On Printing a Blog

A number of commentators expressed interest in how I had my blog printed into a book. Here's a fast rundown of how I did it. 

The company I used is Blog2Print. It's an American company, so the price was in US dollars. It crossed the border without incident. The blog book was pulled from the internet, with very little effort on my part. 

One minor hiccup occurred - About the time I thought my book should be arriving, I received an email from a kind woman, Jen, in the southern states who had received a copy of the book. She found my email address through the blog. Any of her attempts to contact the company to let them know were useless.

I contacted them, and they said to check the tracking number given, and that the book was on the way. I did, assuming that they had sent another book. No. They hadn't. So I contacted them again, and they printed another copy and sent it off. They also gave me a discount for all the hassle. 

For this first book, I went with the basics - medium sized photos, hardcover with a dust jacket. You can see that the layout isn't all that artistic. The pages are 8 1/2 x 11, printed on a medium weight glossy paper. The colours are great. The book is 212 pages. No comments, although I believe you can get them included as well. 

I also chose the Compact (default) layout. Thus, the photos do not line up with the text, the way they do in blog posts. Sometimes I'll write, "in the above photo" to explain something, but in the book, the text does not necessarily fit. For me, that's okay, although I'm planning to go through the book with a pen and explain a few things. 

It's possible to choose another layout that will use more pages, but keep the photos and text layout as it appears on the blog. I will likely do that next time, and make the photos larger.

While writing this post, I've been creating my second book, for 2015. However, I just received a message saying that I posted 1391 photos that year, and the maximum number per book is 1150. They recommend narrowing the date range and creating 2 books in place of one. I may do that.

It's also possible to delete certain posts and photos. I'm still learning as I go along. I'd like to figure out how to have some photos large and some medium.

I hope this is of use to some of you. I'm sure there must be other companies that do this, so if you know of any, mention it in the comments. And if you have any more questions, I'll be happy to try and answer them.