Today’s product of the day is a book-shaped prototype of a Groundhog Day Resolutions “blog to book”. I’ve been doing the GHD Resolutions for 5 years and have quite a lot of writing. How much? Year One weighs in at 62 pages in its raw form.

I thought it would take a lot less time to do, but I was unfamiliar with the InDesign workflow for creating long-form documents; it ended up taking me 9 hours, plus the 30 minutes to prepare this blog post. About half that time was spent fumbling around with master text frames and trying (then discarding) plugins to make text flow easier. The rest of the time was spent defining styles as I formatted the text that I copied and pasted from my web browser, and figuring out how it might look. The result is a PDF that is about halfway-ready to convert to the ePub format for mobile readers.

If you’re interested in reviewing my 2007, you can download the entire 62-page draft ebook for free:

• Download Groundhog Day Resolutions 2007 eBook (TEST DRAFT) PDF

If you want to print it from Adobe Acrobat Reader, the settings I used were under Page Sizing & Handling, selecting Multiple and 2 pages with page order horizontal and print both sides / flip on short edge in orientation: Portrait / Auto-rotate pages within each sheet. My printer does full-duplex (double-sided) printing, so if you don’t have that feature I suppose you don’t have to select that.

A warning: I didn’t edit the text at all, and I it could benefit hugely from a few more passes. It is largely the same as the original 2007 posts, sans one or two sentences I clipped to make some pages fit…oh the joy of being both editor and layout guy! What I’m planning on doing is getting the entire blog series into ebook form and then distilling it down to something very concise and explanatory; it’s the story of my journey from wannabe to where I am now. The funny thing is that apparently in 2007, I was doing exactly what I was doing now, just not very well :-) It’s almost like no time has passed! I left room at the side of each page for me to add commentary and useful links. I think it could be a pretty cool ebook for people who are on a similar journey, and it’s a good warmup for writing other long-form content in the future.

In case you’re wondering about the weird size, it’s based on a Blurb 6×9″ paperback format.

Enjoy!