Poppy Patchwork


My little bit of this big World

Thursday, 21 September 2017

Creating my blog book

I have my blog diary books, I love looking at them
 Every post since I started this blog
I have been working on my 2016 book, earlier in the year I was not sure if I would finish this book.
I always publish with a company called Blurb, when I produced my 1st book in 2012, I researched all printers on line, Blurb I felt was the best for me. Now I use them so all the books look the same.
For each book I was able to import all my words and photo's in one action, which I then had to edit to a page per post, thus keeping the books to between 130 and 160 pages and keeping the cost down.
I never pay full price for my books, they would cost about £100, I always wait until they send me 60% off, which allow me to use nice glossy paper, making the feel of the book good.
Last year Blurb changed and stopped the importing from blogs, which stopped me, as to add each post I thought would be too much.
I have started adding each post by hand, I copy all the words and drop them into the page text box, I then have to copy each picture to my desktop and then import through the function on blurb. When I edit I can leave my words in one box, or as shown below spread the word boxes over the page. The import is really done quite quickly, I have found a routine which works for me.
The whole process is not much more work than before and doing the process post by post, I am finding less stressful. I sort and finish each page before starting the next.
 Using the template as seen above, 
I can tidy and sort each photo and my words to make the page look neat.
Using photo boxes and text boxes, adjusting their size to suit.
you can have as few or as many as you require on each page. 
My first book was hard work, but the more I create the easier it gets, I understand how Blurb works, and I love the template with all the grids, I do like things to be neat and in straight lines.
2016 will be completed and waiting for any discounts due, I am not in a hurry to print, and the details sit waiting for me to press the publish button.
I have made a couple of other books, I had a dolls house and a blog to go with it, when I got rid of my house I created this book to remind me of all I achieved.  
 After our daughter got married 
I printed a wedding book for us, much cheaper than through the photographer. 
I have used other companies, we made a photo book for Logan for his first holiday with us and without mummy and daddy, which due to the cost (much cheaper), not as nice as my books. We used Photbucket on a Groupon deal. 
We tried to make our girls a childhood book each, but our photo's were poor quality,  typical 80's and 90's standard.
I did another post here, back in 2012, shows my 1st book I made, it shows more pages of the completed book.

Have you printed any books ?

12 comments:

  1. It's a lovely idea getting books printed. It's like photos, it's all very well being digital and storing them on the computer but I like to have them in an album so I still get all my favourites printed off.

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  2. This is a really interesting post. I'm going to look blurb up. Thanks for the info x

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  3. Thanks for that, Marlene. I've been thinking of getting mine done too but found Blurb a little expensive. I've noticed the Groupon offers as well. How was the process with Photobucket? Did you use much text when you did the book with them or was it mostly pictures?

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  4. What a great idea. I have seen others mention blog books but they never mentioned how they did it or where they got them from.
    Great idea doing the photo books for the grandchildren, i will definitely look into that for our 2.

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  5. This is so timely as I was literally thinking only this morning about getting a blog book done because I remember reading something you'd put either on your blog or a comment on mine about printing them off. I am going to do the same thing and just keep coming back to it so thanks for sharing this information.

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  6. What a lovely idea.
    I know I would never do it not enough patience!

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  7. Lovely history for you to look back on in the future. I don't think I'd have the patience.

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  8. This is a lovely idea. We have a few of the photo books. We use photo box. The grandchildren love to look through them.

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  9. Thanks for explaining how you do it. Very interesting.

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  10. What a great idea. Now your digital diary has become real books. Every year my son and DIL make us a book for Christmas. It covers their year. I love them and often find myself looking through each book.

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  11. Thanks so much for sharing this. I will look into it over the winter, hopefully finding one where I can transfer my posts over easily.

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  12. WOW! That's fantastic! I've looked at many 'photobooks' of other people's, but never thought of one of my own :)

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