Blog Book

Here are a few pictures of our blog book.  I think it turned out great! The company I went with was Blurb, and though it was crazy time consuming, I liked that I just downloaded the program to my computer, and worked at it whenever I wanted...I didn't have to be signed into an online site, or grant permission to a random company to have access to my private blog (I ran into that problem with a few of the other options out there). You just sign into blogger, select the posts you want slurped into a book, and it loads them into a standard format. 

 You could be done there, but the formatting is lousy, so you need to scroll through the pages 2 at a time, and select layouts from a list of options on the left of the screen. My first book took forever, because it took awhile to figure out which layouts worked for certain posts and I had some posts with many many photos, and others that were all text.  I've got the hang of it now, and can sit down and edit several pages in a short amount of time...but I still have 1000's of posts and photos, so it's taking awhile.  Anyway, the first book arrived, and I'm really really happy with how it turned out.  I chose to print 8 x 10 books, rather than 12x12 or other traditional sizes for albums...mostly because I know we'll have many many volumes of blog books and I think 8 x 10 looks prettier and fits better in a bookshelf.  I'm also glad I decided to spend a little extra to upgrade to better quality paper (which you can't tell from my non-quality photography) and to have the images on the front and back printed directly onto the hardbound book, rather than a glossy jacket.  The children LOVE looking through and talking about when Quincy was born, and their favorite pages have photos of Reese throwing a tantrum and the post about potty training where I posted a pic of her first poop in the potty.  Gross, but hey, they're excited about family memories and their personal history, and that was the point of printing in the first place.  Another plug for blurb is that they sent me a 15% off coupon with the first book to use on the next, and they emailed me a 25% off promo today that I need to check out...so there are discounts out there.  I'm honestly beyond caring about the cost at this point, I'm just glad that I'm finally getting it done and that my family is enjoying it.  Anyway, I had a MILLION questions and was totally overwhelmed about making ours a book (hence, it took me 3 years to finally do it), so if you have any questions, call or message me and I'll tell you what worked for me.