7 Holiday Book Gifts You Can Write and Publish in Time for Christmas
1.Your Favorite Recipes, all in one convenient, easy to find place. Your specialty dishes passed down through the generations. Or how about adding your own special creations that everyone raves about? You could add your favorite holiday dessert recipes and recipes for your special holiday season drinks. Maybe there is a snack recipe that family and friends go wild over. What a great way for mothers and grandmothers to preserve and protect the family recipes that define the generations. Your recipes will stand the test of time, printed, in one convenient book and your legacy will be preserved for all time.
You could go all fancy and proper using any software to write your book, though something as simple as Microsoft Word or it’s rival freeware, Open Office, or Google Drive will do. Or even more simply, scan your current recipes into PDF document pages at your local FedEx-Kinkos. You could have your book done this afternoon in a format unique to you!
2.Your Favorite Hobby: Moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, you have accumulated all this wonderful knowledge about your hobby, your passion. Why not list your top ten or twenty best tips and then flesh those out with some details for your kids and grandkids? And their kids and grandkids. You’ve worked hard and long to gain the knowledge and skill that you have now. Why not build a bridge across the void for those who follow after you? Give them a shortcut, make life easier for them, give them a head start. Grandpa, imagine the look on your grandson’s face when you give him that book on fishing tips you lovingly wrote and published just for him. It will never be thrown away. An instant heirloom for generations to come. What will your legacy be?
3.Your Children’s Artwork: you have the best intentions mom and dad. Always saving the artwork your children bring home from school. It’s wonderful stuff. You should be proud. And one day they will thank you for saving that paper snowman or santa. If it survives. As an alternative, why not scan or take a photograph of your children’s artwork and let those become the pages of a keepsake book your child can find, reprint and cherish forever. You can create Johnny or Jenny’s first published art book! Creating that book is as easy as scanning or taking a digital photograph to create the pages in PDF form and then let Amazon’s Createspace publishing do all the rest! For under ten bucks you can preserve your children’s artwork in their own published book and create a family keepsake that will be the envy of friends and family alike. They’ll all be saying, “That’s so cool!”
4.Poems: What could be more romantic than giving the man or woman you love the gift of poetry you create, just for them, in a real book published, by you? “Why I Love Thee, Stephanie” would make a great title, don’t you think? OK, I’m not the poetic type, I’m sure you could come up with something better. Point is, this will be a gift that gets remembered. Forever! Nothing says “You’re Special to Me” like a book written for and dedicated to that one special person in your life.
5.A Sketchbook. If you’re artistic, you probably have all sorts of sketches and drawings laying around. Bits here and there. Rarely do we keep our work all tidy and neat in a binder or spiral book. And even if we did, those types of media do not lend themselves well to portability. Why not photograph or scan them into PDF form and create your own printed book portfolio? Sure to impress friends, family and quite possibly the employer who finds you are the only one who presented a published book along with their resume. Or maybe you’ve just collected a bunch of doodles you made while talking on the phone that when put into a collected book form would make someone laugh or swoon? A printed book is a great way to organize, preserve, protect and to show off your talents.
6.Bedtime Stories: When my oldest daughter was small I would often make up bedtime stories based on the activities that we had done that day or based on things she had learned and shared from school. These were personal stories. She always played one of the characters. Maybe I would and her friends would be players too. Maybe her favorite cartoon characters as well. If digital publishing were available to me at that time I definitely would have loved to create a storybook just for her. Now, you can.
7. A Book of Lists: Who are you? How will you be remembered? What are a few of your favorite things? Whether you want to leave a lasting legacy by letting them know the real you, or maybe you just want to bond closer with that special someone in your life, or perhaps leave a trail for your kids to follow, a book of lists is a great, simple way to present the real you. List your top 10 movies, people who influenced you the most, your top ten favorite artists, musicians, bands, your favorite animals, your favorite hobbies, your favorite jobs, your favorite games, books you’ve read, your favorite places to visit or live. You get the idea. On each page you share your top 10 in every category you can think of. Teachers, friends, bosses, drinks, foods, restaurants, hotels, parks. You can quickly and easily fill multiple pages and let the important people in your life know exactly who you are. And have a printed, published copy to have and to hold and to pass down through the generations. And best of all, you can always update or add more pages whenever you like. Amazon’s Createspace can make this all happen quickly for you…
Whichever option or idea appeals to you most, you can create and have your very own book published, printed and delivered to your doorstep in time for holiday gifting. But it’s December 5 today so you’ve got to get started now.
And if you’re in business, any book of tips, ideas, resources that will help your client or customer (that is not presented as a catalog of your products or otherwise blatant pitch for your product, but a real, helpful guide) would make a welcomed gift that lets you stand head and shoulders above the competition. And you could do it for not much more than the cost of sending that same-old, same-old boring, useless “Holiday Greetings From Us to You” card. Be special this year. Stand out. Send a book instead. Your book.
This holiday season, why not give the gift of you – in your own published, paperback book? It’s not nearly as hard as you imagine.
Let me know if I can help!
You’ll find more great ideas on how to quickly create your own published and printed paperback book, in my book, Book Writing Magic.
