Down the River. What About The Book?

Fort Meyers Beach, FL
26 27.29 N 081 56.57 W

We're heading south, down the Coolahatchee River once again. We had a great time up here and we're both very glad that we took this side trip.

Actually, it was hard to leave LaBelle. The longer we stayed there, the more I warmed to the place. On Tuesday morning I was just getting warmed up on excuses for staying another day or two when Libby said, "Nah. Let's go." I think we really have mostly nomadic blood in our veins by now. No matter how nice the place, we get the itch to move on after two or three days. Only Vero Beach and Marathon seem to have magnets strong enough to make us content to stay. I'll search through our blog archives for confirmation, but I believe that we have averaged 100 to 125 locations visited every year since we started.

Speaking of blog archives. Libby and I worked to many weeks turning blog archives into a format suitable for publishing a book. It was a lot more work than I expected. The trouble is that it appears that the past 4 years blogs would make the book 1200 pages long! That's far too big. Almost all cruising books published nowadays have 200 pages or less. Even Jamea A. Michener, I suspect, must of had trouble convincing his publishers to print 1200 page books. In this economy, everyone is cutting back including the publish-on-demand companies.

Another dilemma is what to do with the pictures. Books with lots of color pictures are very expensive to print. We found while editing that many past blog articles would have to be substantially re-written or eliminated if the pictures were not present. Ditto for the other approach of publishing a section of 5-6 pages of B&W pictures in the center of the book. That too would require major re-writes and elimination of articles.

That leaves us with a bit of a dilemma. We're not sure what to do next.

1. We could choose only the most choice posts, editing in down to the-best-of type of book. The trouble with that is the audience. I visualize my book audience as people who would love to cruise. They can live the cruising life vicariously via our posts. Changing it to the-best-of removes all those mundane and ordinary days, and one looses (I think) the sense of living it vicariously.
   
   
2. We could try to publish it in 2, 3 or 4 volumes. But if each volume costs $15-$30 retail, then it gets too expensive. We would also have to follow up with a new volume every year.
   
   
3. We could self publish it 1200 pages long; pay for it ourselves, and restrict distribution to close family and friends to whom we want to give gifts. I guess that the copies might cost more than $100 each. The trouble with that idea is most of those people have been reading our blog all along. They already read it; they don't need any book.
   

For the time being, we're stymied by this dilemma. We would welcome suggestions.