There’s literally billions of blogs out there but have you ever wondered what type of blogs people are choosing to print? Neither did we until we got into this business but now we’ve dug through our recent blog book orders to find some answers about our customers and their blogs and their books. We find it interesting and we hope you will too.

Subject Matters

There’s obviously some overlap or fuzziness between categories but we’re not surprised to see Travel as the standout blog book category — it is, after all, what we created the site for. Travel includes a large subsection for Sailing - who knew there were so many sailing bloggers or blogging sailors? I guess they have more time sitting around on deck with satellite blogging link in one hand, mimosa in the other.

Family blogs tend to center around child-rearing, from birth and adoption, through the potty stages all the way until the cuteness dries up and the dreaded teenage years come into play. Still you can always thumb through your blog book of the early years and reminisce about those sleepless nights.

Mission, as in church missionary, was a bit of a surprise but in retrospect the content is very similar to travel blogs with the added bonus that many missionary groups encourage communication and reporting in the open.

Here, Other is a catch-all for Personal Journal blogs, Geneology blogs, Community blogs, Poetry blogs, Foodie blogs and various Hobby and Cat blogs. A wide and sometimes eye-opening miscellany.

Content Stats

Below are some histograms of blog book content statistices: how big, how thick, how many posts or articles. Deriving pages per post is left as an exercise for the reader.

We can see a bias towards larger books, towards our upper page limit of 300 pages per book. Many customers make their blog book in multiple volumes in which case page counts are generally high as people seem to like to keep it in as few volumes as possible even though the price difference isn’t that great.

We definitely need to make it easier to produce multiple volumes with fewer clicks. Also consider creating books volumes with more pages however we’d probably need to move to a slightly lighter paper so the book doesn’t become too thick. It’s a trade-off that requires some thought.

As expected, the vast majority of people buy just a single copy of their book although their are a few multiples, including people who order a single copy (just checking us out!) but then come back and order several more.

Cover Configurations

The automatically generated cover for your blog book includes a mosaic of images selected from the contents of the book. There is also an option in the Configure Cover dialog to select a single custom image instead of the mosaic.

Hey - our default cover with a mosaic of photos is really popular! Sometimes with a long journey or a long journal, it’s hard to capture the essence in a single picture so the mosaic wins. The None category shows that there are few minimalists who eschew all images!

What about our other defaults?

Turns out it’s the same with the cover color - 65% of people choose to stick with our default dark-grey cover. It’s clean, it’s modern, it’s timeless, it’s BLACK! (almost). It’s hard to do better. For multiple volumes, it’s split pretty much evenly between keeping the same color for all volumes or using a different color for each volume.

Blogging Platform and Host

No surprises here with Blogger and Wordpress dominating the blog hosts used by our book makers, with Blogger slightly ahead. Squarespace blog books, our third primary supported platform, still hold onto a healthy chunk while Other mops up including Wix (support newly introduced by PixxiBook at beta trial level) and a number of unsupported blog hosts that just happen to work well enough.

Wondering which blog site to choose for your new blog? You can’t go wrong with Blogger or Wordpress. Blogger is more basic, straightforward, less to configure and less to go wrong. It is fairly primitive in look and feel but does a good job with managing your content. Wordpress is for the more advanced user, more configurable, easier to dig yourself into a hole. If you want a more professional look, then sure go for Squarespace or Wix - both good choices but unnecessary for personal blogs IMHO.

Do you want to fork out for a custom domain name (web address) for your blog? About one third of our customers do. It’s easier to remember. Everyone else uses a subdomain of their host.

What do bloggers think about their PixxiBook blog books?

Ready to make your own blog book?