For book/ebook authors, publishers, & self-publishers

Lulu and similar - your views?

Hello everyone,

Can anyone tell me about their experience with Lulu.com or perhaps similar kind of services?

How do you rate the quality of the print? How does it compare to a book you would buy in the bookstore produced/published traditionally?

I perceive my book's target audience to be mainly in the UK and the US.

Greatly appreciate your views,

Best wishes,

Nicolaas Engelbertus

now@is-ness.org

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Lucifer LeGivorden on November 18, 2011 at 6:34am

Ok well this is my first post here so bear with me. I published through Lulu after doing extensive research into self publishing. They are pretty good. You do 99% of the leg work yourself unless you want to pay them the rates for professional production. They offer extensive services to handle each aspect of making and marketing your book from start to finish, including ghostwriting for folks with writers block (shivers). The quality of the actual book is excellent, and identical to what you will find in any bookstore. you can hire pros through Lulu to help you design or do all the work for you, but I used photoshop 7 and did all my cover designing myself. Marketing can be a bit of a pain for any author on a strapped budget again they can help you for a price. I am doing my own marketing and am only now beginning to see profits from it.

Lulu is good over all but there are some glitches. Trying to find info on lulus help section is a nightmare. You'll be better off making contacts with other authors on the site who have figured it out themselves and go to them for help. The knowledge base on lulu can get very confusing at times and can require allot of digging and hunting around. getting paid has also given new authors problems too. I just recent got my first payments through lulu after almost a year. This was mostly do to my revenues not hitting payment limits.

Over all lulu is a great place to go for self publishing in the end. But be patient if this your first time as the site can be frustrating at times. Make sure you have either the funds to hire lulu staff for help or know friends or acquaintances to help take up some of your design work if you get easily frustrated. I tend to be a loner so I did almost all the work myself then spent about three days trying to use their cover editor to upload my image files and put them all together. Also use their templates. Deciding the size and shape of your book is critical to the amount of pages you want which will effect you final selling price, also your font style and size.