Hard Copy, Soft Bound...

I used Blog2Print to make a book of my first 95 posts on this blog. Easy-peasy! 116 pages, chose the black/white cheaper version, selected black for the cover with my blog header painting for the image. Twenty something dollars, including free shipping. Not bad! Arrived yesterday (much faster than promised) and actually looks really good!

Two regrets, two things I'd do differently if I decide to do it again... I'd use reverse chronological order, starting with post number one and progressing to the most recent post at the end of the book. I thought it would be good the other way, but reversed my decision as I started to read through the book.

The other thing is that I'd pay more attention to the front and back cover photos. (1) There's a little box under the photo where you can over-type their instruction to title the photo. I'd delete their words but leave the window blank as the title looks goofy. (2) I'd make certain the photos I upload from my files are high resolution, not the ones that work fine on the blog but look all pixelated and stupid on the cover of the book.

Oh, and I might also delete a few posts from the book, particularly the ones with lots of pictures. Blog2Print formats everything just the way it appears on the blog (text size, font, text alignment, bold, italics, etc.) EXCEPT placement of photos. Two of my posts have a bunch of photos with a few lines of text under each photo. The book ended up having the text lines all bunched up and the photos at the end with no accompanying text.

I chose black and white, because this blog isn't about color or photos and because it's MUCH less expensive. But still looks good. The color photos in the various posts just show up as black and white. They look fine that way, especially since it's not about art here.

I chose not to include the comments. Maybe I'll regret that decision because many of the comments are soooooooooooo great, helpful, inspirational, funny, nurturing... dunno... we'll see.

As I said, it's really easy to do the book on the Blog2Print website. You just check your platform (Blogger, WordPress or TypePad), tell it the range of dates you want included in your book, and then tell it to upload. At that point, if I remember correctly, you can actually "see" and "read" your book. Then you get some editing options... like cover color/design, uploading cover photos, whether or not to include comments, how to order the posts. Not a lot of editing possibilities, which keeps it simple.

All in all, I'm satisfied and will do it again. Nice to have it in print... like a journal...