LULU Publishing On Demand

Lulu is a publishing on demand company. They allow you to publish real life books, ebooks, CDs, DVDs, and much more. They offer a VERY cheap solution - but they also expect you to be able to handle the responsibility of what you are doing. You are going to edit your own words, looking for typos. You are going to create your own covers. You are going to get your own ISBN. If you feel ready for these tasks, Lulu is a great option for you!

For my test run with Lulu, I chose a romance novel I'd written - "Badge of Honor". To begin with, you choose the size of the book you want to publish. They have a variety of sizes, from comic-book size to romance novel size and several other standard sizes. I went with the "pocket paperback" size - i.e. the standard size you see romance novels and mystery books on store shelves. This is 4.25" x 6.875". You have a few binding options to choose from, incluing the ring-binding you see on some cheap cookbooks. I went with perfect binding, which is the standard binding you get in store-bought books.

The price just to create a book in this format is based on the number of pages you have. Here are two prices I found in my own tests:

306 pages = $10.65
350 pages = $11.53

With my example, I began with a 306 page book. If I wanted to make a profit on sales, I could sell my book at $12.65/book and make $2 for each book sale. If this sounds like a little, consider that most authors make only 50 cents or so per book sale when they work with a standard publisher.

If you start to charge a higher profit, Lulu does start to take a commission. So if I set my revenue to $2, Lulu adds on a commission of 50 cents. They do not take any commission if you go with the basic price.

With ebooks, the "printing" cost is much lower. If I sell an ebook for $9.99, they take $2 of that as commission, meaning I make $7.99 for each ebook sold.

You have to keep in mind that, since regular publishers do this in volume, their price per copy is much lower. So if you go into a store, you can normally get a romance novel or mystery book for maybe $4 or $5 a copy. You need to keep in mind that the person buying your book on the web is going to have to really want your book if you're charging 3 times the normal rate for your book.

OK, back to the process. You are now ready to upload your book and your cover images into Lulu.

Formatting your Book for Self Publishing

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

Publishing On Demand Step By Step - Lulu
Lulu Self Publishing - Setting Up the Book
Formatting your Book for Self Publishing
Creating a Lulu Covers

Quality of Lulu Books
Print Copy Sample from Lulu #1
Print Copy Sample from Lulu #2
Print Copy Sample from Lulu #3

Promoting your Lulu Book
Problems and Issues with Lulu

Lulu Self Publishing Main Page
Getting Your Book Published
Writing Tips and Online Books

Online Literary Magazines

Lisa Shea's Homepage