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When I started writing for Adoption.com last January, one of the first blogs about Russian adoption that I was lucky enough to read was “Three Sons And A Princess”. It was the tale of a military family with three boys who were trying to adopt a little girl, affectionately dubbed the “Pineapple Princess”.
Jennefer, or Jeneflower as she sometimes styles herself, is the mom of the clan and its chief memory officer. Her writing captured the ups and downs of her family’s adoption journey and featured so many smart tips about surviving the craziness that was Russia over the last year that I sometimes thought she should have been doing my job instead of me. She also proved herself very skilled at taking advantage of every new technology wrinkle the Internet has had to offer. Last year, in a post on video blogs, I told you about the video she posted on YouTube of her second trip to Russia, complete with a soundtrack.
Though we all seem to think that everything that goes up on the Internet is there forever, it may not be. Jennefer’s original blog was hosted by ClubMom and when that gig ended, the blog went dark. (Her new blog can be found here.) But once again turning technology to her advantage, Jennefer found a way to preserve the blog–in book form.
She tells me that, in the fall of 2006, she discovered an Internet-based publishing company called Blurb. The company made it possible for would-be authors to upload text and photos, and be rewarded with a glossy custom book that they could publish in softcover or hardcover format and, if they so chose, sell through the Blurb site.
Jennefer says that it was fairly easy to use Blurb’s publishing software, called BookSmart, although it took her a few tries to add in photos that were not part of the original blog posts. “The key to using the program is not to try to fit too much of your blog into one book,” she wrote me from Seoul, South Korea, where her family is now based. “Too many pages make the process terribly slow and cause problems.”
Though Jennefer offers her blog books for sale on her new blog, she says she didn’t create them for the money. Though they are expensive, Blurb reaps more of the profit than its authors. “I don’t think I will sell a lot of books, if any!”, Jennefer says. “If I did sell one or two I would probably have enough money to take my family to McDonald’s once. However, they probably would have to order from the dollar menu!”
