Print Copy Sample from Lulu

For the third version of my Lulu book, I fully aligned the text left to right and added a new "thanks to" page at the beginning. For the cover, I did a few changes. I put in a "full cover" including a decorative spine, instead of using their default spine layout. For the cover, I lessened the canvas effect so it was more subtle. I went with top right light which is a standard lighting effect, it's how humans tend to imagine light from the sky falling. I set relief (depth of the canvas) to 10 and scaling (how big the canvas squares are) to 150. Make sure you hide the text layers before you texturize your image - you don't want your letters to be textured :) You want your letters to be crisp and easy to read.

I put in the order for this on 9/10/2007 at 1:44pm. I chose priority shipping to see how quickly that would work. Amazingly, I had the book in my hands on 9/14! It goes to show that the creation time can really vary on books.

On the downside, this was the first book I got from Lulu that had issues. It was missing the last chapter! Here's an image of the back of the book. It ends at the second-to-last chapter. Not only that, but the pages are "slanty" - and very near the top of the page.

You can see in comparison that the middle of the book has a wider top margin. The top margin gets smaller as you get near the end of the book.

Here's the back of the new book (on the left) compared with the back of the Lulu "load in a JPG" book on the right. The difference is that the left one, I had to include the UPC code myself. On the right one, I loaded in a JPG of the back cover and they then superimposed the UPC code for me onto that. They look about the same.

Here are the two spines. This is the main reason I loaded up a "full cover" this time - I wanted a better looking spine. My new spine is on the left, while their default spine (from run #2) is on the right. You can see that the left one does look prettier.

For the front of the book, I kicked up the "degree of canvas" look on the new one, which is on the left. It's hard to see in this smallish version, but when you have the print copies in your hands it is a fairly noticeable difference.

So in general I would have been pleased with this third run, with the way the cover looks and the insides look - but unfortunately they screwed up the printing! So now I have to wait to get yet another copy and hope it is done properly.

From Susan: I found out via the forum or questions and answers at Lulu.com that the distribution service that costs $100 checks every book before it is sent out, but for the free service the books are not checked before being sent.

I have 7 books published and only had that problem with one of them. It is a good thing that they want the author to order a copy for inspection. Their customer service told me that after they straighten out the initial printing problems it should print out fine from then on out. Fortunately, having sold 356 copies, I have not had anyone complain to me.

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Badge of Honor Take a look at the Badge of Honor sales page in Lulu, to get a sense of what the final product looks like. Badge of Honor at Lulu.com

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Print Copy Sample from Lulu #1
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