Self publish your book, memoirs, or recipes using Lulu.com, a premier print on demand web site.

Self Publish with Lulu

Though known as a print on demand self publishing company, Lulu prefers to call itself a digital marketplace that eliminates traditional barriers to publishing.

What is Print on Demand?

Print on demand publishers print only upon receipt of an order. This allows them to avoid the costs associated with inventory. Modern electronic printing equipment and a prevalence of high quality word processors, led by Microsoft's Word, makes printing a fast, nearly automatic, and economical process.

Lulu's Offerings

Lulu has templates and support for fifteen types of printed material, including paperback and hardcover books, comic books, and cookbooks. Six forms of photo-oriented material and eight forms of digital media, such as CDs/DVDs and videos round out the printing options available. The remainder of this article will focus on books, however, most of the information will also apply to other media.

Self Published Book Options

Whether you've written the next great American novel or you've gathered together grandma's recipes for a family cookbook, a print on demand publisher such as Lulu is a low cost alternative to the traditional print shop in your city.

Lulu offers eleven black and white book sizes, ten color sizes and three binding options (Perfect Bound, Plastic Coil, and Saddle Stitch).

Lulu offers templates for the popular word processors to give you a head start on suitable fonts, margins, headers, and footers. However, you can use your own styles as long as they fit the specifications required by the distribution industry.

Color or Black and White

The choice of color or black and white refers to interior printing. Color covers are standard for both.

Your Book Cover

Though you can't tell a book by its cover, the cover is your first chance to make a good first impression, so cover design is critical. If you're artistic, or know someone who is, Lulu provides detailed specifications on cover requirements and provides templates to aide your design.

If you're on a tight budget, consider one of the more than one hundred fifty stock covers. These are attractive and free, but still allow you some customization.

Lulu provides a Services Marketplace where you can connect with third party design services to get the cover exactly as you want it.

Distribution

Once your book is completed and you've approved the final version, there are distribution options to consider. Lulu provides an online marketplace for your project at no extra cost, essentially a web page devoted to your products descriptive material, color image, preview of the first ten pages, and shopping cart.

If you want your book to be available from book sellers globally, purchase an ISBN, a unique number with barcode assigned to your book. Lulu coordinates obtaining the ISBN and provides information to Books in Print, the source of new book information used by book sellers.

Typical Costs

There is no cost for uploading your manuscript, formatting it for printing, reviewing and modifying it, even multiple times. If you haven't elected to purchase professional services in the marketplace, your first cost in this whole process will be when you order your approval copy.

Your book will have a fixed cost based on the binding and book dimensions, along with a variable cost per page. For example, your cost for one copy of a 6 x 9, perfect bound, 100 page, black and white paperback would be $6.53 at current prices. Printing the interior pages in color ups this to $19.53.

If you select to purchase an ISBN, there are currently two options, one at $50 and the other $99.

Self Publish Your Book

Self publishing your book through Lulu is an excellent alternative to the traditional route of courting agents and publishers. It is fast, inexpensive, and produces a high quality product.