Lulu.com is a self-publisher's dream.
Written: Jun 11 '05
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And for my 5th review today, let me tell you about Lulu.com…
I recently self-published a collection of short stories called Soup. It was written by myself and two other authors. This is our third volume of stories printed in the past couple of years. For the previous two volumes, I had been printing them at Office Depot at a cost of about $4.00 each and then giving them out to friends. It has now become too much of an expense to do this and so I figured since I gave away the first two, maybe our ‘fans’ will buy this new one. I looked around online for sites that would let me publish and I found Lulu and instantly fell in love.
Lulu.com is the ultimate resource for writers who want to self-publish their work and sell it online, but don’t know much about how to go about it. The final products are a bit more expensive than standard size paperback books, but this is still a nice way to get some stuff out there. The service is very easy to use and great for people like me who will probably only sell a couple dozen copies of our ramblings. Their site has an extensive help section that will guide you through every aspect of getting your book ready for print.
Lulu is an online publisher with no setup fees, no contracts, no extra fees, no minimum orders, no copyright issues, no strings attached. You can write a book and order just one copy and that’s it. Basically, the site provides you the printing service and also processes orders online for your/their customers. You can pay a fee to get an ISBN number and even have your work listed on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Of course, it is up to you to market and sell the book, but it is still pretty cool to say you got a book listed on Amazon or B&N.
How much does it cost? Well yeah, that is the first thing everybody asks. The base price for a ‘perfect bound’ (just like a paperback) book is $4.53 plus $.02 (two cents) per page. If you write something 200 pages long, it will cost you $8.53 if the pages are in black and white. For color pages, they cost $.15 (fifteen cents) each. A full color cover is included in this total price. The shipping starts at about $2.50 and then goes up depending on how quickly you want the book to be shipped.
You can also have the book bound with spirals or saddle stitched depending on what you want to print. If you are doing a cookbook or some kind of manual, then the spiral option would probably be best. If your book is relatively short, you can just go with the saddle stitch option. Your book needs to be at least 35 pages long in order to get it perfect bound, otherwise it won’t be thick enough to print anything on the spine and then you will have to get it saddle stitched. If your book is more than 88 pages long, it will be too thick for saddle stitching and then you’ll have to get it perfect or spiral bound. It costs the same either way.
What size books can they print? You have five options for print sizes. 6x9, 8.5x11, Comic size 6.625x10.25, Landscape 9x7, and 7.5x7.5 square. I wish they let you print in small standard paperback size, but that option isn’t available. I got my book printed in 6x9, which is the default size. It was a little bigger than what I wanted it to be, but I’m still quite happy with it.
My book was just over 51,000 words and took 138 pages using Verdana set at 9 points for the font. I had mine printed using 6x9 size and perfect bound. The total price including shipping is $9.75.
Now, you do have the option to earn royalties off your work, but I decided to sell this at cost because I would feel guilty if I made any money off this stuff. We are writing just for fun and don’t want to get into profits and all that, at least not yet. With this site, you can specify how much you want to earn off each book, but Lulu will also add their 20% commission on top of that. This means that if you want to make $2.00 off each copy sold, it will increase the price of the book by $2.40. You also have the option of letting people pay to download the book at a much lower rate. However, you can’t print with no royalties and still have people download for a set price. For this reason, I decided to make Soup: Volume III available in print-only form.
To upload your stuff to the site, you simply put it all in some type of word processing software and format accordingly. I did mine using Microsoft Word 2000 and just set the page sizes to 6x9 and adjusted the margins so that it would print on paper exactly how I had it on screen. You then upload your file to the site and they automatically process it into an Adobe Acrobat file that you can review and approve before continuing. That way, you will know exactly what it will look like. The only drawback is that you have to use the Windows standard fonts, otherwise it will adapt them to something else similar.
Lulu has a very nice gallery of cover designs that you can use for your book, or you can design you own and upload them yourself. If you want to use the images from their gallery, they will generate the covers based on the text you put in there. However, I found a nice little cheat that lets you get the whole cover to edit in whatever graphics program you use, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements. When you are in their gallery, you can click on the graphic for a slighter bigger view of it. However, they want you to use a graphic that is a couple thousand pixels wide when uploading your own cover. If you take their preview graphic and try to resize it that big, it doesn’t look good, so here’s what you do in Internet Explorer for Windows:
1. Click on the gallery graphic you want to use for the cover.
2. Right click on the image and go to properties. You will see some information about the graphic file and the section labeled ‘Address’ will tell you where it is located.
3. Highlight the Address of the graphic and then do a Control-C to copy it. The address should look like http://www.lulu.com/items/covers/8.5x11//zoom_oaktrees6x9.jpg
4. Open up a new browser window, then go to the Address bar and press Control-V to copy that image link into the address.
5. Press enter to display the graphic.
6. Click once on the Address line and then edit the ‘zoom_’ out of it. Now it should look like http://www.lulu.com/items/covers/8.5x11//oaktrees6x9.jpg
7. Press enter to display the full size image.
That’s it. Now you have the full size cover that you can download and edit with Photoshop or whatever program you use for graphic editing. Lulu probably wouldn’t like me telling people how to do this, but I figured it out on my own just by looking at the file name.
Once you have all your cover designs in there, the last thing you do is set your price and license. You can pay $34.95 to get an ISBN number, which will get you a unique ISBN number and a barcode for your book, plus have it listed in Books in Print and allow you to take copies of your book to local bookstores for them to sell. For $149.95, you can get the Global Distribution plan which will get your book listed into Ingram’s Database and allow major booksellers like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders to sell your book.
When your book is ready for sale, Lulu will give you a bunch of ‘Buy it now’ graphics to put on your website so that it will link directly back to where people can purchase a copy online with their credit card. On the page listing your book for sale, you can also write up your own description and include a preview for potential buyers. People may also rate and review your book and you can make this information available for other potential buyers. Finally, Lulu will tell you the number of hits your book page has had and also give your current sales rank on the site.
If you are interested, here is a photo of the final printed copy of Soup: Volume III - http://myweb.cableone.net/bfulks/ramblings/soupIII.jpg.
I think it looks great and I was beaming from ear to ear when I opened the package. The paper and printing quality is as good as anything from a major publisher and there is nothing like seeing your name on the cover of a very professional looking book. In short, I was highly impressed with everything about my experience with Lulu.com and will definitely be using their services again in the future.
Warning: Shameless self promotion!! - For more information on my short story collection, check out my Profile page.
Recommended:
Yes
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