A few weeks back, we shared on Instagram that we were in the process of creating a book!!! We shared a little sneak peak in Stories of the beginning stages of our book making and today we’re so excited to share the finished project that we partnered with Blurb Books on, as well as all the details of how we created it.We’ve actually been talking about putting together a book of some sort since about 2013, the year we started this blog. About 6 months into blogging, we were contacted by a publisher about doing a book and while we knew it was too early in the game to get into something like that, since then it’s always been one of those projects on the future to-do list. We weren’t quite sure what topic we’d want it to be on, what format – regular or e-book, and mostly just weren’t sure about the timing of it all. We knew it would be a lot of work to do, and we’re both just doing this part-time, along with juggling other jobs and family life. So we’d talk about it from time to time, mostly when publishers would contact us to see if we were interested, but never really got quite serious about it until this past year. We started actually thinking through more details, trying to decide if it would be feasible and if we really wanted to commit to it. And then during that time, Blurb Books reached out to us to see if we would be interested in partnering with them on making a book and we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try it and see if we thought the book publishing world might be a good fit for us.We love that with Blurb you can completely call all the shots – you create, design and self-publish your own book. You also have the option to sell the book you create through Blurb, Amazon, Apple iBooks or Ingram! Blurb also has a (free!) plug-in for Adobe InDesign, and since we’ve had a little bit of experience using InDesign, we thought it’d be the best way to create our book. And it really was so simple and easy using the plug-in, we just picked a few different layout/design options from the menu, put in our photos and text, made the cover and back and then sent it off to be shipped! (I mean, there were a ton of photo shoots, editing and tweaking in that whole process, but it was simple to do/understand on the creating & publishing end!). And while you don’t have to be a designer to create a stellar book of your own, we do have to give a shout out to Manda’s brother Craig, who is a designer, and ended up helping us sooo much with layout/design end of things (you’re the best Craig)! We decided to do a book on mocktails because it’s been such a fun series for us on the blog and seems to be well-loved by you all. We also thought it would be cool to have a copy of some of our favorite recipes in book form, ya know, to make us feel so legit when we’re in the kitchen creating! Once our book actually arrived, we were pretty excited! When ordering products like this, you never know what to expect when it arrives, but our book is really, really nice! It’s definitely professional quality and one we’d expect to find at stores. We went with the Standard Portrait 8×10 size, with premium matte paper and a hardcover. We weren’t sure if the premium matte would be the right look we were going for (we did consider the proline uncoated paper, we love that look, but it wasn’t available for the book size/format we had chosen) but we’re really happy with it and think it’s probably the best fit for a recipe book. You can actually order a paper swatch kit to see all available papers in person, and then they let you apply the cost of the swatch kit to your total when you are ordering your final book. We’d probably go with a slightly smaller size book if we were going to sell/create more books; this size is nice, but with this specific book, since it isn’t terribly long, we think it would look better in a smaller size. So that’s a change we’re keeping in mind for the future.So what do you guys think – would you be interested in a mocktail book if we decided to sell one?? Anyone else ever toyed with the idea of creating their own book? We know it’s getting more common for bloggers to do, and we admire everyone that’s published one, it’s so much work; but also so fun to have a book that we created sitting on our shelf!
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