I haven’t been blogging much lately, partly because there hasn’t been a lot to blog about (I have been doing a lot of genealogy and the weather has been terrible, so I have been sitting inside, on the computer, a lot). But I recently finished a time-consuming second pass through my ancestors and have started visiting some cemeteries. I have also, in the past week, been spending a lot of time figuring out how to get this blog into print. Jett has been “encouraging” me for some time to get this done. So… I am now doing it.
I was hoping that I could just contract with some service that could print directly from the files on bluehost.com. However, my attempt at doing this failed and, in retrospect, might not have been a great idea to start with, because a blog doesn’t necessarily translate to print form very well. I then found a service that was just a publisher – I send a PDF file and they will print and bind it. So I started looking into how much effort would be involved to produce a PDF from the contents of the blog.
I decided that I wanted a separate volume of each year of the blog. I started the blog in October 2011, so the 2011 volume would be small and would be a good test. Over the course of two days, I produced a PDF file containing all of my 2011 posts. It came out to 26 pages. I sent it off and ordered 10 copies at a total delivered cost of about $58. Now I am working on 2012, which will likely be over 100 pages. If the 2011 book looks good I will be ready to publish 2012 by the time I get it.
Then 5 more volumes, probably each over 100 pages.
Good thing the weather sucks because I will be spending a lot of time indoors over the next couple of months.