Blogger's Vanity

March 11, 2018

Blog2Print

It's a fear that's haunted me for years and with good reason. I've been around awhile. I remember first hearing about weblogs way back in about 1995 when I got my first desktop computer and went online. My first blog was over at Live Journal. I made all my mistakes there and [hopefully] that blog is long gone. Then came Blogger and it was a much better fit. Or was it?

Back in the day, it was a good idea to have a newsletter mailing list. I thought it might be nice to put my newsletter out on a blog so everyone could read it. I put a lot of work into that project only to have Blogger shut it down. Why you ask? Because I ended each blog with the same signature line and, back then, the system tagged it as spam (and not the kind that comes in the can). Now everyone has a signature line and it's cool with Blogger. 

Not one to give up, I tried again but eventually I was targeted by someone who obviously didn't like the romance genre. After a particularly nasty, and personal, attack, I deleted that blog. To this day I believe this was another writer who was angry I had a book final in the 2007 EPPIES and she did not.

It's all water under the bridge now, but oh how I wish I had saved ALL those blog entries! I have a few but I tend to compose straight into Blogger instead of a document. The next blog post after this one will be The Kendricks 900. That's right. NINE HUNDRED BLOGS here at Between the Keys. A lot of what is here is like the old weblogs. It's not all about promoting the books. It's about sharing my life with readers and other authors. I would hate like hell to lose this record of the last ten years of my life. 

Last week I was fact searching and blundered upon a reference to a service that turns blogs into books. The service is called Blog2Print and I jumped right on it. It works. I now have three neat and tidy .pdf volumes of Between the Keys from the first post in 2008 to the end of 2017.  I'm amazed at how relieved I am to have those items! 

Who knew I had so much vanity that I needed my silly little blog posts to be preserved - and at a price. Not a high price. I do have limits. But under $10 apiece for each .pdf. If I wanted to spend the big bucks I could have had them printed on paper, but I just said no. A digital copy is adequate. 

It did get me thinking, though. There's no reason in the world I can't create a single document for my blog entries in Word and save it as a .pdf at the end of the year. Seriously. You'd think a reasonably intelligent person would have thought of that years ago, but again, noooo. Anyway, that's underway now and it's a habit I'll continue. I can approximate a matching cover with Photoshop. Live and improve is one of my mottos. 

So is spending about $30 to preserve my blog entries nothing more than writer's vanity? Maybe, but I don't really care if it is. 

KC Kendricks
www.kckendricks.com