Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Blog to Book

I have been so excited about printing my blog into a book. I figured that it is the closest thing I have to a journal right now, so may as well put it into a lasting format. I looked around at several different places and decided on Blurb. I liked the look of their books best and liked the versatility they offered over some of the others.

I am currently working on my book and will hopefully send it off to print by the end of the month. Here are a few pros and cons I have discovered thus far working on this project.

Pros:
  • Fairly easy to use, straightforward
  • Reasonable prices
  • Options for layouts
  • Background options, patterns and colors

Cons:

  • Slow program and not as sensitive to mouse drags etc as I want - really annoying!
  • Must use layout templates that can't be altered - i.e. expand a text box
  • Time consuming - This may just be the perfectionist in me, but I have already put in about 6 hours into the book to make it look the way I want. I'm only 2/3 the way through

So there you have it! My review of Blurb while it's still a work in progress. Have you printed your blog? Who did you use and were you happy with the result?

6 comments:

Ashli Miller said...

i had a friend who used Blurb back when it would just suck your blog right into a book. She said it took only minutes to get it the way she wanted. Blurb says they are working on making that work again, and I'm planning on waiting until then to use it.

Kristina P. said...

I definitely want to do this! I'm coming up on my year, so I would like to turn my blog into a book.

Jessica said...

Ashli- It does slurp your book and spit it into book format. But it puts every post on it's own page and in the same format. So I have been going through changing formats, backgrounds, and condensing some of my posts. When you blog starts at 160 pages, that's a lot of work!

Kristinia- Good luck with that!

Riddle Girl said...

Thanks for the info. I would love to see the finished product and a final review on the process when you are done! I was going to do one each year, if possible.

Live.Love.Eat said...

My blog friend Scary Mommy did this but I am not sure who she used. Great idea!!!!!

Jenny Whiting said...

So you can slurp blogger on Blurb? When I looked at blurb before, it looked like it didn't work with Blogger, just other blogs like Typepad. So that's good to know and I definitely want to hear how it turns out. I also plan to do the same thing once I decide what website to use.
Jess, you're quite the blogger now!! your Etsy shop looks great. I really like your photos; they're beautiful and look so professional! I hope it works out well.