Books & Book Reviews, Life

Blurb Book Review

*This post contains affiliate links, and I received free product to review for this post. Opinions are my own. Should you choose to make a purchase, I will receive a percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you.

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to do something with all the digital photos I’ve amassed over the last several years. With four kids, as you can imagine, the photos start to add up fast. The opportunity to create and review a book from Blurb.com presented itself at an opportune time. I was looking for a great gift for my oldest, and I had a bunch of the photos he took while he was on a study abroad in Ghana. 

How Blurb works

Blurb.com has a tool, Bookwright, that helps you to design your project, BookWright. You select what size book you want, and you design the book in the tool. Then, you export your project and upload it to Blurb.com. They print the book and send it to you. 

About BookWright

BookWright is the tool used to create your book. At first, I found the tool a bit clunky, and it took some getting used to. Part of the problem was that my son’s photos were taken on a phone, so many of them were not high resolution. I made it work, though, and once I got the hang of the program, creating my photo book went really quickly. 

There are templates for book covers and page layouts. Layouts can be created with a combination of words and text. I think for my next book, which will be a collection of annual photos from 2017, I’ll play around a lot more with the text features and try my hand at doing some journaling about the different events that happened. 

About Ordering from Blurb.com

One of the neat things about Blurb.com is that you can create books to sell from your photo projects. While that wasn’t my plan with this project, and won’t be as I put together my family photo books, it is a really neat perk. In fact, you can get an ISBN number and your book can be distributed through Ingram. 

I found the process of uploading my book and ordering it simple. You can also print multiple copies, which would make for a nice gift for grandparents – design a book with photos of the grandkids and then print as many copies as you need for gifting. I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly after I placed my order I received the book.

About My Blurb Book

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I ordered my book, but when I got it, I was really impressed. It’s gorgeous and looks amazing. It’s going to make a nice gift for my big kid. The colors are vivid, and it looks really professional. While I wish that some of the photos could have been larger, I think that the smaller photo format was fine as it let me capture the essence of the trip he took. 

My Blurb.com book came wrapped in plastic and I was really excited to check out how it turned out.

Front of book
Back of Book
One of the pages inside the book

Another page from inside the book (yes, he got to see elephants in the wild. Amazing!)
Yet one more page

A Special Deal on a Blurb Book for You

Books from Blurb.com make outstanding gifts. In fact, I’m pretty sure that in addition to our annual volumes that I will be making another book to print as a gift. If you’d like to make a photo book – either for yourself or as a gift, you can save 35%.

Sign Up & Save 35%

Ronda Bowen

Ronda Bowen is a writer, editor, and independent scholar. She has a Master of Arts in Philosophy from Northern Illinois University and a B.A. in Philosophy, Pre-Graduate Option, Honors in the Major from California State University, Chico. When she is not working on client projects from her editorial consulting business, she is writing a novel. In her free time, she enjoys gourmet cooking, wine, martinis, copious amounts of coffee, reading, watching movies, sewing, crocheting, crafts, hanging out with her husband, and spending time with their teenage son and infant daughter.

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