Publishing without Perishing

[Shardrol]

A little mini-fracas on Kevin's travel thread reminded me that I meant to tell you people about lulu.com, which is one of those publish-on-demand places. You upload your manuscript & choose the format & they will print however many books you want. It costs around $6.50 for one copy of a 100-page book & it's easy to find out the cost of whatever it is you want printed.

It's a good way to print just a few copies of your book & you can also refer people to the website where they can order it themselves. I do think this sort of thing is going to transform the world of publishing. People will no longer need to lay out a huge amount of money to have something printed.

I'm sure there must be other places that do the same thing but I've known several people who published through lulu.com & it seems to have worked out well for them.

[Dan Rowden]

Timely thread. Lulu is one of the better POD companies out there but I've also seen some bad things said about them.

This forum is quite useful: Books and Tales

As is this page: POD Comparisons

[Unidian]

I published something through Lulu and was happy with the results overall. As long as one keeps in mind that outfits like Lulu are really about vanity printing rather than "publishing," they should be fine. Some of the other companies play on people's egocentric ideas about "getting published" and such and manage to extract fees, claim rights, etc. No one should pay for vanity printing unless you have money to burn on a book that is going to sell 5 copies. Lulu offers as a good a service as one can reasonably expect in this market segment.

[Dan Rowden]

Yeah, fees, copyright and levels of distribution seem to be the three main things to look at with POD.

[Unidian]

One thing to note is that the actual quality of the finished product with Lulu could probably be a bit better. It's not anything I could put my finger on directly, but the books do seem slightly "cheap." However, I don't know how one would get around this without paying for one of the expensive services, since Lulu is doing it all for nothing more than the dollar or two they make on each book sold.

There's also "Publish America," which does its best to market itself as a "real publisher" who actually pays you an "advance" (which turns out to be a check for one whole US dollar), but based on a lot of stuff I've read over the years I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole. It's vanity printing marketed to the ego, and they have a horrible contract where you sign over exclusive rights for seven years or something similar. On the plus side, you'll sell more copies with them, because they try very hard to get you to pressure your friends and family to buy. It's ugly all around, and you can no more get into real bookstores with PA than you can with Lulu. In other words, you can't.

One more thought - "Poison" isn't particularly badly written, you know. Has anyone considered approaching actual legitimate publishers? You already know none of the "biggies" will touch it, of course. But there are a lot of small publishing houses specializing in all sorts of things. It probably wouldn't generate many more sales than going through Lulu, but at least you might be able to get it into a few bookstores and libraries, etc.

[Dan Rowden]

I don't know about the last few years but over time Kevin has approached a great many publishing houses without success. - big and small. As to POD quality it can be a good idea to do two things: 1) look at a book made by a POD company first; 2) contact authors who have used them to get some feedback.

Oh, and 3) use better grammar than that last sentence contains.

[Shardrol]

Rather than think of Lulu et al as vanity publishers, I just think of them as printers. I wonder if Lulu would actually allow itself to be used as a printer, i.e. not have the book be 'published' by Lulu but by whatever name the author wanted to use (Genius Press, for example).

You can improve the look of your book by designing it yourself & sending them print-ready files. I agree the templates they offer are crappy looking but you don't have to use them.

I am half of a (very) small publishing company. We typically have print runs of around 2000 because we can't afford more. With something like Lulu you can actually print them one at a time (which most commercial printers won't do) so you don't need some huge outlay of cash at the beginning.

If you want the books to be in bookstores a small publisher needs to have a distributor, who deals with the bookstore for many different publishing companies. Bookstores will usually be unwilling to deal directly with a small publisher. Distributors typically take 60& of the price of the book, order a bunch of them & then send back the ones they don't sell (at your expense & often damaged). Many of the small-press distributors have gone out of business in recent years so that's probably not a good way to try to go in any case.

It is sometimes possible to get books listed with Amazon by dealing with them directly. But if what you really want is to have the book be read by more people one interesting guerrilla tactic I've used is to just leave the books in bookstores (shelved in the proper place). I don't actually know what happens when a person tries to buy it but it could be interesting. If you're going to do this it would be a good idea to obtain an ISBN.

[Unidian]

Rather than think of Lulu et al as vanity publishers, I just think of them as printers. I wonder if Lulu would actually allow itself to be used as a printer, i.e. not have the book be 'published' by Lulu but by whatever name the author wanted to use (Genius Press, for example).

Yes, they will, and in fact some small publishers use them that way.

But if they call it "Genius Press," I'll just fall out. LOL.