One of these days, I should probably try to put into words my philosophy about making money off our Postcard Valet web site.  In a nutshell, we want everything we have to offer – photos, videos, writing – to be free for you to enjoy… but more money means more traveling, and that’s important to us, too!

It would be easy enough to put up some Google ads or to explore other set-it-and-forget-it revenue streams on the site, but I hate how banner ads destroy the aesthetic.  Besides, when I visit other sites, I tend to completely ignore all the ads, anyway.  Don’t you?

The best solution, in my mind, is to create something special that you’d want to spend your hard-earned money on.  For example, we haven’t really pushed it, but we already have a link to our Smugmug gallery where you can purchase a print of any one of the photographs posted under the “photography” category on Postcard Valet.  And today we’d like to present you with our first published product: A 2011 Galapagos Wildlife Calendar!  (Actually, there are two of them!)

This is so cool!  I just received my blog-turned-book in the mail from Lulu.com!  It turned out better than I’d dare to hope!  Exclamation points should be reserved to represent forceful dialog, but who cares?!

Seriously, though, A Midgett Blog, Volume I: 2003 has been published and I couldn’t be happier.  It’s a 166-page, perfect-bound, 6″ x 9″ trade paperback.  It’s somewhat of a hybrid between a full-size hardback and a mass-market paperback.  I put so many hours into learning all the ins and outs of self-publishing and spent so much time designing the layout of the pages and the cover that I worried that I would be disillusioned by anything less than printing perfection.  Even with heightened expectations, Lulu doesn’t disappoint.

Technically, I suppose you would have to say that this book is “printed,” rather than “published.”   I looked into the two publishing options offered by Lulu:  Published by Lulu and Published by You.  In the former, Lulu will reserve an actual ISBN for your work, effectively listing it worldwide in every major bibliographic database.  Walk into any bookstore, do a search on Amazon.com, and you’ll be able to order your book.  With the Published by You option, you’d be listed as the publisher, which would be cool, but you would also have to go through the hassle of registering your own ISBN through the US ISBN Agency.  Both options add at least $100 to the cost of printing.  I decided to just print it.  Who’s going to be looking for my blog at a bookstore?

Having a book “published,” with all the acceptance that the word implies, would certainly be something to be proud of.  I would have thought I’d have experienced some niggling disappointment when I passed on the whole ISBN thing.  Turns out, not even a little.  I have an artifact now, a physical thing that sits on my bookshelf.  For some reason, that’s just so much cooler than digital bits flitting around in cyberspace.

A single printing cost me about $30, which I don’t think is terrible considering that a book of this size would probably have a retail price of $15.  The cost would drop all the way down to $8 or so if I were to print the interior pages in black and white.  However, I wanted the freedom to color some of the text, not to mention keeping the original color photos.  If I really wanted to pinch pennies, I could have reduced the number of pages by shrinking the font size of the body text style, too.  Actually, I think the default font size came out a bit too large, anyway.  A good thing, too, considering the rough draft of Volume II is clocking in at 450 pages ($72!).

Besides the slightly large font, there’s not a lot I don’t like about my first printing.  The glossy black cover attracts fingerprints, but I can live with that.  The dark blue text box on the back cover doesn’t seem to be differentiated from the black background at all.  The edge of the spine is worn down to white in a couple places, but I think that probably happened during shipping.  I did notice one typographical error while flipping through the book, but I’m not about to proof-read the material yet again just to see if there are more.  Easy fixes, if I decide to order another copy or two.

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So, 2008.

Yeah, I didn’t get as much writing done over the break as I’d hoped. Instead, I fiddled around with WordPress a lot, both on my own sites and someone else’s. If you’re the type of person that likes to read this via the RSS feed – And why shouldn’t you? The new version of WordPress tried to stop me from including the whole entry, but I fixed it. I got your back! – you might click through and take a quick look at the new design. I frittered away a lot of time on it while procrastinating. Hope you like it the one time you see it.

Looking over my blog’s web statistics for 2007 was enlightening, though I doubt any of you care. Just a hair shy of 50,000 “unique” visitors last year. Well, not really. That statistic resets every month, so there’s no telling. But still… scary on so many levels. Who are all you people?

On a related note, I did an ego search on Google the other day for the word “midgett.” This blog is third on the list after Midgett Realty and the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter! That’s insane. “Arlo” shows up on the second page, but I doubt I’ll ever climb to the stratospheric reaches of Arlo & Janis and Mr. Guthrie.

What else is new? Hey, remember my idea to create a hard-bound book out of all these blog entries? Well, once I got to work on it, I realized publishing is harder than it looks. Specifically, proofing, editing, and designing the layout for a manuscript is a bitch. I scaled the project back, however, and I’m almost ready to try self-publishing a volume encapsulating just the first year of the blog. If it turns out, I’ll move on to 2004 soon. Right now I have a nice, big Word file – boy do I love Office 2007, by the way – with copious footnotes, a table of contents, and 4 or 5 appendices. Only thing holding me back is the foreword. Anyone want to write that for me?

Also, with the end of 2007, my first timeline was officially complete. I slapped up a new one for 2008, but my life has been boring so far; nothing to report. I went ahead and archived the old one, though it makes me feel bad that I didn’t write about many of the things on there. Guess it’s time for a quick synopsis:

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I’ve been working on that book idea — taking the 175,000+ words and pictures in this blog and archiving them in a dead tree format.  I didn’t think a crash course in publishing would be this time consuming. 

First, I grabbed a hardcover book template from Lulu.com.  It’s a Word document and the page numbering, margins, and the like were already set.  Next, I needed to figure out how to get the content off my blog and into the blank document.  I found the easiest way to preserve the formatting was to copy and paste directly from my html pages.  Took quite awhile, but all the italics, bolds, hyperlinks, and pictures pasted into the document essentially intact.

While doing that, I managed to do something smart.  I set up a number of styles and applied them to specific sections of each entry.  Photos are centered, captions are italicized, dates are right justified, titles are big and bold, comments are formatted differently than the body text, stuff like that.  I learned some neat things about styles in the process, but I haven’t actually used them yet.  When I’m ready, however, I’ll be able to make global formatting changes with just a couple clicks.  New font for every titles?  Center justify every date?  Perfect.

Right now I’m staring down 12 Megabytes of text and photos, spread across 462 pages.  It’s so very tempting to simply fire this off to the press and call it good.  Instead, I’m hoping to persevere long enough to make this something I’ll be proud to show off.  That’s not going to be easy.  I’m learning that the web is a very different medium than a book.  I’ve got more questions than answers at this point.

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Here’s an idea.

Recently I read about some bloggers who had been devastated by the loss of their writings.  It sounds like this wasn’t just a coincidence, but rather a global problem with the service they were using, Blogger.  Doesn’t matter; I run my blog with WordPress.  But it did get me thinking.

Once upon a time, I installed a word count plug-in on my blog.  It’s right up there at the top of this page.  As I write this, the total is up around 168,000 words.  That’s a hell of a lot of information to lose.

Oh, I’ve got backups.  My web host can roll back to a previous image of the server at a moment’s notice.  Plus, WordPress has a MySQL database backup option.  Heck, if worse came to worst, I could go back to the original text documents I used to compose each entry.  Of course, they’re often not the final edits, don’t contain the photos posted along with them, and they’re spread out among four computers and various backup discs…

You know what would be cool?  Getting a copy of my blog printed as a book with one of those online vanity presses.  I’m under no illusions that it would be of interest to anyone but myself, but you have to admit that it’d be a pretty neat-o way to archive all I’ve written.

I’m psyching myself up to tackle this daunting project.  Lulu.com has a very robust offering of printing methods; I’ll probably use them.  And while I’m confident that, in time, I can figure out their processes, I’m not looking forward to formatting 168,000 words and photos to their precise requirements.

Idea:
Someone should create plug-ins for the major blog services (WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, etc.) that automatically download the entire contents of a blog and saves that information in pre-defined, ready-for-the-press, .pdf templates.  Templates ready-made for specific-size book formats on a site like Lulu.com would be perfect.

Wouldn’t it be cool to order a book version of your blog with just a click or two?

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