Book Cover – Buy the book on Blurb.com.

I spent much of my weekend creating and designing a coffee table book to remember our trip to London, England, this past Thanksgiving.

You see, no one wants to sit at my computer going through all the photos of our trip. No one is that interested in me just taking all the pictures, projecting them, and talking forever about our trip.

People are interested in seeing when I have taken the time to create a storyline and think about what I want to communicate about our trip.

The exercise of creating a book will help you have something to help you remember your trip and also make it more intriguing for an audience to enjoy.

As I worked on laying out all the pages and trying to create some sense of order, I had to include some text. In addition, I needed to include information that would help us remember what we saw to be sure I didn’t lose pertinent details.

You get what we call the X-Factor when you put two or more photos together. Combined photos communicates something different than the photos just by themselves. They strengthen each other.

Adding text further helps fill in all the information in a photograph.

The funny thing about great photos is that they ask questions. Yes, the best photos have your audience asking questions. Who is that person? The image was strong enough to make you want to know.

Where is this place? Inspiring adventure is what a successful travel photo will do because your audience will want to go there if it is successful.

I can picture myself in many years sitting drinking some coffee and sitting by a fireplace as I hold the book and flip through the pages to help jog my memory of the beautiful time I had with my wife and daughter.

Call me sentimental, but I realized this might be the last time we have to do anything as a family for a while. My daughter will attend college next year, and who knows how our schedules will be going forward. I know we will do things in the future, but will we get this kind of time together?

While you can find some bargains on books about England, they are not our photos or specific memories. The book I put together is our trip and includes all the places we went to and enjoyed as a family.

The photo book may be the most archival way for our family to preserve the photos and memories of our trip. CD/DVDs tend to fade over time, and hard drives can fail, but the printed page lasts much longer than all these other formats.

I encourage you to take the time to put all those photos that you took on your latest trip into a book. Then, marry the images with text, and not only will this preserve the memories, but it will allow you to share this with family and friends.

We all have friends who want to know about our trip because they plan their trips. Now we have something that can help them see what we did and help them determine if they want to see what we saw or maybe add some new locations that we didn’t go to for our trip.

I recommend using Blurb.com for your book project. These are beautiful books made by you. You can turn your ideas into professional-quality books, magazines, or ebooks for iPad and Kindle.