My Journey Journal

Many of my FB friends know that I am in the process of doing a bulk reproduction of my Breast Cancer Journey Journal. I'm really excited about this. This is what I have done.

I decided to print my BC journal because people in my extend circle were telling me I should. I know the market is saturated with books like this, so I didn’t want to try to go through the hassle of working with a publisher. I’m not hoping to market it to the world…just those in my extended circle. So I asked people if they’d be interested in it and once I heard from 10 people to the affirmative, I decided to go with it. I decided right off that this would be a grass roots kind of effort on my part. I’m not looking to be “professional” in a sleek high glossy kind of way. I want it to look nice but I’m not hung up on it. I seriously think that a layman’s kind of look adds to the charm of it. It’s like scrap booking…looking too professional takes away from the design…makes it look cookie cutter. That said, I went on EBay and bought a binding machine, I talked to a couple places that did photocopying and found a great guy at Office Depot who really cut me a super deal. I had already laid everything out in MS Publisher. It was a time consuming process because I had to basically cut and paste from my blog and from FB. I pasted it first into Word and then went through each entry with a fine tooth comb. To my horror, I found out my blog posts were not always grammatically correct or free of spelling errors. So I cleaned them up and then pulled everything into Publisher. This was fun for me. Seriously. I loved tweaking it.

I wanted to print it on the back of some heavy (probably a 32 lb) paper that I saved from a landfill back in the nineties when I worked at a law firm but it wouldn’t reproduce well because the paper is not smooth. So I had to scratch that idea and print it on pink paper. Each sheet has two pages of the journal on it and then each page is folded in half. I started out folding each piece of paper but I discovered today that Office Depot has a machine and will do it for me! This will save a ton of time.

I'm selling it for $10 a copy plus shipping. I feel kind of bad to charge that much but I'm not working and even though I'm not looking to make a huge profit, I'm also not able to go into arrears. Right now I'm up to 49 copies!!!! I'm really happy with this Here is a picture of the finished product.

To those of you who have ordered it, I thank you very much! I've said it before and I'll say it again...I've been blessed.