Blog to Book

About Thanksgiving time last year I got interested in those services that turn your blog into a book. I'm forever trying to remember what I wrote and when I wrote it. So thought it might be fun to try one of the blog to book services and end up with a printed version of this blog that could be thumbed through for ready reference.

It was more difficult than I thought it would be to find a service so maybe I wasn't looking in the right places. I ended up with SharedBook's Blog2Print product. Find it at: http://www.sharedbook.com/

It was easy enough to set the start date and ending date for my blog book project. I would have liked more cover design choices, but that's the artist in me:) I finally decided on the default design for the paperback cover. I'm a design freak so would have liked more control on all aspects of the book, especially title page and page layouts. The biggest sticking point for me is that the captions don't stay with the photos... they float to any available location. That's really awkward.

Granted, there might be design options that I missed so check for yourself. I did chose the option that saves space and places content as the widget deems best. Sometimes the widget and I don't see eye-to-eye! But I get it that the service needs to be easy to use.

The cost for my 50-something page book in paperback with full color pages was in the mid-$40 range. But here's what happened. I put the final version of the book in my shopping cart on their web site and then had second thoughts. Forty dollars seemed like a lot to me, so I thought I'd shop around a bit more. A couple of days later I received a coupon code via email for 15% off. How could I resist? I took the plunge.

BTW, this service also offered a hardcover version for about $10 more or a PDF file for about $15.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results. But next year think I'll shop harder and see what's out there at that point in time:)