Episode #57:This Blog Is Now A Memory Book

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When I first started this blog last year, during the summer of 2024, I wasn't sure what I wanted to write about so I started writing about the projects I had been working on since I retired a few months earlier in January. I thought it might be interesting to read those activities and posted several entries. After a few weeks I re-read them and even I was bored with the content and ended up deleting the several posts and consolidated them into a single story. After thinking about it for a bit, I re-started it with what has ended up being a collection of my trips, adventures and memories. I thought this would be a great resource for my grandkids and their children so they would know more about me than I ever knew about my grandparents.

 By the end of the year I had published about 45 blog entries complete with pictures. One day I had the thought, 'what would happen if Google stops supporting and does away with this platform?' All of the work I put in to create these stories and memories would be lost. 

With that possibility in mind, I copied all of the stories and saved them on a couple of thumb drives. As I finished that process, I thought of the large three ring binder that I made to chronicle a hard copy of my adventure trip in New Zealand in detail and thought that would be even a better idea for preserving a back up for  my blog.

One day around Christmas I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw an advertisement about people that had created a book that was created from stories of memories of the customer. The business model was to furnish the customer a series of prompt questions to be answered by a parent or grandparent regarding their past as a child or young adult. Pictures could be added to the story to enhance the memory and give another level of insight to the parent or grandparent. I thought this would be a perfect venue for my blog and much better than a 3 ring binder.

As you know, once you click on an advertisement on FB, suddenly you see many more of the same topic and I suddenly find several companies that are in this same business. I find the one I like best and email them to tell them that I have stories already written and photos included and ask if I could enter these in their platform to be published in book form and the answer was yes. While the pricing structure to publish each copy of the book is relatively the same $70-$120, I choose this company for a couple of other reasons. They are a United States based company and therefore will abide with all of the legal privacy laws and they are not too far away in Austin Texas and the reviews I found were all pretty positive overall.

Over the course of the next several months I copy and paste the text and associated photographs into the their platform. This ends up being quite a labor intensive process because find that I have to do all of the editing myself. This is one of the reasons that my blog has grown so slowly over the last 6-8 months. Also during this time, my mother begins to have some serious health issues and in just a few months  dies from the effects of lung cancer.

I have just completed the third and final version of my memory book. The company that publishes the book (Memorygram) requires a minimum of 24 pages to publish a book and a maximum of 450 pages. I am currently at 450 pages. The book is full sized with large print for easy reading and almost all of my stories have pictures added. This book allows the author to customize the cover with several templates so I selected a picture of me as young child on the front cover. The book measures 8 1/2" x 11 1/2" and is a little over 1 1/4" thick and is printed on quality paper so the pictures look very good.

I have titled it The Images, Adventures And Reflections Of My Journey. As soon as I get the latest version back, I will review it once more for spelling, grammar, etc. I will start buying copies for Christmas gifts for family and a few extra copies for Brad to keep for his kids for him to give to them as they get older. 

While this blog is the catalyst for the book, this blog has more stories than my book due to the printing limitation of the Memorygram. I will continue to add stories to here over time so it will contain more stories and memories. 

Who knows, if I end up with enough stories I may do another book and call it The Sequel or something.

I think the book will make a great gift for the grand babies as they grow up  in an even more digitized lifestyle than even their parents did and eons away from where I grew up. I hope the book with pictures will help them to realize some of those differences.

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