Friday, July 27, 2012

Second Lulu Blog Book!

Guess what?! (Hint: If you read the title, you'll probably win.) My second Lulu book came! I ordered it on July 13, and it came on Monday (July 25), so it had a 12 day turnaround. Not bad.


I love my second book even more than the first one. After looking at the first one and seeing how things transferred from monitor to book, I made a couple changes so now it's pretty much exactly how I want it.



First of all (and pretty obviously), I did more with the cover. I like the title bar on the first book, but I wanted this one to be different. So, I simplified the title bar by removing the strip of pictures. I then made a collage on Picmonkey (an awesome site I found a couple weeks ago that I love, and that you have unknowingly seen evidence of on my blog in form of those picture collages I've been doing) using some pictures from the year, and centered that underneath the title. I put both of those (the title and the picture collage) on the polka dot background, which I slightly enlarged (so the polka dots are bigger) and changed to a more yellow-blue tone. I also changed the font on the spine.






I really like how it turned out!



Secondly, I changed the main inside font (Trebuchet) from size 12 to size 11. The size 12 seemed just a bit too big, but the size 11 is perfect. And it takes up less space! Which is great, because this book was also quiet a bit (40 pages) longer than the last one.



Lastly, I added more space in between the date stamp, title, and body of the posts. It just looked better on the printed page. I made the decision after seeing the spacing in the first book, but it was actually kind of tough as I was formatting this book; I kept wanting to put less space in between them. Some things just look different in Word than on the printed page. In Word: less space = looked better. Printed: more space = looked better. Anyway, I'm glad I did add a little more space. It looks good.


So that's my second blog book! I'm really happy with how it turned out. The price (for 188 pages, hardcover, black and white) was $20.02 with $4.99 shipping. I used a coupon code that got me $3.60 off, so my total was $21.41.
 
Again, I totally recommend Lulu for printing your blog into a book. It does take more time and work than Blog2Print or Blurb (actually, scratch that - I think Blurb would have taken more time. But Blog2Print would have been less), but it's way cheaper and you can format it exactly how you want to. It's good quality printing and binding.
 
I updated this post on how to make a Lulu blog book, adding what I learned from this time around.
I'm working on this year's book already. I've copied and pasted all the posts up to this point, and I'm working on formatting them. From this point out, my plan is to work on the book once a month. I'll copy all that month's posts and format them in one go. That way, at the end of the year, I'll just have to do the last month's posts and be done with it.  So, yeah! Lulu's great.


Be sure to check out these posts too!

11 comments:

  1. Looks great!! Totally copying you!

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  2. Thanks for these very informative posts! I'm currently uploading my pdf to lulu and really looking forward to getting my book! Couldn't have done it without you "walking me through it"!

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  3. Thanks for all the info. I am wanting to put my blog into a book for my Mom. This might just do it. I am not sure I have MS Word, I use Open Office, I'll have to contact LULU to see if that's doable. Once you got your book all done, how long did it take to actually get it in hand!

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  4. Going to try it out! Can't wait!

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  5. You may never read this comment, but I have to tell you; THANK YOU! I am so glad I found your blog about the best place to print a blog. I have been going around in circles with the other two choices and have hated the format. This took 3 hours from start to finish and I am SO happy. I can't wait to get my book in the mail.

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  6. You are the only person on the internet who has accomplished exactly what I'm hoping to when I finally get my blog printed. Thank you SO much for this detailed post!! I've been wanting to print for forever but was so frustrated by the limitations in layout on both Blog2print and Blurb. It's been a little daunting (especially since I don't have MS Word) but I'm finally making progress and I cannot WAIT to get it finished. Can't thank you enough for writing this post.

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  7. AWESOME review...thanks so much for posting all this helpful info, I'm totally going with Lulu just off of your info. Merry Christmas! :)

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  8. I've used Blog2Print twice, with mediocre results, for all of the reasons that you list. Today, I had another recent travel blog to print and I used IntoRealPages, which is a fairly new company. It was better and cheaper than Blog2Print, and kept my photos with the text better, but still far from the flexibility that would turn an OK print into a fantastic print. I also tried the Blurb format and for all of the same reasons, I rejected that also. Next time that I do this, I am going to try LuLu. Although it is a whole lot more work, I think that the end result will be just what I want, which is (just like you) to have my print look just like my actual blog. Thanks so much for your very detailed posts about this process.

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  9. What size book did you get? Thank you for sharing!

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  10. Thank you for this wonderfully informative post! Off to print my old blog now!

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  11. Thank you SOOOO much for this review of sites that turn blogs into books!! Just what I was looking for to help me make a decision. I can't quite tell from your photos of your Lulu books and they are black and white as well, so that makes it a bit difficult to tell, but what would you say about the quality of the paper in your books? It looks like it could be a little higher quality printing/paper with perhaps a more glossy finish.
    Thanks :)

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