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.

1. Write the book (naturally)
2. Obtain an ISBN
3. You get a Lulu account
4. You create your project on Lulu (filling in relevant details)
5. You upload the PDF of the work (they take Word and other formats, but I prefer PDF)
6. You either use their generic cover or upload your own cover
7. You publish.

08 January 2011 This is the first article in the "My Lulu Experience" series.

Obtaining the ISBN

Lulu's tutorials led me to buy one ISBN for my work. The strict rule is one ISBN per work. You do more than a minor revision, or have different form factors, then you are supposed to use a different ISBN. Lulu strongly supports that view, though my observation is ISBN recycling is acceptable, even encouraged, in some contexts.

I paid $150 for my ISBN. I since learned through The Well-Fed Self-Publisher that I could buy a block of ten ISBNs for $250, or $25 for each instead of $150. I also learned that Amazon doesn't use ISBNs for Kindle publications—but if you use the same ISBN as your print copy, Amazon will associate the two works very quickly. I'm not if ePub, B&N and other electronic books expect a unique ISBN.

Let's assume your marketing strategy is a hard-cover and a soft-cover book. Lulu's advice would have you spend $300 for the ISBNs. That's one book. The Well-Fed advice would let you publish five books and keep $50 in your pocket.

Contrasting that with CreateSpace, which offers no advice on the matter—at least none that I saw. So, Lulu offers the advantage of giving some advice on its site. However, with the plethora of books, including ''The Well-Fed Self-Publisher'' on the market, perhaps CreateSpace wisely stood aside?

My lesson here was I should have conducted more research, looked for more material before I bought. I'm sure you spend more time in preliminary research before moving forward. I adopted a less patient approach.

Score: 0 Lulu; 1 CreateSpace