Whooo, “self publishing”!

I fantasize about being Hugh Hefner.

He has a library of scrapbooks and photo albums that I envy. I know this because I am an avid fan of Girls of the Playboy Mansion. But that’s not the point. Thing is, I want to be a bitter-and-fluffy old lady with a tall bookshelf of my tl;dr journals (I also want three blonde girlfriends.)

With this in mind, I decided to go the “self-publishing” route for optimum fanciness. I’m blogging about it because I can only find reviews for photobooks, and hopefully someone who wants an plain ol’ b/w text book will find this~ ♥

Blurb.com

I tried these guys first, because Blurb lets you automatically pull (“slurp”!) posts from LiveJournal into your book. A b/w text book could only be 5×8 inches, however, and slurping wasn’t even an option! Pffft!

I had to pick a size that better suited for photos. Square. Awkward. I then found this slurping business sucked – loading entries took at least ten minutes, and sometimes didn’t even work (comparatively, LJ Book is quite fast). Nevertheless I tolerated this, since I had a lot of entries, but it insisted I only had 473 posts, when I have at least a thousand! There was also no way to specify you only wanted posts from 2008 – you had to click on each individual post.

But I am patient. I want to emphasize this, by the way. I am patient. When I’m in the middle of playing Sacrifice and my computer freezes right in the middle of something EPIC, I am patient. I have control. I can breathe.

…All that yelling/screaming is only because the game is working properly.

Anyway. You edit your book with BookSmart, which I hearby dub the most frustrating program OF ALL TIME. BookSmart froze. Every. Ten. Seconds. It froze after every slight alteration. Now, the default layout I didn’t want, so I had 400+ pages to change. I was emitting frustrated high pitched screeches. Flailing! Hitting things!

This can all be avoided by getting a pdf of your LiveJournal with LJ Book (where you can specify you only want entries from 2008), converting it to a .doc, which BookSmart can add. You can also do this with 5×8 size. It’s not perfect, you’d still have to edit pages. And you’d still have to deal with BookSmart.

BookSmart can die in a fire.

LULU.COM

Lulu I found frustrating too, because links often went to help pages that didn’t exist. I stuck it out with these guys though, just because BookSmart sucked that badly.

Editing was much easier. Luckily. You decide what size book you want. You download a .doc template, and your words go in there. You don’t have to watch silly videos telling you how to use a brand new program, either – it’s just Word. As a bonus, spontaneously changing the size of your book is less of a hassle than with BookSmart.

Lulu has so many options that it’s confusing: binding, paper quality sizes… and I’m notoriously indecisive. It’s actually a state I enjoy. “OKAY BECKA NOW IT IS TIME TO ASSEMBLE THE JIGSAW PIECES OF YOUR MIND.” After several pie charts, I decided on “Digest” (8.5×5.5 inches), which instantly limited me! It’s only available in “publisher grade” paper, and I could only get it in paperback. Mehhh.

As far as the cover goes, you have the option of templates, doing very basic things online, or being hardcore with Photoshop and uploading a pdf. I was lazy/impatient and did something simple online – just purple. But it’s not the cover that I cared about, but the non-stop lulz that is documenting of my life.

The 310 page book, including shipping, etc, came to about NZ$30. Pretty decent for a book only marginally better than Twilight, and with an even more dubious plot. It would have been more expensive with Blurb, I believe.

I was really impressed when it arrived: it is indeed a book (….um, obviously I didn’t know what I was expecting). I was truly relieved by the paper quality, it’s not at all quasi-newspaper-ish, with pages like a cheap romance novel NOT THAT I WOULD KNOW WHAT THOSE LOOK LIKE OF COURSE. Only thing is: Blurb.com inserts a blank page first. Lulu doesn’t. I didn’t realise. You open the book, and BAM WORDS, which I’ll keep in mind next time.

But the bottom line is: Lulu definitely recommended. And in the upcoming days there will be photos going here. I promise. Hurrrr.