10 December 2010. With only 20 days remaining in 2010, I'm finally starting to clean up a few of my past publishing mistakes. I published the Macropedia Terradoma: Imperium Edition in May 2009 using Lulu. It was my first try, and Lulu compelled me to charge more for the book than I wanted to. I won't go into those details, Lulu is a great service. The rest of this article is less exciting market and social network monolog. But, I also mention how a friend reminded me to fix the price; from an extortionist's $42.00 down to a more reasonable $11.88.

Instead, I'm using CreateSpace, a subsidiary of Amazon for my official publications. I started the process in October, but forgot to complete a step. Oops! This morning I discovered Amazon was following this blog. You can see in the upper right corner (as of today), I have a link to my author section. There isn't anything there that's not here, but I'm trying to spell a word with the different social links. So far I have the letters A-F-R-T and spelled RAFT.

On to the price. It takes up-to 15 business days for Amazon to make available a release of a CreateSpace work. So, maybe by January 4, 2011 the book will be available for $11.88. Lulu required a minimum sale price of closer to $25.96 in order for me to expect anything resembling a royalty. Again, I'll spare the details of why Lulu's royalty model gives almost the same royalty for the same book at double the price.

But, wait! Amazon lists a price of $42.00! What gives?! There's the rub. The book is (:abbr POD Print on Demand:), which allows a bookseller to offer a copy for sale without actually buying it. In some cases, a bookseller will do just that—offer a book for sale. When you buy it, then they buy it and ship it to you. Of course, you pay shipping and handling, so the final price to you is closer to $50.00; and he makes about $17. The alternative would be to buy it yourself from the site the bookseller found it at, with a significant markdown.

A friend of mine pointed it out when mention of the book appeared on Facebook. The book is available on Lulu, until Amazon publishes it for $24.96.