How to turn your blog into a book

A few weeks before Christmas, as I was floundering about in my usual search for the perfect Christmas gift for The Builder, I had a moment of, well, to put it politely, genius. I'd make the Fibro blog into a book for him. A nice little precis of our lives over the past couple of years.

Right. Now how was I going to do that? Initially I had visions of reformatting every post into Word and... well, let's just go no further down that long, winding and difficult path. Instead, I turned to my best mate Google and typed in 'blog to book'.

Voila! Several enticing options for me to simply press a few buttons and have a neatly printed book appear. But which to choose?

I had one false start with a company that seemed to offer exactly what I needed but... well, let's just say the program turned out to be way too difficult unwieldy to think about in the middle of the night (my natural working time). Then I stumbled across Blurb.com.

Despite the fact that I couldn't quite work out how much it was all going to cost, I followed the instructions, exported my blog, imported my blog, edited my blog (Blurb has an advantage over The False Start in this area), removed posts that were not relevant, added photos that were relevant, dillied, dallied and dithered and, after several nights of hard work, discovered that I had created a 320 (!) page hardcover book. Eek allores!

Taking a deep breath, I uploaded the whole thing and then awaited the final costing (you don't pay until you get that figure, so no stress - just lots of work wasted if it turned out it was going to cost an arm and a leg). And I was surprised. Pleasantly surprised. Very pleasantly surprised. The whole custom-made thing, including shipping, cost less than some of the gift books that come out around Christmas (email me if you want the exact figure - The Builder reads my blog every day and I don't want him knowing how much Santa and his elves spent).

I pressed publish. I pressed private (you can choose to have your book publicly sold). I waited anxiously to see what the quality of the whole exercise would be like.

Again, I was pleasantly surprised. There are some limits to the design process, which may be less pleasing to those with a more discerning eye than I, but for what I wanted - a wholly personal and meaningful one-off gift - it was perfect. It's a tangible record of all this ephemeral writing. A tangible record of those tiny moments of family life that are otherwise lost to memory (despite an extensive archive to wade through).

It reminded me that, while the Internet is forever, holding a book in your hands makes your words so much more... present.

If you're a blogger, give yourself a present and visit Blurb. I really recommend it*.

*Not a sponsored post. Just saying.