• What’s That You Say, Lulu for Publishing? 04 March 08
  
• More On Lulu 07 March 08
  

In the above posts dealing with the Lulu publishing service I’ve promised to bring updated information back to my readers and, as of right now, I have yet to do so. So here I go. I have come to use the Lulu service for something that they may not have intended their services to be used for, but it has proven to be extremely convenient and cost effective for me. In publishing, we writers will normally wind up sending our manuscripts all over the place during the early stages of a project’s life. It goes to agents, editors, to peers for review, and on and on. This can get expensive, but thanks to Lulu it doesn’t have to be so.

Having used Lulu to publish my very first book ever, called Youji Haiku, I had already seen how easy it could be to get a writing project through from conception to first printed copy, and with Lulu it’s exceptionally easy. But where I found Lulu to lack was in the final, per-unit cost of a published work. If your book has any length to it the retail price can very quickly jump to over $20 per copy, making Lulu a poor choice for anyone looking to enter the mass market paperback industry. Now, I should be clear that Lulu’s products are top of the line. The quality of their work is exceedingly high and makes the price tag seem a bit more reasonable, though still not low enough for certain aspects of publishing.

Of course, there are areas where they really shine, and this is why they have become vital to my prepublication process. I have been communicating with a literary agent about my project for nearly a year now. For most of that time she has seemed pretty wishy washy and even a bit detached. I had no plans on letting the issue go until she flat out told me no, so I kept at her. Meanwhile I knew that I had better be improving the manuscript in the event that she finally caved in and asked to see the whole deal. To me this meant having my closest friends, and some former colleagues who are in the book or were there for the more important parts of it, read it and provide feedback.

So I called a local print shop and, to my surprise, they quoted me an ungodly amount to take my manuscript from a .doc file and make it into a nice, printed document. They wanted in excess of $50 per unit! I couldn’t believe my ears. I called another print shop in my town, this one being a national chain, and got the same thing. There was no way that I could afford $50 per copy just to send them off to my friends and colleagues, never to see them again. What’s more, if those peers decided that they didn’t like my book, they might even have wound up in a trash can. Plus, the shipping costs for getting the huge 8.5 x 11 manuscript to each reader would have sapped my budget even further. Suffice it to say that I knew this was not going to work. So I went back to Lulu.

Five Years in Hawaii as produced by Lulu.com

Because I, as the author, pay only the production and shipping costs when ordering my book from Lulu, I knew that I could order and ship copies of a novel-length book to my selected readers for roughly $20 per copy. That’s a huge savings, around 66 percent cheaper when shipping costs are calculated! Now, even at that price I can’t afford to send out a dozen copies, but I can save up and send out two or three, which is exactly what I plan to do. But something else has come up that has put the spotlight on Lulu and given them a chance to really shine.

I finally managed to get more out of that agent than “please send it again.” She wrote me and informed me that she liked my project but because it was in part about Navy Intelligence, the Department of Navy would have to give their stamp of approval before she would touch it. She doesn’t want to get sued, and I too would hate to lose anything that I might stand to make on the book by way of lawsuit. So, using Lulu, I put together an extremely rough version of my finished product.

I say that it was rough because the book has yet to see an editor other than myself (though I’ve read and revised the document something like five times now). I don’t want my readers to think that it’s “rough” because of Lulu. In fact, I can rest assured that the book being shipped to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations this week is of the highest quality. I might even dare to venture that the NCIS agent who will be reading and passing judgment on my book will be a little impressed that a book in it’s prepublication stages could look so nice already.

Black and white photo insert.

And so it seems that Lulu can effectively serve more than one purpose. They are certainly a viable self-publishing option and they have even recently updated their offerings to include a special in-store distribution deal with Borders Books. I’ve heard mixed sentiments about that to date, and the $500 price tag prohibits me from experimenting. But for my limited distribution needs while in these prepublication stages, Lulu is like a wet dream. At risk of sounding like a paid representative for Lulu (which I am not) I would say that I would certainly recommend Lulu to anyone looking for a self-publishing option except those hoping for mass market paperback exposure. The costs are just too prohibitive for that niche, but outside of that Lulu is the way to go as far as I’m concerned.

Thanks for reading and please feel free to provide feedback or detail your own Lulu experiences in the comment box.

JMK