Blog to Book Publishing

I had mentioned how I am printing my old blog entries and I wanted to share with everyone what sites I used to accomplish this.

1. Blog Booker – First I used this site to publish my actual blog into a .pdf document. It includes photos and comments if you want it to. Unfortunately I had to delete all of my comments. There was something wrong in my coding about 1/3 of the way through as my blog was uploading to this site that caused it to have an error and stop processing. The only way I could think to get rid of it was to delete all of my comments completely. This was done by going into my PHPmyadmin in my hosting control panel. If you need to do this to your site, just google it and you will find the directions on what to do specifically.

2. Nitro PDF – Next I downloaded a free trial copy of NitroPDF software so I could upload the PDF of my blog. This program allows you to edit your blog text, but for some reason I wasn’t having very good luck with editing the text like I wanted to. The best part of this program is it allows you to save the PDF as a word document. I can then open the entire document – over 650 pages into Word. The only very big negative with this step is the photos do not copy over to Word. Bummer. But since I am manually reviewing each and every post and making sure there isn’t anything that I wouldn’t want my kids to read someday, it isn’t a problem for me. I am just manually copying the photos over into each post as I am editing it.

3. LuLu – I am not to this step yet, but once I am done editing the Word document I will be using this site to print my actual blog into a book. If you are really into printing your book you can actually sell your blog or any type of book that you upload to Lulu and sell it to the public in their Marketplace. You can assign your book an ISBN and sell it on Amazon as well. Of course I have no interest in this type of publishing since I am printing my blog for personal use only.

I am choosing to print my blog, all 650 pages so someday down the road my kids can read my posts. I have journal entries back from 2002 right after Chase was born all the way to 2009. Most of them are family related, but many of them are my personal thoughts related to things going on in my life. I think it will be really neat for my kids to read when they are old enough to understand and appreciate what I have written. I haven’t designed my cover yet or decided if I am going to print the book in black and white or color. Either way, I am excited to get all of my editing done so I can publish my blog into a book!

Hope this helps others that may want to print their blog as well.