The thrill of seeing one's name in print

It has been more than a month since my last entry. Somehow, the new year has not exactly filled me with new, inspiring thoughts to pen down and share. It didn't start off too well - my mother was hospitalised for dengue fever and so we spent New Year's Eve in the hospital and New Year's Day paying another visit. Stressed, tired for most of the first week.

Anyway I have also been spending some time realising some of my self-publishing projects which I have been doing through Blurb. I received my "Blog Book" on my months in the US and Mexico, and also the rather slimmer journal on my brief trip to Siam Reap. Nothing particularly new or exciting for readers of this blog, contentwise, but definitely looks good on my bookshelf. My only problem is that after going through the text so many times, I don't find it particularly interesting to read right now; it is also irritating to find little errors scattered throughout the book. I look forward to taking the books up at a later date when my memory of what I wrote has dimmed a bit.

For my next project, I'm thinking of doing a family cookbook, something which combines my favourite recipes from my many many cookbooks :-) and recipes pilfered from various family members. It is going to be a really long haul project if I am to cook, photograph and then write about each one. Still, it is quite an interesting project which will occupy me for some time. And one which I can potentially take orders for!

In the meantime, may I proudly present my three self-publication projects:

Self-Published!

Ok, I admit it. I have jumped on the self-publishing bandwagon. It started off innocuously enough, with photobooks based on my travels to the US and Mexico. This was done using QOOP, an on-line publishing dot.com which is linked to Flickr. QOOP also provides for blog publishing - only not from Blogger. I was disappointed...

Then I discovered Blurb. Blurb is another on-line publisher and it allows printing from Blogger! All I had to do was download the software, and "slurp" my blog into the book. So I tried it out. In practice, it was more difficult than I anticipated. The software is reasonably easy to use but this version is in the beta stage and so it crashes frequently - extremely irritating ! Nonetheless one persevered...

The blog book took some time to do. I added photos, formatted pages, inserted an extra entry (which I never got around to doing the last time). Changed the font size, page by page (now you know why it is not the most user-friendly piece of software).

So I decided to switch course and did a short little book of cat poems and photos. This had the added advantage of letting me try out the Blurb service without incurring the higher costs of my blog book. My cat book is primarily a photo book with little poems (called "catteral") thrown in because I wanted to talk about the cats. Sent it off and about a month later - voila! It appeared on my doorstep, thus:










Need I say I am enraptured by my own creative product? Blurb promises "bookshop standard" printing, and I agree that it delivers. Forgotten were all the irritations, the times when the font size would not change, the times when the desired page format was not available...

I printed two copies of the book, one for myself and one for an appreciative reader. Well, my mother is not really an appreciative reader (she does not think much of the poems) but she rather likes the photos of our little darlings and she took it immediately. The total cost of printing and publishing: about US$40 or about US$20 per book. Pretty expensive, but this is (as my mother likes to say) a very limited edition!

I have since finished my blog book (whilst waiting for "Catteral" to arrive) and sent it off for printing; on the computer now is my travel journal for Siem Reap. With 2 books under my belt, I am now becoming more adventurous in terms of layout and colour schemes. And definitely there will be one other interested reader for this book!