How to Make Your Blog into a Book

1.28.2015

Have you ever considered making your blog into a book? I do! I make one every year, in fact. I love having an in-print record of all my posts and I like the security of knowing I have them if the Internet decides to freak out and delete my blog or something.

My blog books are also useful as historical records. I use these a lot to look up when stuff happened. If Jordan asks me, "When did we go to the lake house last year?" No worries! I'll just look it up in my blog book.
I use Blog2Print and haven't had any complaints. Their website is super easy to navigate. You really can't mess it up. I know there are other blog printing services out there, but like I said, I've been using Blog2Print for about 5 years now and don't have any complaints with how much books have turned out, so I'll just keep using them!

If you get a soft cover book in black & white and use one of their gajillion 15% off coupons, it will cost you around $30 for 1 book with a year's worth of posts in it. The total cost, of course, depends on how many posts you include in the book, so that price can definitely go up or down. They do offer the option of color photos and a hardcover front and back, but that is much more expensive so I don't go that route.
You have the option of including a table of contents, which will give a title and page number for each post. That way, you can find things easily. You also get the option to choose which posts to include in your book! I typically do not include things like my Blog Talk posts, sponsored posts, or other things that I wouldn't care to keep or read about later.

When you input your website address into the site, you can choose a range of dates, so you can make a book of just posts from a certain year or period of time!
There are a few options for pictures: you can pick the size (I usually go with medium, pictured above), and you can have them included in the post in the order they appear (pictured below) or clumped together at the bottom of the post to save space. For the first few books I chose the second option, but I realized I much prefer putting pictures in order, even if it does take up more space and cost a little extra. There are a ton of other customization options available too if you just click around.
As you can see below, some of my books are really small and some are larger. I started including an entire year's worth of posts, which is what the bigger ones are. But like I said, if you want to do 6 months or something, you book will be much smaller (and cheaper!).

 Have you ever made a blog book?
Leave a comment with any question about Blog2Print, and I'll get back to you!

*I am not being compensated in any way to write this review. I just wanted to share with you all about this awesome service! I paid for these books myself, and all opinions are my own.
Kaity B. said...

Thank you so much for sharing! I've been looking for a service like this!

Jennifer @ Run Jenny Run said...

I did not know this existed - sounds like something I would like to do eventually!

The Lady Okie said...

Sure thing!

Chesson | Magnolia+Main said...

This sounds really cool! I didn't know you could do something like that. Thanks for sharing!

Allison said...

I had no idea that this was a thing! That's really cool!

Christina said...

You're amazing. Hands down. Love this and will most likely be making one now. :)

Paige @ Reasons to Come Home said...

Do you know if they will work for a WordPress self hosted site?

Courtney said...

I think you've talked about this before? I really appreciate the tips and the reminder! I have always wanted to do this and it sounds right up my alley computer savvy wise :p

Brittany said...

I've always wanted to do this, but have never gotten around to making one! I'm always weirdly paranoid that my blog will be deleted and I feel super behind because between my two blogs, I've been blogging since 2004! Is it possible to simply exclude videos from the post and excerpts of text that pertain to the video?

Caroline @ In Due Time said...

This is SO awesome! I love it! What about if you actually want it to go into print/publication? Does this website help with that or is it more just for personal use/printing?

Leslie Lukens Martin said...

Such a cool idea! I'd never thought of doing something like this! Once again...you're brilliant! :)

shelleystirs said...

They are like yearbooks for the blog. Love it

shelleystirs said...

...so much that I forgot punctuation! :)

Kayla MKOY said...

I've heard of doing this before and you totally have me convinced! That is so neat!!!!!

Laura said...

This is such a cool idea! I had no idea you could even do this! Thanks for posting!

Amy @ A Desert Girl said...

Doing this. I thought blog-to-book'ing was super complicated but you made this look and sound easy-peasy. Thanks for the recommendation.

Ali said...

This is so cool! I had no idea you could do such a thing!

Carolann said...

This is such a great idea! I just started blogging and I have thought about how much fun it will be to one day look back through posts. There really is nothing like reading things on paper so I am absolutely going to keep this in mind! Thanks for sharing.

MakeMeUpMia said...

This is the coolest thing ever!!

Allison said...

Wow, this is such a cool idea! I've never thought to turn my blog into a book - I may have to do that this year. :)

The Lady Okie said...

It is not complicated at all. (I mean, you can MAKE it complicated, but it's really not) I make one every year and like having them to look back on! We spend so much time on our blogs, it's nice to have a keepsake like this.

The Lady Okie said...

If you go on the website, there are options at the top for whatever kind of blog you have. I only look at the blogger, but I'm pretty sure they have an option for Wordpress!

The Lady Okie said...

I haven't looked at all the customization options available because I just do the super basic stuff, but from what I've seen I don't think you have the option to actually edit the posts themselves and take out pictures and text. You can choose to not include certain posts, though. There's also another place I've heard of called blurb.com, which I think is a software you download to your computer. They might offer more options like you're talking about to change texts in the posts.

The Lady Okie said...

To my knowledge this is just for personal use. They don't do publication or marketing or anything like that. If you wanted to do something like that, you could probably just use Amazon's service to make an ebook that you could sell online.

Kristin said...

This is such a great idea! I thought about doing this for a while {Blurb offers a similar service} but just haven't gotten around to it. I like the idea of having a yearly archive!

Erin LFF said...

Thanks for this post! I've seen a few companies mentioned in the past from bloggers, but couldn't really remember any when it came time to actually do it. I, too, worry about losing everything and have been wanting to do this. Checking them out now :)

Cece @Mahogany Drive said...

Such a good idea! I did this for my mom a few years ago as a mother's day gift. I think I used blog 2 print. I hand picked the posts that I thought were most fitting. She LOVED it. I would like to do it again for me though. I have going on 6 years of blogging now so sheesh-it would be a lot to catch up on; although I probably wouldn't include every single post.

Kristen said...

what a brilliant idea!

Sarah said...

I've heard of this but hadn't actually put my eyes on it, LOVE this idea!

Renee Young said...

i never knew you could do this!!! thanks so much for the idea!!! :) i can't wait to make my own blog into a book <3

The Girl who Loved to Write said...

So cool! I really need to do this! It would also be a great gift if you knew someone who blogged!

Rach said...

THIS!! This is perfect! Thank you so much for sharing! I had a Xanga when I was in high school and I painstakingly copy and pasted each post into a word document so I could print it off and make a book. And I did. And it was great. And I've known forever that I want to do that with my current blog as well, but it just took SO much time that I haven't made it a priority. But this is brilliant! Thank you so much for sharing this!

Kerry @ Till Then Smile Often said...

This is such a great idea!! I am horrible with remember what I did throughout the year and having it printed out would really help.

Beka @ Sunshine to the Square Inch said...

I'm so glad you shared this - thanks!

I was actually planning on e-mailing you sometime to ask you how you turn this into a book. I also think my grandma would LOVE this! She can't figure out the internet. She actually asked me to look up something on google and said, "Do you know what Google is?" ha!

Anyways, thanks again for sharing this. I think it will be fun to print this especially after our year abroad.

Shea Lennon said...

I've always wanted to do this! This is such a great idea--I've worried before about something happening and my blog just disappearing. (Not that that would happen, but still.) I love the idea of having a hard copy--thanks for sharing this!

Unknown said...

Those look pretty neat, I must say. I love it! Yours look so cool! :)

Andrea H. said...

Thank you so much for sharing!! I have been wanting to make one of these for various topics I post about and for each year, but wasn't sure where to start. Excited to get started on it now :)

Kiki said...

What a fascinating concept! I never would have thought to turn my blog into books, because I use the internet as a way to "keep" or "hold" onto my posts. But I really like the idea of having my blog posts on paper and in a bound book. Thanks for sharing! :)

Megan said...

What?! I have never thought of this, and now I'm ashamed! As we've discussed, I love physical scrapbooks (or photo books), and I think blog books would be a great addition to the stack. :) Thanks for sharing!

Holly said...

Oh I love this!!!! I was thinking of doing this for all of my trips to baseball parks. Thanks for sharing!!

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