Self Publish A Book At Lulu.com: How Well Does It Work?
Do you think you would like to self-publish a book
, but you are afraid of being out hundreds of dollars and having your garage full of boxes of books? In theory, print-on-demand publishing may be just what you have been waiting for. You can buy as few or as many copies as you wish, and although the cost per copy is high compared to large print runs, it is not prohibitive.
To see whether the technology is ready yet, I published a book at Lulu.com. These are my experiences.
I started with the contents for a book. I've been publishing an e-zine for over four years on how to be witty, so I just used the articles for the contents .
I was able to format the articles into a book in about one day's work. It actually took me a week, because I was creating screen capture videos of the process to produce a CD to show my friends how to do it.
After the one day's worth of work, it took me a week to receive my copy -- I only had to buy one copy. Unlike with traditional printers, I am not out hundreds of dollars, and I don't have my condo filled with cartons of books. The single copy of the 108 page 6 x 9" book cost me $6.66 to print. If I include shipping, it cost $10.65 overall. The book is nicely bound and has a pleasant cover design that I neither had to pay a designer for nor create myself.
Lulu offers a wide choice of book formats. My choice of 6 x 9 was arbitrary. Lulu also offers a choice among many attractive covers.
I used OpenOffice Writer along with Lulu's page of suggestions to format the book. They offer a template, but strangely, their advice on how to lay out the book is not reflected in the paragraph styles in the template file.
I do, of course, have some complaints.
When the book arrived it did not have the title and author printed on the spine. I found no documentation on the number of pages required for the title to appear. I have since then reformatted the book and added a little material. When I uploaded 120 pages, I did get the title and author on the spine. Somewhere 108 and 120 pages is the boundary. It would be nice to have been told where it is.
The cover wizard takes a long time to load. It also has a tendency to lose formatting information. When I put text on the back cover, choosing different font sizes for different paragraphs, the cover wizard would frequently lose this formatting when I navigated off the page to take a look at the layout. I repeatedly had to reformat.
Also, when typing text on the cover, it is difficult to see what you have typed without magnifying the cover size, but the magnification goes away as soon as you type any more characters -- terribly annoying.
Information on how to sell the book through Lulu and other sales venues is not perfectly clear. I have a suspicion that some vestigial descriptions are still online of options that are no longer in use. It may be too easy to put the book up for sale at Amazon and bookstores. There are two problems with it being so easy. The first is that if you just spontaneously do it, you lose the chance to have a product launch. A great deal of the sales of a book come from the product launch. In particular, reviewers want to get early copies so that they are only reviewing books that are coming out soon, not books that have been out for a year. Second, you're tempted to just get an ISBN from Lulu. Unfortunately ISBNs include within them the identifying number of the publisher. If you wish to move your book to another printer, you won't be would take the number with you. Anybody who finds a copy of your book will go to Lulu, if they want to buy more of them. There is a lot to know about publishing. Read Dan Poynter's Self-Publishing Manual before you put your book up for sale -- except perhaps by direct access.
My experience with Lulu has been positive thus far. There are a great many people who want to get a book out and are stymied by their inability to find an agent and interest a major publisher. They are stymied by the thought of having to spend hundreds of dollars and ending up with a garage full of boxes of books if they self-publish. Lulu lets you get a high-quality book in whatever numbers you need quickly and cheaply. Most people will find Lulu and the other print-on-demand publishers to be just what they need.
by: Thomas Christopher
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