New Book (?) on the horizon?

Stone gargoyle in Belle's Library in Walt Disney World

Last Christmas my aunt gifted DH and I with a gift to the World - Walt Disney World, that is. With the stipulation that we go at the same time as her and my immediate family. Fortunately they're all only mildly crazy (hey, you knew I got it from somewhere) and a lot of fun to vacation with so we took her up on the offer in a millisecond. As Christmas presents for everyone I put together a pocket sized scavenger-hunt extrodinaire for the World, including the standard "find a stone monkey statue" stuff, points for going on the rides, pressed pennies to hunt down, pages for a daily schedule, abbreviated menus for all the counter service places in the parks, and a full section of logic puzzles, word searches, and games to keep everyone occupied when the lines got long. It was a huge hit.

Since I've sunk all that time and work into it I began to wonder - would other people be interested in this little booklet? Would it be possible to publish this hunt and both share the fun and get a little back from all my research? I'm in the first stages of finding out. After investigating two of the new online self-publishing places, blurb.com and lulu.com, the latter really had the size and prices I was looking for. Check one. So I uploaded my hunt to their site and ... oops, I was under the minimum number of pages. I thought that was a little odd since I had 73 pages and they wanted a minimum of 40 - but who knows how these things are calculated. Added some more games and puzzles, uploaded and ... drat. In order to get my booklets for my family to the right size to carry around - half pages (5.5"x4.25") - I'd set MS Word to print two pages per sheet. So Lulu was showing my stuff just the way Word was told to print it, only with everything shrunk beyond readability to fit onto the smallest size booklet they offer. D'oh. Which, yes, means that they thought I had half the pages that I do, what with the two-per-page and all. So they calculate their pages the same way everyone else does. That makes sense.

So now I'm messing with MS Word and trying to get everything to fit on the newly sized paper I'm forcing it to think it's using. You'd THINK that once everything was standardized to fit onto that original half sheet that just resizing the paper to a true half-sheet size would have everything fitting the same as always. You'd think. Sadly I now have another 7 or so hours of strictly formatting to mess with before I can even think of publishing. Oh well. Gives me time to look into copywrite issues, marketing, and all that jazz. If I'm going to sink that many more hours into this then I DO want it to pay me back, litterally. :)

So that's what's happening over in our little apartment. I've got more just randomness about sewing classes, a possible move, and current sewing stuff to blog about next time. For now I've dawdled enough messing with the Scavenger Hunt, time to hit that there homework with a nice, large stick. Teach it to mess with me. :)