Turning Your Blog Into a Book

I decided to give myself a Christmas present this year and printed off my blog in book form.

I had heard about this when I first started blogging, so the thought of doing it has been in the back of my mind for awhile. After a year of posting, I decided to get serious and found out it's really quite easy!

I couldn't find a lot of sites that print blogs, but one that kept popping up was Blog2Print. It works with both Blogger and WordPress. Basically, you enter the web address of your blog and it creates a book that you can then edit and order to print. There are several options for customizing your book and you'll want to spend some time experimenting with what works best for you.

Let me tell you, I'm thrilled with how my book turned out! It's 300 pages and includes 69 posts with comments. You can choose to print your posts without comments, but they felt too special for me to leave out. 

Here's a few pictures of the pages in my book. So fun to see a whole year's worth of work in one place!

Not everything prints exactly as your blog looks onscreen. You can see in this picture that the photos that aren't separated by words in a post are printed as a group in the book.

Also, captions aren't printed directly under photos as they are on a blog. You can see here that they show up in a sentence below, as if you're starting a new paragraph.

I chose to include the comments in my book which added considerably to its length, but it's fun to look back and see what other people said about each post.

There are several different pricing options for the books. For example, my full color book with comments ended up costing me about $125, but if I had printed it in black and white and left out the comments, it would have only been about $20. Also, you don't have to include every post on your blog. You can choose the ones you want and all of them are listed in a Table of Contents with their corresponding page number. I chose to not include link party posts and posts that didn't have a personal meaning to me. 

As I said before, I'm very happy with how my book turned out. It's nice to know that even if I stop blogging, I'll have a record of what I've written. Seeing my thoughts in printed form was motivating and made me think of why I really have this blog. It's a great way to document our family life! I hope to have plenty of material to print off next year, too!

Have you ever thought about turning your blog into a book? Think it might make a good Christmas present for you or someone you love?