Parenting

Making Your Blog into a Book

by Scary Mommy
Updated: 
Originally Published: 

My purpose in starting Scary Mommy was to create a baby book of sorts for my kids. I am not the type of mother who jots down first words, steps or foods, and my memory cannot be counted on to remember anything. I have to force myself to print pictures, and despite loving crafts I’ve never jumped on the scrapbooking bandwagon. A blog seemed like a fun way to track our days together, the good the bad and the ugly. And it has been.

As 2008 drew to a close, I began working feverishly to transform my blog from the past year into book form. It was an enormous pain in the ass, as the site I picked (blurb.com) wasn’t compatible with blogger at the time. It took forever, as I had to manually import every single picture and entry. But for 50 bucks, I have a copy of my blog in hardcover. I hand designed each page– some have only text, some only photos and most a mix of both. You can use any fonts available on your computer and totally customize everything. I can’t give them a totally glowing review; there is no way to ever speak to an actual person, the binding on my first book was defective and needed to be replaced, and the system crashes pretty frequently. But, it was worth it, and I love it. And it’s giving me renewed reason to keep writing in 2009.

This article was originally published on