The Meat and Potatoes
My First Lulu Experience
This Christmas, my girlfriend Heather decided that she wanted to publish her father’s novel as a gift to him. I told her that I knew of a hot new self-publishing service called Lulu, and we decided to give it a shot. I don’t have the patience to provide a full detailed review of the process, so I’ll sum it up as briefly as possible.
Overall the process was easier than I expected considering how complicated publishing can be, however I think the process would be difficult for some one who does not have at least a basic design background (bleeds, trims, dimensions, oh my!).
The bulk of the work was getting the original Word document cleaned up and ready to be uploaded. Lulu’s part was fast in comparison. If you don’t have a solid document to work with, expect some tedious and lengthy work getting it up to par.
There were a few points where I felt like I didn’t have a clear next step or where information was missing or hidden, especially when trying to upload the cover. However, with a little hunting I was able to find what I was looking for. I think this could all be fixed with a handful of tweaks to the interface.
I should also mention that our order somehow became detached from our account along the way. After a quick chat with a customer service representative we were able to re-associate the order and it was processed and shipped in the time they promised (which was very speedy).
The process took a total of about 6-8 hours which included the quick cover we did and all the document formatting. Lulu’s part was only about 15-20 minutes of that total, not including the time we spent tracking down the order.
Contrary to my expectations (due to the relative simplicity of the process), the final product came out beautiful. We were thoroughly impressed. In the coming weeks, we plan to do a much more robust version with a different (hand-drawn) cover and additional styling of the text. This was very last minute so we worked with the time we had. Here are a few pictures:
Wow, that’s an eye catching book cover. Why the want to redo it? It looks great to me.
What’s the spine and back cover look like?
I added a shot of the spine. I just used their editor for that, but you can create the entire front/spine/back jacket. We didn’t go that far with this preliminary version. The back is blank on this one.
The cover is cool, but since I hadn’t read the book I felt it was a little too literal. Plus, I couldn’t talk to her Dad as it was a surprise, and I wanted to get his vision for what it should look like. He’s having a drawing commissioned of a photo of his squad.