I'm Published

In what looks to be a giant ego attack, I have written a book.  Well, make that six books, because that's what it took to get my blog postings from the last four years into book form. 

Wow, this picture is blurry.....but it's better in real life.

 So, who decided my blog was worth sacrificing trees for?  I did.  I published myself using blog2print.  I've been debating doing this for years, and this past fall decided to take the plunge.  

Carl and our sons thought it was a good idea to print a hard copy since there is a lot of history in the blog and it's nice to have books to page through and reminisce.  It's sort of like a scrapbook for lazy people.  I'm awful at scrapbooking, so I took the easy way out.

Using the blog printing service was fairly simple.  You have choices on the color and type of cover, front and back cover photos, format style and which blog posts you want to include.  Since I write way too much, my books ended up being too big for one volume, so I broke them down into two volumes of approximately 400 pages for each book.  

I decided to have 2010 published first and waited to see what the finished product looked like before I went any further.  

The pictures turned out quite well.  There probably could be more pictures and text per page in some cases, and you do have the option of running posts together to save on room.  

I opted to have my blog printed the way it was originally written.  There is an option to have the pictures printed separately. I'm not sure what that would look like, so I decided to leave the format alone.

Some of the pictures came out nice and big, and others are small, it seems that any picture taken in the 'landscape' format is large, and the 'portrait' format is smaller. I'm not sure why that happened; maybe there was something I missed in the translation, but all of the pictures are clear.  

Once the first book came back, I decided to print the rest of them, too.  I also did a compilation book of the gardens from 1978 to 2013 which we can use as a history lesson of sorts when we have garden tours.  (Yes, that's right, we like to bore the tour groups, too.)

My mother is reading two of the books this winter, so they aren't pictured.  She's been a little embarrassed by the pictures I've posted over the years of her and the stories I've written, but she forgave me when I explained that there is only one copy of each of these books, not millions. 

 You can put any picture you like on the back cover of your book.  I want to get some plastic protectors for them because their glossy covers are easy to scratch.  

This wasn't cheap, the average cost of one 400 page book was around $150 which is a lot of money, but when I thought about trying to put all of these photographs into a scrapbook, I reconsidered.  The cost of printing photos, arranging them and writing text was high, too, and this way, the work is already done for me.

I haven't had 2013 printed yet, but I plan on doing so. 

I'm committed now.   

(Or should be.)