Printing my blog into a book!

Okay, I’m suuuuper tired right now because I am just getting over a cold AND I managed to wake up at like, 2:30 a.m. (after not going to bed until ~11:00 p.m….) and never fell back to sleep. 😩😩 (Why? Why? Why??!)

But I’m feeling chipper enough to share something that has me really excited!

As you may have noticed, I love to write detailed trip recaps when we travel. My most epic blog streak yet was during our August 2021 trip out to Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, when I dutifully typed out posts every single morning from the WordPress app on my phone- complete with oodles of photos, captions and more.

More recently, I shared recaps from our Isla Mujeres, Mexico, trip, and I did detailed Memphis posts last spring.

Anyway, I’d been thinking that it would be cool to somehow print those out and at the very least stick them in a binder or folder or something to keep them! Because while the blog is great and all, who knows if realistically it will be around to look back on in 20 years.

I decided to do some poking around online, and I found a website called Into Real Pages (intorealpages.com), where you can literally just connect your WordPress (or Blogger/ other) website and it will automatically convert your blog posts into a printed book!!!

You just select the dates that you want to print, and it does the rest. There are various size/ cover/ color options, but you can’t exactly personalize every last detail of every page layout (though you CAN edit posts/ delete things if needed). That was totally fine for me!! I just wanted easy. (I made one while I ate lunch in about 15 minutes.)

You can write a Forward describing the book, which I did (so far I just made one for our New England trip, so I wrote a little blurb about where we all went, etc.) and it also includes a Table of Contents (useful if you print, say, several months worth of posts- it would list each month and the page number).

Here’s a screenshot of the cover of my book:

I went with a soft cover, because it was a little cheaper and I also kind of prefer to handle soft cover books! But there are various options. (You can also personalize the back cover! I added the boys’ ages on the back: “Ethan- 13, Asher- 11”, so I’ll always remember how old they were on this trip.)

After the Forward/ Table of Contents, my first couple pages look like this:

Just directly from my blog to the pages! If you had various months included, I believe it would do one of those nice “monthly” pages for each one. (Mine were all just from August, though.)

I had a LOT of pictures in these posts, which I wasn’t sure how it would handle. From what I can tell, it will be great! Just like the photo book I would never otherwise make. 😆

Many of these trip recap posts had shorter/ bullet point style text, but it looks like it would be perfectly fine with longer text as well.

It’s a small brother owned company, based out of the Netherlands, but they ship to the U.S. and I think all around the world. My book is 166 pages, and I paid $74, including shipping and VAT, with a coupon code I found online. I think the hard cover version would have been somewhere around $100. You can print a single book up to 800 pages, if you wanted to!!

I’M SO EXCITED!!!

If it turns out as nice as it looks in the pictures, I am definitely going to print some other trip recaps, or maybe even put together a book of some other misc. posts I might like to keep.

*I read a review online from several years ago that said they had poor customer service, but I think that was due to some family issues back then when they had temporarily stopped producing books…I had a question and emailed the support address and heard back from them within 30 minutes!

Can’t wait for it to arrive!! 🙂

Daily Gratitude:

I am grateful I found this printing option. My original plan was to go to the UPS store and try to print a bunch of copies on regular computer paper and put them in a 3 ring binder. This is going to be WAY better.