You Can Publish Your Blog as a Book

nar·cis·sism  (nahr-suh-siz-em)
noun

inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity. 

van·i·ty (van-i-tee)

noun

excessive pride in one's appearance, qualities, abilities, achievements, etc.; character or quality of being vain.
vanity press or vanity publisher
a publishing house that publishes books at the author's expense.

I became aware that you could have your blog published as a book.  So I did it.  I published my HB in 5 blog up to the half-way point of the Schedule (Volume 1).  I did not do it for myself, of course, but for my fan.   I gave her the hard-cover edition for Christmas.  The reception was so overwhelming and the demand so great that my blog is now out in a paperback edition! 

The catch is that you have to, or at least I had to, pay to have the blog published.  But that is not a new concept.  Wikipedia notes that "[i]n the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was common for legitimate authors to, if they could afford it, pay the costs of publishing their books. Such writers could expect more control of their work, greater profits, or both. Self-publishing was not judged negatively as it has been more recently. Among the authors taking this route were Lewis Carroll, who paid the expenses of publishing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and most of his subsequent work. Mark Twain, E. Lynn Harris, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Anaïs Nin also self-published some or all of their works."  So there!

Several outfits will do this for you.  I used Blog2Print as my Vanity Press.  I looked at some others, but this one seemed pretty easy, and I was very pleased with the results.  

 The program uploads your blog and gives you a complete preview to review.  You can choose to include or omit comments, or you can select which comments to include, which can save quite a few pages, and pages are money.  You can also select the entire blog or only those posts within a particular date range. 


There are things it does not do, however.  It is not very customizable.  It does not pick up the blog design--the headers and sidebars--just the posts themselves.  And within the posts, if you embed a video it does not show a screenshot or thumbnail.  Most of my posts are in Blogger, but I had used LiveWriter for some of my posts, and I had to redo the pictures in Blogger to make them appear in my book.  You can include some pictures at the back, and I printed and scanned some screenshots of my blog design and included them there, but the quality was not very good.  (Anybody have an easy way to capture high resolution screen images and save them?)


There are several versions of your book available to choose from, including a digital version which is pretty reasonable (about 8 bucks).  The site notes "[t]he Digital File Download is provided to you as a PDF file. With your purchase you'll receive a download of your completed book. The file is yours to read, print, and save on your computer for reference whenever you like (in case you lose track of it - we'll keep a copy for you for 30 days)!" This might be the way to go if you are looking to publish for archival, as opposed to presentation, purposes.   Those of you with blogs of recipes, particularly family recipes, might find this a good way to preserve them. 

So, if you are interested in joining the ranks of Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, E. Lynn Harris, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Anaïs Nin--and me, check this out.