Law Firm Blogs - 8: Turning Your Blawg Into a Book

News this month is Blogger has teamed with Blog2Print, and you can convert your blog to a paperback book.  Here's the catch:  each paperback will cost you $14.95 -- and that is for a 20 page book. 

Add a page, it will cost you another 35 cents. 

While I like the idea of converting a law firm blog into a book that can be used for marketing purposes, I don't know that this offer is cost effective. 


I think a law firm blog-book would need to have well over 20 pages to be impressive to a client.  Of course, maybe that depends upon the client - and the topic covered by the blog.

However, before I made any final decision I would want to check out the quality of these "soft bound books."  The image provided by Blogger Buzz (shown here) looks nice enough but I would need to see the product in hand before I made any type of commitment.  Of course, that offer of a pdf version for $7.95/each might be a really nice option here ....

My Blog Posts Get Top Spots in Google Search Results Consistently Over Time

This afternoon, I stopped to check the stats for my personal blogs and found some nice results. I do this a lot, but today I actually stopped to make a little tally.

I've listed some of them here, and these searches are accurate as of today's date - using only Google. I have results in Yahoo, Bing, Ask, AOL, etc. but I chose only to check Google Search Results and only through the past couple of days results as recorded by StatCounter. For some, I saved the search results in OneNote, but this got to be time-consuming so I didn't do this for everything on the list.

And while I write professionally for several blogs/blawgs, these results are only for my personal blogs - as well as a little tidbit at the end where I blogged for a couple of friends and kept track on StatCounter for them, too. No waiver of client confidentiality here.

The biggest search result?
2 out of 1.75 billion for a two month old post

1,750,000,000 and my post is number two, after being published in June 2009 (see no. 1 under Backseat Lawyer).

Lawyer Writer News Flash: AP May Not Believe in Fair Use - They Want Payment for Excerpts Over 4 Words Long

This has been up for awhile over at the Associated Press site, but I think most folk are either ignorant of this fee schedule, or they're just blatantly ignoring it.

Me, I think it's stupid. AP wants you to pay for ANY excerpt of any of their content that you use on your blog. That's right. Quote as little as FIVE (5) words, and AP wants you to pay them $12.50.

Are we being punked? No. Apparently the AP is serious. Stupid, but serious.

And rather than rant, I refer you to the article written by Derek Bambauer for the Harvard University blog, Info/Law.

They are so ... well, polite. They call it "overreaching."

Stupid, overreaching. Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to.