Lulu Press - various topics

Lulu Press - various topics
Okay, we've been bouncing this topic back and forth for a while now, so I think it's time that we figured out the Lulu costs, and how they compare to other alternatives. I've got a 106,000-word short fiction collection that I'm contemplating for publication at Lulu. Unfortunately, I don't have the book laid out yet, so the first thing I had to figure out was how word counts translate into page numbers. I took a number of 6x9 books for which I own both printed editions and electronic editions. Here are my calculations. The page numbers for the printed editions include unnumbered pages. Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice: 167,000/366=456 words per page. Sharon Kay Penman, The Sunne in Splendour: 408,000/944=432 words per page. Diana Gabaldon, Lord John and the Private Matter: 88,000/324=271 words per page. Patricia A. McKillip, Riddle of Stars: 215,00/608=354 words per page. Obviously a heck of a lot depends on layout. Hobb's and Penman's books both have narrow margins, while Gabaldon's book has generous leading (space between the lines). If I were to publish the book through Aventine Press (a self-publishing press that veinglory mentioned), the pages would be 110,000/400=275 words per page. http://www.aventinepress.com/pub_agree.html Here's what their interior layout looks like: http://www.aventinepress.com/design_int.html Big margins are what are making their words-per-page count so low. I decided to use McKillip's book - which is a book club edition, nice margins but narrow leading - as my basis. That gave me 300 pages for the book. The question was: Could I publish this through Lulu in a way that was competitive in price with mainstream presses? I took as my basis of comparison Meisha Merlin, a well-respected SF/F small press that is especially prone to publish m/m titles. It publishes mainly in a 9x6 paperback format. I checked Amazon for recent books by them that were around 300 pages long, and they seemed to be selling for fourteen or fifteen dollars. Then I checked Tor, which is one of the leading New York SF/F publishers. Most of its paperbacks are mass-market sized (6x4), but I did find one recent 9x6 paperback. It was selling for thirteen dollars, suggesting that Meisha Merlin's prices weren't much different from the big-press prices. LULU-ONLY DISTRIBUTION On to Lulu. Here's my calculations for books distributed from the Lulu site, which I double-checked with the Lulu book calculator: $4.53 (binding) $6.00 (two cents per page) -- $10.53 The royalty is my decision to calculate. Lulu adds on a 20% commission. So let's say that I want to sell the book for $14.95. The calculations are as follows: $4.53 (binding) $6.00 (two cents per page) $3.53 (my royalty) $0.89 (Lulu's commission) -- $14.95 (cost of book to buyer) There are no extra costs to me if I sell the book only through Lulu's Website, so I begin receiving a profit immediately. BASIC DISTRIBUTION SERVICE Basic Distribution provides you with an ISBN, a listing in Books in Print (which will allow buyers to special-order your book at real-life bookstores), and a one-year listing in Amazon Marketplace, which is the used-goods portion of Amazon. I checked, and Amazon Marketplace books turn up in the same manner that new books do in their catalogue. International shipment of Amazon Marketplace books is not available through Lulu. Lulu says, "To calculate your Amazon royalty, multiply the total price by 75%, subtract production costs, then multiply the remainder by 80%." Okey-doke, here we go: $14.95 x 75% = $11.21 - $10.53 x 80% = $.55 In other words, if I continue to sell my book at $14.95, I only get 55 cents royalty. I can raise my royalty, of course, but that will begin to raise the cost of the book out of the competitive range. Let's assume that I keep the book at $14.95. Basic Distribution Service costs $34.95, which means that I would need to sell 64 books to earn back my investment. From that point on, I'd be earning a profit of 55 cents a book. GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION Global Distribution (which you can upgrade to from Basic Distribution) provides an ISBN, a listing in Books in Print, and a listing in Ingram's database, and British databases. Lulu claims that this means that, in all likelihood, your book will appear in online bookstores. I can't figure out any way to tell the difference between new books and Marketplace books at Amazon, but I found listings for Lulu books at Barnes & Noble and Powell's. Global Distribution takes a lot more work for you to put together, and you have to pay a big fee if you revise your book thereafter. Here's the calculations for Global Distribution, using the royalty I calculated above: $1.56 (binding - note the lower cost) $6.00 (two cents per page) $3.53 (my royalty) $0.89 (Lulu's commission) -- $11.98 (wholesale price; i.e. the price at which the book is sold to the retailers) x 2 -- $23.96 (suggested retail price; the price at which the book is likely to be sold to the buyer) Ouch. Let me try this again, using the 55 cents royalty we tried for Basic Distribution. $1.56 (binding - note the lower cost) $6.00 (two cents per page) $0.55 (my royalty) $0.14 (Lulu's commission) -- $8.25 (wholesale price) x 2 -- $16.50 (suggested retail price) Global Distribution Service costs $150, so it will take sales of 273 books to earn back my original investment. Now, what can't be calculated in all of the above is how the different distribution methods are likely to affect sales. Obviously, the more places my book is listed, the better it's likely to sell. But to what extent my financial gain is offset by the much lower royalties that are necessary to keep the book in a competitive price range isn't clear. Anyone have more info to add? Or comments? Please do tear my math apart

I skimmed the math, because I'm assuming it's spot on and I'm too lazy to bother, :-) , but I think it all sounds right. And if you compare just the international service distribution price of Lulu to the before even publishing fees of some other outfits, you're ahead of the game just choosing Lulu and paying for the international distribution package. But then of course you have to do the work yourself, formatting, proofreading, etc, or pay someone to do it for you, or get it done for free with the help of a friend. Whereas the other outfits force in-house services on you as a part of their publishing contract. So if you do want extra services, as in out-of-house, you pay twice, once for the outfit you chose, and again for the extra help outside of that POD. All around, if you don't mind shopping around for proofreaders, editors, formatters, whatever, you're better off with Lulu in terms of initial costs. Unless of course you have to spend a shit load more money on those proofreaders, editors, formatters than I did. But then, I paid myself nothing. :-)

What I'm more concerned about is the royalty situation. If my figures are right, it's impossible to get a decent royalty if you price the book to be competitive with big and small presses - unless, that is, you sell it only at Lulu. What I'm wondering is how much benefit there is to buying the Basic and Global Distribution Services. If you have to sell nearly three hundred books to make a profit, and your profit is only half a dollar a book, is it worth the number of customers you would pick up internationally? And if you go for the Basic Distribution - where at least you don't have to spend as much - are the number of customers you would pick up worth having your royalty slashed to one-seventh of what it would be if you sold the book only through Lulu? Karen, The Gryphon Taint: Volume One is only about 300 pages, yet you priced it at $16. I don't want to be nosy about your financial matters, but how are you managing the magical feat of getting a decent royalty from this?

I get no royalties from Gryphon One. I paid for the ISBN in order to put the book up on sites that wouldn't take books without an ISBN. Gryphon One is free to read as a PDF file, so anyone visiting my site, or Memoware, can download the entire volume to get a taste of my work. They can do the same for Bound One. I made a promotional decision to make those two books my promo work, to let people sample my writing style and to discover if I really can pull off a decent read throughout an entire book. I did this because I am unknown and have a series to sell. What I lose on Gryphon One and Bound One, I hope to gain later in sales of the series. But my biggest problem is not so much proving my literary skills any longer. It's finding ways to get the word to the right audience. So perhaps I should fork out money for the international ISBN, not to get royalties again, at least not for Gryphon One or Bound One, but to let more people know about the free promo reads. So far--promoting only where I was able to do so for free because I'm not rich--I have managed to get three dedicated readers that bought the entire series, excluding the free ebooks, all the way up to Disposition of Ashes Three. That's all the books I have so far published. One of these readers was a man. I had an email from him. Another is likely a man, because he asked me on another forum, a gay one, when I was going to publish Disposition. It seems my primary audience may be gay men, but I don't know how to reach them without starving my children. So there you have it. I can only hope that word of mouth spreads in the gay community and that they don't just pass out the ebooks amongst each other, because the progress is going to be slow otherwise. And on the note of ebooks spreading around for free and me losing royalties as a result, I don't plan to publish any further books as ebooks until I've seen a reflection in royalties. In other words, reader support. I'll publish as hardcopy though. I think that after paying for and reading the Dispositions, anyone complaining that the books are pricey should realize that I have to work to make a good read, and that the price is worth it, and that I can't keep cutting my own throat by publishing ebooks that can be passed around to hundreds of people in a matter of days, just like an mp3. They wouldn't have bothered buying all the other books if my writing was crap to begin with, so there's a point where I just have to let the readers decide how bad they want the next installment of the story. And there it is. My current state of affairs.

"It seems my primary audience may be gay men, but I don't know how to reach them without starving my children." Nifty. ASSGM. The gay male section of Literotica. That's the three ways in which I've reached male readers. Do you have any a side story for the series that you could post at the above three places? One with erotic content? Then you could say, "For more stories in this series, see . . ." For Nifty and ASSGM, you can provide the URL to your Website when you post the story; for Literotica, you have to be a bit more roundabout in how you word your invitation, as they won't allow you to post your URL on the same page as your story - but they do have a bio section where you can post your URL. I'd make the same suggestion for female readers: post your side story (or another one; this doesn't one doesn't necessarily need to be erotic) at a bunch of online fan fiction archives or original fiction archives that accept m/m, and invite your readers to visit your Website for more of your fiction. Here's another place where you should definitely promote your story: Uniquely Pleasurable: Links and Reviews for Original Slash Fiction, Art and Other Media http://unique.logophilos.net The online fiction communities are a very good place to promote self-published works, because they don't give a hoot about whether you have a traditional publisher or not; all they care about is whether your stuff is good. The primary difficulty you'd ordinarily be facing is that they're used to getting their works for free, but since you have free e-books to promote, that's not a problem for you. Hopefully, they'll be interested enough to read more of your stuff.

OMG why did i know know about http://unique.logophilos.net ! Was I standing with fingers in ears going LALALA? I know what I will be doing tomorrow--but must sleep now zzz--

Thanks, Dusk. I really appreciate the tips. :-)

I just experimented in going through the Lulu publishing process, up to the point just before hitting the Publish button. I thought I'd tell those of you who haven't gone through it what it's like, because the Lulu FAQ doesn't tell everything. There are five steps. BOOK DATA Here you list basic information about the book, such as its title and description. The description can't use HTML if you're going to be selling the book at an online bookstore. This is also the page where you determine the access level. As I think most of us here have figured out, if you make the access level "Mature," it can't be accessed by most casual browsers of Lulu (because the default access level is lower than "Mature"). However, you can link directly to the page on which your book is located, thus circumventing the access level requirement. Lulu doesn't mind this. UPLOAD AND CONVERT You have the option of uploading your file through the Website or through an FTP transfer. Lulu will accept various types of files and convert them into PDF, or you can save yourself conversion worries by submitting a PDF file yourself. If you submit a PDF file, Lulu's system stops you if your fonts aren't embedded, if the pages aren't the right size, if your security feature is turned on . . . It's a smart system. BINDING AND COLORS Lulu asks whether you want colors inside the book and what type of binding you want. The system is smart enough to drop any binding options that don't fit the PDF file that you've uploaded. At this point, you're told how much the various printing costs are for your particular book. COVER ART All of the above processes (provided that you've got your file correctly formatted) don't require much thought. This stage, though, gets a bit tricky; you need to read through the Help section on cover art fairly carefully. You're given the option of using their image galleries to create the front and back covers, uploading your own images for the front and back covers, or uploading a one-piece cover. If you upload separate covers, you can add an image and description to the back cover. Like all of the steps so far, this stage seems to be set up to be idiot-proof. I chose the option to upload a one-piece cover. I was greeted right away with the typically cheery message, "Don't worry! You can cancel or come back to this step at any time before you're done." Then I was told how wide my spine would be, how wide my total cover would be, and (just in case my math wasn't the best, which it isn't) how far my spine was from the edge of my cover. Then I tried the other option of playing around with Lulu's cover image gallery. The images struck me as quite noisy for book covers; there really isn't much place for putting a title and author. So, unless you see a particular cover you fancy, I think you're better off uploading one of your own cover files. You can't use HTML for the back-cover description. Next you're asked to choose the cover fonts (type, size, and color), background colors, and spine layout. The fonts are previewed as you choose each one. Here are your choices: Arial Arial_Unicode Century-Gothic Clairvoux Copperplate Courier Delphin-IA Didot-LH-Headline Eccentric Edwardian Script Franklin-Gothic-Book Franklin-Gothic-Demi-Condensed Frutiger-Ultra-Black Futura Galahad-Regular Garamond Garamond-Bold-Condensed Georgia Giddyup Hardwood Helvetica Herculanum Hobo Ironwood Juniper Kaufmann Khaki Lucida Moonglow-Bold Ouch Palatino-Light Poetica-Chancery Quake Raleigh-Demi-Bold Rosewood Spumoni Tahoma Times-New-Roman Trebuchet Verdana Essentially, they've taken the standard fonts for Windows and mixed them up with a bunch of display fonts (i.e. fonts you wouldn't use for reading but which are used for titles and such). They offer a variety of styles, echoing different time periods. Others can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but there doesn't seem to be any way to add special characters or to customize the placement of the title and author on the front cover. And the font that you choose for your title and author will also end up being the font for your description, which is frustrating. You can take the Lulu logo off the cover at this point. At *this* point, they tell you that you can choose to have the background color appear on the front cover without an image. That sort of information would have been helpful earlier on. They offer you three previews of the full cover, which is nice: a small preview, a large preview in PDF, and a preview showing the crop marks. My suggestion is that, if starting a cover from scratch seems too big a deal, you save the PDF preview, fiddle around with it, and then upload it as a one-page cover. Either that, or supply your own covers (one-page or separate front and back). I'd only recommend using their covers if you really can't manage to produce one on your own, because their layout options are so limited. PRICING AND ROYALTY This is very easy. You choose whether you want the book to be a download or a print job or both, and then you either say what royalty you want or say what price you want the book to sell at. Lulu automatically shows what your royalty and their commission is. Unfortunately, you can't set different royalties for the e-book and print versions, so I'd suggest that, if you want to do this, you upload a separate edition for the e-book, as Lulu permits you. I went through the process of creating a paperback, which offers you the option of also creating an e-book. I don't know whether the hardback process offers you the option of creating a paperback and e-book, or whether the hardback is separate from these. You also get to choose between a standard copyright license, various Creative Commons licenses, or various GNU Free Documentation licenses . . . or you can choose your own license. The last feature is very nice indeed, because Lulu allows you to list what the attributes are of your license so that people can search for your content by license attributes. The only thing up to this point that the Lulu process hasn't shown me is whether the layout of my book actually works once it's on the printed page. Is my text too close to the middle of the double-page spread? To find that out, I actually have to buy the book. Lulu gives you the option of making your book available only to yourself in the meantime. Once the book is published, you can pay for an ISBN and for distribution outside Lulu. Once you have the ISBN, you need to go back and revise your back cover to add the barcode with ISBN to it. You can easily do this, Lulu says. There are other little things you need to do after publishing, such as offering a preview to readers, editing your storefront, and telling Lulu where to send your royalties (otherwise, you won't get any). It would nice if Lulu put together a simple chart of the possible stages of publication. As it is, you have to grub around in the Help files to figure out everything you need to do. Fortunately, the Help files are easy to read, and Lulu has active support forums. * * * My overall conclusion is that Lulu's publishing process is made for technophobes like me. The only place where this breaks down is in the cover art stage, where the options are too limited for fully satisfactory results. Other than that, it looks to me as though you can create a good product in a very simple manner, provided that you know how to properly design the manuscript file you're submitting. Does anyone who has gone through the actual publishing process want to offer any corrections or additional information?

Most of the problem areas you covered are handled in the specific forums for that step of publishing. The page size minimums or maximums are downloadable as a word file. I used this Lulu word file to change all my manuscripts over to one that fit properly. This way I avoided having my paragraphs beginning or ending too close to the spine. As it is, mine may be a smigden too close, but this is easily fixable by uploading a new version of the manuscript with the change included. Covers: you should make one that has lettering that you put on yourself. Lulu's lettering is ok, but it doesn't subsitute for a complete front or back cover that you yourself designed. When I tried the Lulu lettering, they showed my author name off centre. Didn't like that. Also, you need to match the spine colour to your front and back. This can be done with Photoshop. There's a tool for choosing a color, so that when you hover your mouse over a section, you see the rgb or hex code for it. I have all of my codes recorded on a word file so I never forget them. You really have to use the forums on Lulu when you have trouble at all. It may take a day, but you will get an answer to your question, and you can always nudge. My cover, btw, was taken from the Lulu ones. I was able to download a copy of the thumbnail or whatever example resulted from my choice, then used a pdf reverser to pull out the original. I then used photoshop to brighten it up and give it the emerald green look (it was originally a blah green). And then I added the picture to it. I uploaded the result back to Lulu. There are specs for cover pixels per inch that you need to follow.

One of my beta readers was kind enough to send me a copy of her Lulu book, so I had a chance to see how it compared with non-POD books. Her novel is about 200 pages long and happens to be in 8-1/2 x 11 format. After digging around for a while in my bookshelf, I found a comparable book: Roy Kinnard & Tim Davis's: "Divine Images: A History of Jesus on the Screen" (Carol Publishing Group, 1992), which is the same size and length. Here's my review: SHIPPING TIME So-so. The order was sent on March 23, was shipped on March 25, and reached me on March 30. Since I'm only two states away from Lulu, I don't think much of UPS's delivery time, but Lulu seems to have done its job properly. PACKAGING Very nicely packaged in cardboard. Easy to open without slicing into the book. The book was well padded. COVER Covers for Lulu-distributed books are "laminated 100# Ultra Gloss Cover Stock, Digital Color Silk - C2S, 90 bright," according to Lulu. No kidding; I could use the covers as a mirror. I'm not fond of the glossiness, but if I remember correctly, the glossiness should make the art show up better. The art on this particular book was smudged, but it looks to me as though that might have been due to the original file. The covers look thick enough to stand up to a little abuse. PAPER Here's where size makes a difference. (A pause to let you take in that thought.) Lulu's 6x9 books are printed on 24/60# Cream Text, 90 GSM," while the 8-1/2x11 books are printed on 24/60#, 96 bright white. "Bright white" is right; those are the whi-*test*-('") book pages I've ever seen in my life. The 24/60# 90 GSM gibberish is telling you how heavy and thick the paper is. 24 means it's 24 pounds; by comparison, typing paper is usually 20 pounds. The paper looks a little lightweight to me compared to the "Divine Images" book, an impression that is increased by the fact that the book wilts the moment I place it on an uneven surface. However, the paper is certainly opaque; no type can be seen from the other side. BINDING Not that great. Mind you, it's much better than the mass market paperbacks I own, but not as good as "Divine Images." Because the cover is bound about slightly up the side of the pages, this means that the book can't be as easily opened as I would like. I don't know whether the same problem exists with 6x9 books. On the other hand, the pages don't look as though they're about to fall out at any moment. TYPEFACE Nice and dark. If you examine the type closely, you can tell that it's more ragged than ordinary type would be, but that's not the sort of thing you'd notice without putting your nose to the page. SUMMARY Overall, I'd say that it's not the best printing job I've ever seen, but it's far from the worst. It's better than the average mass market paperback, and it doesn't come off too badly in comparison to the average trade paperback.

Except for the cover, sounds about like the quality of your average Thesis publication.

Okay, now that dates me. Back when I did my bachelor's thesis, I had what must have been the highest-tech method at my college of producing a finished product. In other words, I had a laptop. This was back in the college days when you were high-tech if you owned an electronic typewriter, but my father was a little ahead of the curve. He gave me an Epson laptop, aesthetically the most beautiful computer I ever owned: it was cream-colored, and the function keys were burnt orange and tan. It had a six-line screen and 50k of memory in its hard drive . . . with the add-on memory. Otherwise, it had 8k of memory, about enough to store two pages of text. Without add-ons, the only method of saving outside the hard drive was through a little, built-in, magnetic tape cartridge. My father saved an entire book he was writing through the tape cartridge; I forget how many zillions of tapes it had to be stored on. However, the computer was so up-to-date that it could be attached to one of the earliest 3-1/2" floppy disk drives. 'Twas a big improvement over the exposed disks that came before that. The word processor was Wordstar, which meant that you had to type in the codes, such as the codes for italics. On the other hand, you didn't have to take your fingers off the letters of the keyboard, a trick that the word processors of today still haven't figured out. The computer was dead on arrival, alas, because it was issued around the same time that the first IBM PC rolled out. The printer . . . Ah, the printer. Dot matrix, printing onto limp computer paper. I shouldn't blame the printer for my struggles in printing out my thesis. The problem was actually the hard drive, which ran so slowly that it took a full minute for it to feed information about a single page into the printer. The net result of this was that, if the printer choked on page 45 of my thesis (as it inevitably did), it would take the computer 45 minutes to get back to where it had left off. Oh, and I bound my thesis with a paper clip.

View Full Version: Lulu Press - various topics