Digital Into Physical - Blog2Print Books

I shared the news a week ago that I will be closing down my blog at the end of this year.  One of my big concerns when I thought about ending Anne's Odd and Ends was the loss of all my content!  All those photos/stories of my girls growing up as well as recipes.  I use my own blog as a recipe resource almost every week, ha!  So I started researching ways to turn my digital words into a physical book.

My research lead me to select the company Blog2Print to make my memories a reality.  I had 5 (almost 6) years of blog entries so I had to make more than one volume. What I discovered is that the book size is limited by the amount of photos more than the amount of entries.  They could not put more than 2000 in one volume (and 430 pages).  That may sound like a lot but I quickly found that I had too many photos!  They have three photos options (small, medium, large) and I went with the medium choice.  

I ended up making three volumes and will do my last book after I finish out 2017.  Volume I is the biggest at 356 pages, Volume II: 269 and Volume III: 273.  I think that volume IV will be around the same range.  Remember my pages were limited by the number of photos I had which is why I never made it to 430!
So what did I think?
I was very pleased with the book outcome.  It is a big (8x11) hard bound book with professional looking pages, photos and printing.  It included a Contents section (needed to find all those different recipes!) and of course page numbers.  The books can be customized quite a bit, with font, color, cover colors, etc.  I was also able to make a different dedication page for each volume.  

Shipping/Creating took awhile, about 2 weeks from when I ordered the book till I received it.  The books all came VERY well packed, wrapped in bubble sleeves, surrounded by paper in a big box.  No damage there!

These books are definitely not cheap although the cost can be offset with coupons codes and by selecting a softbound cover instead of hard.  Another super budget option is to just buy the PDF version of your book.  Those only cost $8.95!  That way you would have a permanent copy that you could copy later.  My books cost about $120 each (that's with coupon codes).  Worth every penny!
Tips for making your own book cheaper and easier:

1. Go through your blog ahead and remove all unneeded entries.  Fluff like product sales, promotions, etc.
2. Go through each blog entry (tedious but worth it!) and remove extra photos.  For example, I didn't really need 5 photos of a soup recipe.  Removing them made my book smaller and easier to read.  I kept all the kid photos though!!

For more information on Blog2Print go here.