2012 book done

If you've followed the blog from the beginning, you know that around August I get obsessed with finishing the previous year's photo album. Every year I methodically do about an hour a week and get halfway through my photos by March. Then I get frustrated or lose interest and don't sign into Shutterfly for months. There's actually some reasoning behind the August deadline:

1. My cousin Amy usually finishes her book around this time and then sends an email so we can all see it. Shutterfly notices my activity and voila...I have a 50% off coupon that expires in 6 days. Nothing like that to get me moving!.
2. We go on vacation which makes me panic about the hundreds of photos I've taken and feel really far behind in getting my photo books done. Two weeks ago I may have looked relaxed on the beach, but the moment I glimpsed my camera I thought "What if all these photos on my flash drive get lost? Or I just pile them into my computer and they become virtual shoe boxes of photos that sit for years and Penny only vaguely knows of photos from her childhood?"

So I've crammed about 7 hours in the past 4 days to get this done. I've edited multiple times so hopefully I don't find glaring errors when it arrives next week. Note: any new mom out there who wants a photo book right away...wait until you get enough sleep. I ordered Penny's first photo book with the wrong birth date!

Click here to view this photo book larger

Shutterfly offers exclusive photobook layouts so you can make your book just the way you want.

Some interesting numbers about this photo book:

•  1000+ photos taken in 2012 
• 650 photos uploaded to Shutterfly
•  336 photos used in the album 
•  81 pages (only 100 are allowed. 2010 I had to keep editing to fit everything, 2011 fit into 90 something, and now I'm at 81. Not sure what that says...)
• Total Cost: $171. You know I'm too frugal for that: I paid $73!  Never pay the actual price. Once you start working on a book and have more than 20 pages completed, you will get a 50% off coupon with an expiration date in a week. You will also get the same email coupon if you view my book while logged into your shutterfly account. I think I've figured this out from a marketing perspective. Tons of people out there are like me and will start books, but lag on finishing. Who knows how many unfinished albums are sitting on Shutterfly's servers? So they give you a big incentive to finish. They then send the same coupon to people who view it in the hopes that grandparents, family, friends will decide to order it. On top of that I always enter in the code Ship30 for free shipping on any order over $30. I also got a $10 off code yesterday. And that's how I got a discount of $98!

And as I say every year...I should start 2013 tomorrow. Then I can actually order it right when we wrap up Christmas. We'll see...now that Shutterfly links to Instagram I'm going to have a lot more photos to comb through. Will the overwhelming feeling convince me to start now or procrastinate until 2014...To Be Continued...