Lulu - Self Publishing

[Stravo]

OK, I was reading my paper on the way to work when I stumble across this article on LuLu, a self publishing internet company. I've checked out their website and the set up seems to work like this.

I send my manuscript to them electronically. I then advertise my book however I see fit (i.e. blog, word of mouth, whatever) A purchaser would order the book via Lulu and it gets bound and sent to them and I get 80% of the purchase price and LuLu gets 20%.

So far, aside from the fact that my books wouldn't be on the shelves of B&N (A childhood dream of mine) and won't be available to a massive audience I don't see a downside to self publishing some random works of mine on Lulu.

Anyone try this route before or have heard drawbacks concerning self publishing or LuLu? I know there is some sort of stigma in the publishing world to self published authors but frankly this might be the best way for me to get off my lazy ass and do something with my writing.

If I get some decent sales on a book I publish on Lulu it might encourage me to finally submit my work to a "real" publisher and see if I may have my childhood dream come true.

Thanks for any insights you might have on this.

[Dalton]

I own a copy of a book that was self-published via Lulu. Iceberg wrote it for NaNoWriMo. The book quality is superb.

[Stravo]

I own a copy of a book that was self-published via Lulu. Iceberg wrote it for NaNoWriMo. The book quality is superb.

Is it really as starighforward as they say? No upfront costs to the author and the purchaser pays for the book (whose price includes the cost of putting the book together?) if thats true this is a gold mine for an author that has a nice large network of fans and is doing this as a hobby on the side.

This is very interesting indeed.

[NecronLord]

Well, alas, I doubt it's entirely legal to publish fanfiction in such a manner. So no Starcrossed. Which is a shame.

Though at present, I suspect Starcrossed would have to be a bloody saga of books.

EDIT: Or possibly not. They have Star Trek and Star Wars categories.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, Stravo's a lawyer. Let him sort that out.

Hmmm...this sounds interesting. What are the requirements for submission?

[Stravo]

Lulu makes it very clear in its FAQs that it will not publish Fanfic even if the author wants to give the books away. Par for the course considering they are copyright infringements.

[Shroom Man 777]

Then what's with the Star Wars and Star Trek categories NecronLord mentioned? I doubt EU authors would also sell their stuff to LuLu.

Stravo, can you post a link to the website?

[Stravo]

I can't believe I forgot to do that in my OP Shroom:

Lulu

[Shroom Man 777]

[Elheru Aran]

Stravo:

Might not be able to publish it officially, but one way to make it easier for fans would be to post a .txt file of your fics. That way all they would have to do would be download the .txt to their computers or print it off. Another option is a PDF, though that would be somewhat bigger.

Just a thought...

[Hawkwings]

hmm... technically, can't you go and ask permission to publish fanfics from whoever holds the licenses?

[Singular Quartet]

hmm... technically, can't you go and ask permission to publish fanfics from whoever holds the licenses?

Technically, yes. But they'll just laugh at you, because they're not going to do it. If they let you do it, then they have to let everybody else do it. Or they can hire you, but that would require them to pay Stravo money, which would be nice, for sure, but it's not going to happen.

[Noble Ire]

hmm... technically, can't you go and ask permission to publish fanfics from whoever holds the licenses?

Technically, yes. But they'll just laugh at you, because they're not going to do it. If they let you do it, then they have to let everybody else do it. Or they can hire you, but that would require them to pay Stravo money, which would be nice, for sure, but it's not going to happen.

Interestingly, though, you might actually be in luck with fanfic based on a Bungie-made universe (Halo, Marathon, etc.) I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I would imagine that the machinima like Red vs. Blue and The Codex, both of which sell DVDS and other merchandise on their own, would have had to approved the sales with the company. I'm not sure how they'd react to fanfiction, but if one really wanted to, it might be worth asking.

Just a random point.

[Alex Moon]

http://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2006/01/ ... shing.html

Book Publishing

In the last few days, I’ve had many people ask me about the publishing business – how does one get started, how hard is it, how lucrative is it, etc. This is a short primer on how it works.

Self-publishing vs. traditional publishing

The primary difference between a traditional publisher and a self-publisher is who supplies the money to print and market the books. With a traditional publisher, the author sells them the sole right to reproduce and sell a book in exchange for a royalty (typically 10-12%) from book sales. A well-known author might get an advance, but most first-time authors don’t.

While every publishing house has staff cover design and typeset teams, it is the very rare publishing house that runs its own printing press. Ironically, most of the publishing houses today do only book layout. They don’t consider the actual book production a core part of the business, so they contract that work out to the cheapest printer they can find. Book publishers are, then, essentially glorified distributors, i.e., they are warehouses with good to great marketing departments and good to great layout design teams.

Few authors know or care much about layout design or marketing, so this works well if you happen to be in that group and are happy with 10% of the sale.

But what if you prefer to do it on your own?

The Choice

As I’ve noted earlier, most people see the self-published author as an egocentric incompetent. After all, if such an author were good, he would have been accepted by someone’s marketing department, that is, he would have a publishing-house patron. Since he doesn’t have a patron, he must be lousy. QED.

I could go through a list of excellent best-selling books that were self-published, or list recent best-selling books that were execrable, but there’s little point. Egocentric incompetence is rife in every industry, whether you are paying for someone else’s version or just doing it yourself, so it hardly matters if the charge is true or not. From the author’s perspective, there is only one question: which will bring more income?

When you sign away your manuscript to a publisher, depending on the contract, you lose most to all control over it for a set period of time. Even assuming they make no serious changes, your book will not see the light of day for at least a year after begin accepted. It takes that long for the marketing department and the layout team to agree on a cover design and a marketing plan.

But, going with a publishing house means you have a lot of marketing muscle behind you.

Maybe.

You see, every publishing house rejects 95% of the manuscripts it gets. Of the five percent it publishes, it doesn’t have the money to market each one equally well. So, it picks whichever one it thinks is most likely to succeed and pushes that one hard. The rest don’t get much attention. If you don’t like the odds, this is how you self-publish.

Business and Book Layout

* Go to your local courthouse and register as a business, either sole proprietor or corporation, as you desire.
* Buy a block of ISBN numbers from Bowker. A book without an ISBN number will not be carried in most bookstores, and bookstore sales will account for roughly 80-95% of total sales for any book. They are sold in blocks of ten for about $300, more for larger blocks. There are no smaller blocks.
* Assign your book an ISBN number off the list you bought and get an EAN bar-code for your book. Don’t buy the barcode from Bowker. They are hideously expensive. Note – don’t use the UPC bar-code. Books have their own bar-code system. The bar codes can be purchased very inexpensively ($10 each) from places like Bar Code Graphics. Make sure your bar code includes the retail price of the book. Many bookstore chains won’t carry a book that doesn’t have the ISBN on the bottom back cover with the price included in the bar code.
* Five years ago, professional book printers would only accept files in Quark or Pagemaker. Things change. Today, Quark and Indesign CS 2 (Pagemaker’s successor) are both still desirable for the cover, but Acrobat PDFs are generally used for text. The files are smaller and cleaner to work with. This means if you have access to a program that generates a PDF from your Microsoft Word document, you don’t have to buy an expensive layout program for your text. Indeed, some printers will even accept PDF files for your cover. Even better, some websites generate free PDF files for you, given a Word document. So, actually formatting the documents for the printer can be quite inexpensive, if you want to cut costs and can find a good, free PDF website.
* If you want to use a desktop publishing program, I strongly recommend InDesign CS 2. It is incredibly powerful and relatively inexpensive, and will run rings around anything you can do in Word. Don’t buy it new. Go to Ebay, buy an old version of Indesign or Pagemaker, then buy the upgrades to get the latest version. Software upgrades are always cheaper than new. That will cut your software cost in half, at least.
* There are lots of tricks to cover design, and I won’t go into them here, but the cover sells the book. It needs to be loud and splashy, with a LARGE title. Walmart won’t carry a book unless the title can be easily read from at least ten feet away. They probably won’t carry the book in any case, but at least give yourself a fighting chance. Also, don’t use Times as the typeface on your cover – use something at least a little unusual.
* To figure out where to place things, how the title and copyright page should look, etc., just look at the books you already have and copy them. No need to re-invent the wheel.
* Price several printers and make them compete for the price. They will bid against each other. The price of the book depends on many factors; most of it is bound up in page count. Having a full-color cover is not really any more expensive than having a single-color cover – it adds only a few cents to the cost of the book, and repays itself many times over in sales value.

Printing

You have two choices: print-on-demand (POD) or traditional printer.

The advantages of POD:

* Relatively inexpensive start-up cost: Setting up a book at Lightning Source costs on the order of $200 to $300. With a traditional print run, you will spend at least two to three thousand on book production.
* No inventory. With POD, you order only as many books as you think you can afford to buy or can sell – a couple dozen is a perfectly reasonable POD run. Thus, with POD, if your book turns out to be a clunker, you don’t have a garage-full of books to get rid of. And I do mean a garage full. Even a short book – 100 pages – in a 5000-book run will use 40 boxes measuring 12x18x8, each weighing 36 pounds. If you print with a traditional printer, you better have somewhere to store the boxes. And your street had better be able to handle a semi-trailer, because that’s how they arrive. Either that, or you meet them in the local Walmart parking lot with a U-Haul…
* Some PODs hook directly into distribution channels. Lightning Source, for instance, is one of the cheapest PODs out there. Since LS is a division of Ingram, every book you publish with them automatically goes into Ingram’s catalog, which is one of the largest book catalogues in America. Having Ingram as a distributor is no small thing, and is tough for a small publisher to do any other way.
* There are a lot of POD printers who offer more services than LS. Authorhouse, Lulu.com, and literally dozens of others will take care of cover design and certain aspects of marketing for you. I've never used these so I've no comment on them. There are a lot of horror stories, so buyer beware.

The advantages of a traditional printer:

* While the setup and up-front cost is high (and no, they won’t give you credit if you are printing with them the first time – it’s half up-front, the rest on the counter in order to release the book for delivery), the per-cost book is quite low. A book that might cost two dollars each to print through a traditional printer will cost well over five dollars per book through Lightning Source, and Lightning Source is pretty inexpensive as POD goes.
* Since a bookstore needs a minimum 40% discount off the retail price, it is nearly impossible to get a book into a bookstore except through a traditional print run or through a POD that hooks into a major distribution channel as part of the contract. Clearly, if you are your own distributor, you maximize up-front profits. However, many bookstores won’t work with you because you aren’t a well-known distributor.

Sales

Finally, you need to get your book into bookstores. That means getting a list of every bookstore in your market niche and cold-calling, e-mailing or postcard-mailing them about your work. Call up radio stations and invite yourself on interviews. Write up news releases and send them to magazines and newspapers. Coordinate book signings at your local bookstore. Think of organizations that could use your book and pitch it to them. Give away lots of copies to decision makers.

Being a great writer is not difficult – there are a lot of great writers. There are also a lot of mediocre writers with great marketers behind them. Great marketing sells at least as many books as great writing. After all, when was the last time you bought a really lousy book and actually returned it? Most of us just sell the clunkers at garage sales.

Speaking of garage sales, most bookstores have a return policy of one year. That means they can return any unsold books to you at the end of twelve months, for credit. If you have a high return rate, this is obviously a problem. The biggest book publishers typically have a twenty percent return rate.

I’ve been fortunate. I’ve had a return rate of one-tenth of one percent. But then again, I’m just an amateur, and not really qualified to compete with the professionals. As one friend remarked, my return rate either means I am a phenomenal writer or I am seriously underselling the market. I prefer the former explanation, but, given my marketing skills (or lack therof) am willing to accept the latter.

So, there you go. You can publish a book for well under $700; around $1000 if you want to lay out the money for the publishing software.

[Jason von Evil]

Stravo:

Might not be able to publish it officially, but one way to make it easier for fans would be to post a .txt file of your fics. That way all they would have to do would be download the .txt to their computers or print it off. Another option is a PDF, though that would be somewhat bigger.

Just a thought...

Someone (Anarchistbunny, I believe) once loaded StarCrossed (then 60-70 chapters) into a PDF. It clocked in at over 1000 pages and 3 megs.

[Surlethe]

The stigma with self-publishing (or vanity publishing, as it's also known) is that you pay up-front to get the book published, so you're not actually making money; thus, you're wasting money on seeing your book in print, rather than letting your writing make money for you. That's why professional authors, I gather, tend to look down on self-publishing.

Of course, if LuLu is free, as I gathered from the OP, then that stigma doesn't really apply to this case.

[Anomie]

If Lulu really is a free publishing company, go for it since you'll lose nothing in the long run.

The only other self-publishing company that I've looked into myself is like what Surlethe said, that you the author has to pay upfront for publishing, warehousing, advertising, etc. and you most likely won't make a profit.

Lulu sounds like a good deal.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

If Lulu really is a free publishing company, go for it since you'll lose nothing in the long run.

The only other self-publishing company that I've looked into myself is like what Surlethe said, that you the author has to pay upfront for publishing, warehousing, advertising, etc. and you most likely won't make a profit.

Lulu sounds like a good deal.

Reading it all over, LuLu really is free. All they ask is 20% of your royalties . . . which are determined as follows:

Selling Price = Production Cost + Profit.
Profit = Your Royalty + LuLu's Commission.

So, for a 375 page hardcover with a dust-jacket, the production cost is $22.52. To sell this book at a competitive price from a well-known author like William Shatner, you set your sales price to be $25.00. That leaves $2.48 in profit, twenty percent of which goes to LuLu. So they make roughly $0.50 and you make $1.98. If you sell a whole bunch of copies, then you get bulk discounts, so you can charge less for the book, or make more money.

However, it wouldn't be quite accurate to call LuLu a publishing company. LuLu is more accurately described as a printing and distribution company (Provided you purchase their distribution services, which seem quite reasonable . . . only $150 per project for all the bells and whistles and $35 if you're a cheap bastard.) They'll assemble the final product and make it available to whomever, but the ultimate publisher of your works is you. You're responsible for getting the manuscript formatted, laid out, and proofread. You're also responsible for the design of the cover and all that good shit. And you're responsible for marketing and drawing attention to your book too.

This is fine if you're a regular Renaissance man or, at least, if you have patient friends who owe you a favor. In which case, you can do all the legwork on the cheap. If you're not so lucky, then it'll cost you the $700 to $1000 to get it into printable form as outlined by one of the other posts in the thread. But that's not bad. You'd only have to sell something like 600 copies of your book to recoup your costs. Everything beyond that, is profit. (Note that dividing $1000 by the $1.98 in royalties listed earlier in this thread gets you a few over 500. However, royalty income is reported to the IRS is 1099-MISC income. As a result, you will have to pay all applicable taxes on it come tax-season, so your break-even point will be consequently higher. None of this, of course, matters if you're only selling e-books.)

[Sonnenburg]

The stigma with self-publishing (or vanity publishing, as it's also known) is that you pay up-front to get the book published, so you're not actually making money; thus, you're wasting money on seeing your book in print, rather than letting your writing make money for you. That's why professional authors, I gather, tend to look down on self-publishing.

Not just that, there's also that there's no real sign that the work is worthwhile from an objective source. A book that's published through normal channels has had to meet certain standards of quality for someone to say "this is something people will want to buy and read." With self-publishing, all you really have is the author's say-so.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

The stigma with self-publishing (or vanity publishing, as it's also known) is that you pay up-front to get the book published, so you're not actually making money; thus, you're wasting money on seeing your book in print, rather than letting your writing make money for you. That's why professional authors, I gather, tend to look down on self-publishing.

Not just that, there's also that there's no real sign that the work is worthwhile from an objective source. A book that's published through normal channels has had to meet certain standards of quality for someone to say "this is something people will want to buy and read." With self-publishing, all you really have is the author's say-so.

Though with some of the utter shit that's published these days (for example, some Star Trek and Star Wars novels, and the recent scandal involving the 19 year old author whom, as it turns out, rather extensively plagerized entire passages of text from other novelists.) One has to wonder what, exactly, those certain standards of quality are; and how much LSD was used in their formulation.

[Sonnenburg]

There's no question that shit is being produced, just that in the case of self-publishing, it only requires one person not seeing it as shit for it to be published, whereas in regular publishing it's a committee of people who fail.

[Stravo]

One advantage to self publishing that I can see from an artisitic POV is that when you prepare your works you're not constrained in telling your story in any way that would limit you as if you were with a big publisher. You may envision a trilogy whereas the publisher forces you to make the first one as close ended as possible so that if its a commercial failure no big loss but it might limit your creativity.

However with self publishing you can tell your story as you see fit.

The huge drawback of course is you lose the marketing muscle that a publisher gives you. Just getting your book on the shelf in a book store gives it far more visibility than your internet blog or website pushing your book.

I'm looking forward giving this a shot in the future.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

The huge drawback of course is you lose the marketing muscle that a publisher gives you. Just getting your book on the shelf in a book store gives it far more visibility than your internet blog or website pushing your book.

I'm looking forward giving this a shot in the future.

Yeah, in the self-publishing case, you pretty much have to drum up support yourself. It could be as little as linking to it on your blog or site, or just casting it out on B&N or Amazon.com and hoping some random person bites. It could also be as intensive as hitting up clubs for people who might be interested in your book, getting yourself invited for interviews at the local radio station, and beyond.

[Anarchist Bunny]

Stravo:

Might not be able to publish it officially, but one way to make it easier for fans would be to post a .txt file of your fics. That way all they would have to do would be download the .txt to their computers or print it off. Another option is a PDF, though that would be somewhat bigger.

Just a thought...

Someone (Anarchistbunny, I believe) once loaded StarCrossed (then 60-70 chapters) into a PDF. It clocked in at over 1000 pages and 3 megs.

No I made a line graph depicting the decrease in rate of Starcrossed chapters per year, but nothing like that.

[Stravo]

Stravo:

Might not be able to publish it officially, but one way to make it easier for fans would be to post a .txt file of your fics. That way all they would have to do would be download the .txt to their computers or print it off. Another option is a PDF, though that would be somewhat bigger.

Just a thought...

Someone (Anarchistbunny, I believe) once loaded StarCrossed (then 60-70 chapters) into a PDF. It clocked in at over 1000 pages and 3 megs.

No I made a line graph depicting the decrease in rate of Starcrossed chapters per year, but nothing like that.

I believe the PDF file was Comosicus.