one will
help me sell it, if that’s what I want. The remaining
two say that, should I desire to spend around $2500,
they will design and publish my book for me.
Now I’m excited! Can it really be done? Is the technical
process is easy enough for a mere mortal like me, worth
the time and effort, and delivers what they say? What I’ve
found is that publishing a color hardcover book filled
with images is much more difficult and expensive than publishing
a black and white paperback of pure text. The question
is how much suffering or expense I’m willing to endure.
Lulu: Just upload a book I’ve designed, and print
Lulu has a cookbook category on its website. “The
perfect recipe for publishing success and mouthwatering
profits,” says the title at the top of the page.
At Lulu's
web
page on cookbooks, I calculate
the price immediately. I don’t see a dust jacket
for the size I want, but for an 8.25 x 7.25–inch
hardcover cookbook, the price is $32 or $47, depending
on which calculator I use. There’s a bulk discount
if I order 25.
Lulu’s process goes like this: I write my book and
lay it out. What? Back up. Lulu offers no tools for layout,
just a terse list of how the PDF must be formatted. I have
hardly mastered Word, let alone the professional design
programs real publishers (excuse me) use, such as Adobe
Indesign, Publisher or Quark Xpress. So my choices look
like this:
-
Create an amateur-looking book in Word
-
Purchase
expensive professional software and spend the next
year figuring out how to use it
-
Hire a
designer or hire a one of the other two POD publishers
to lay out my book and design the cover (more about
that later).
Once I have entered my text and photos, laid out my book and upload a PDF file,
it takes 10 business days to receive my book.
Would my cookbook fit in on Lulu? A search at the store revealed 1340 items, from
the personal (Mary’s Favorite Recipes) to the general (Bobby’s Favorite Recipes for
the Culinary Retarded), from diet books (Eat for the Cure) to the obscure (Your
Dead Meat: A Guide for Preparing Game) to fundraisers (A Blogger’s Cookbook, recipes
to benefit Doctors Without Borders).
I could spend lots more money on many other parts of publishing. If I want to branch
out further than the Lulu storefront, for $99 Lulu will get my book on Amazon, Barnes
& Noble.com, and Borders.com. If I want to spend money on editing, marketing,
self-promotion kits, illustrations and other goodies, Lulu
provides a marketplace of links to all kinds of services.
If I want a review on my Lulu page, even the trusted Kirkus
Review, the name on
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