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A review of Blurb.com (so far)

After a quick search for book printing, I came across the lovely blurb.com. The prices were great and the pages were easily navigable. I learned that printing a book (that I design) would be maybe $4.00. That price is variable, depending on type of paper, print, size of book, whether it has a dust jacket or is a softcover, and lots of other personalized things. Additional pages are $.01 each. So I can easily print a book of, like, 200 pages for less than $5.

Blurb also offers free programs that you can download and use. The programs that I downloaded, BookWright and BookSmart, installed quickly and easily and uploading my Word documents was simple. There are very simplistic tutorials online that I took advantage of.

One thing I love about this site is that I can customize everything about it. I can add an author bio and a photo if I want. I can add thirty blank pages. I can write a title page, an acknowledgement page, literally anything I want to add, I can. They even offer services to turn your book into an ebook, and you can choose to hire one of their editor/formatters to tweak your work.

I'm a pretty impatient person, and getting a book even looked at by a publisher is a huge feat. With Blurb, I can print as many of my own books, designed exactly how I want, whenever I want. I'm crazy excited to work on something. And I know I'll have total power over how it looks.

I will say that it is a little confusing and difficult to get the book from your program to the site where it can be printed for you. I'm still learning how to use all of the tools given by the programs, but so far, I am loving it.

http://www.blurb.com

It's Coming Up

As you (most likely don't) know, I am to graduate in May. As I keep telling people, that's if I pass my classes. Not that I'm in danger of that. I just like to keep a hint of caution. I will have a creative writing degree. It's, like, my dream degree. I didn't even realize how perfect it was until I had been in it for a while. But it all adds up.

• At night, I was the best bedtime story teller. 
• I ate up books; children's and young adult. Still primarily read those.
• I actually wrote a few 'books,' including a book that I bound in cardboard about a unicorn who went on a journey to find other unicorns. She meets a giant spider in the forest. (I had no idea about that movie, The Last Unicorn)
• I also wrote a little four page poetry book. I wrote on the front who illustrated it (me) and who wrote it (me). It was a thrill to see my name on a cover.
• My senior year of high school I got to take a lot of elective courses. From a catalog, I selected creative writing, and it was the #1 class for me. I spent hours on my portfolio, literally binding ten little books with a work each in them to all fit into one of those decorative books that open.
• In English classes, my essays always had a sense of self. I loved writing days.
• I worked in the library for a class period my junior year. Dear god, the smell of new YA books as they roll in and the satisfying crack as they are opened for the first time... 
• I would get more passionate about the creative essays than the research papers.
• I stay up on all the young adult book trends and authors and titles and such. Always have.

So you see, it was something in front of me all along, but I never really put it together. I wasn't even aware such a degree existed. I heard someone say it in passing and I just reached out and grabbed it. My major used to be vocal performance, because it was something I loved doing, but I didn't enjoy the technical side of it. I minored in it instead and took on the writing degree!

Over the years I have written dozens - if not hundreds - of stories and poems. I have written scripts and written critiques for my peers and worked on my own little novels. I edited other people's work and helped them out with plot and characters. That rush from seeing my name on the cover of something? Still totally there. Now I convert my Word documents into epubs so I can read them on my ereader. Flipping through and seeing my book, even if only I see it, is exhilarating. 

So after graduation, I don't know where I'll go. But I'll always have writing. And I will always know that I majored in something I really love.