You'll see on the right sidebar of Dausha Communications website a reference to the Macropedia Terradoma. That was a collective effort of myself and two others to write a Science Fiction milieu using the Lexicon RPG. After we finished it, I put a bit of time in over the following three years to edit and convert the work into LaTex. From there, I compiled it into a PDF and worked through Lulu to publish it. Being my first effort, I naturally made a few mistakes. I'd like to share my lessons learned for any aspiring author.
Note. I should caveat this by stating that my Lulu experience was in 2008–2009, so they may have improved somewhat since. So, your mileage may vary.
The Punchline
Before I dive deeper, I thought you should know where this is going. To print and bind drafts, I am currently using Lulu. For the final publication, I'll be using CreateSpace. This article tries to focus on why Lulu disappointed me. If you find my experience in error, I invite you to comment.
My underlying reason is simple: I want to see my hard-copy book reasonably priced on Amazon, regardless of any third-party listing. My effort on Lulu led to an unreasonably priced book.
Getting a Book Published
The Lulu process is fairly simple. I think this approach is fairly universal, based on my recent CreateSpace experience.
- Write the book (naturally)
- Obtain an ISBN
- You get a Lulu account
- You create your project on Lulu (filling in relevant details)
- You upload the PDF of the work (they take Word and other formats, but I prefer PDF)
- You either use their generic cover or upload your own cover
- You publish.
This should be a short series of articles, focusing on each major aspect of the process. My planned articles include:
- Obtaining the ISBN, and why Lulu's advice was costly
- Cover Art, why Lulu's site was helpful
- Publishing on Lulu, and why it cost too much.
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