- I am trying to do one per year. But they put like 2 pics on each page, so once I changed the layouts to get each post to 1-2 pages (more for big things like Christmas), took out the posts that weren't important to save, etc, I was able to add in the other half of my year that didn't fit in the original 440 pages, and got it down to 220-ish as well for the whole year. I think my blog is more picture heavy, though, so it was easy to consolodate those. Yours has a lot more writing :) Can't wait to see how yours turns out! It's a priceless keepsake...I *so* wish I had a blog when I first started having kids! I have so much more recorded in the past 2 yrs since I have had one than my whole life before that!
I think it would make a great Christmas present - I mean for someone to buy for me, so if it's ready by Christmas, I can give people the idea.
Good luck!
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