Zepfanman.com

Hi there!
I´m considering using Lulu for selling a book without any editor.
Thanks for your video and review, it was very helpful!!
Rosamunda

You’re welcome. I’m glad you found it helpful. I hadn’t noticed many reviews of the service when I was shopping around, so that’s why I did this. Good luck with yours – and post a link to it here when you release it!

Zepfanman,

I, too, am thinking of using lulu for my 6 x 9. I have already formatted my word document this way, with .75″ margins, a .5″ gutter, double-spaced. Is this appropriate? Should I change anything? There aren’t any pictures, but there are footnotes, displayed on each occurring page.

Thanks for all of your effort. It is clear to see that you and your grandfather are so close, and that you both dedicated quality time and energy to see this project to completion.

Thank you!

I slightly modified the default Lulu Word template. Your margins are good, but I only had about 1/8″ gutter which alternated on the right and left sides. You can kind of see how that looks in my pictures and video. Plenty of space in the gutter and easily readable. I did have a problem towards the end of my book when lulu automatically converted the document to PDF, it added a couple of extra pages (throwing off the gutter alternation) after some of my pictures because I had them too close to the margin and the conversion doesn’t always end up exactly how the Word doc looks – hope that makes sense. In short, I would convert to PDF yourself, then upload that.

Templates:http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Interior-Formatting/Templates-for-books-and-discs/ta-p/33674

Zepfanman, You likely wound up with an excess of pages when Lulu converted to PDF because…. do you have Word 2010, or even the 2007 version? I’m betting not. Lulu only converts to PDF correctly from a Word ’97-2003 file. Yes it’s true: search their “help” forum, which is populated—I am quite sure—by fictional characters with yes, names and photos, such as “David Woodward.”

If I sound like a conspiracy theorist, I invite anyone to jump in and tell me why my book is not yet on Amazon. My theory is that Lulu is dying and needs to push their (paid) services more every day. Seriously, the text on their website is perpetually changing: from dialog boxes to their supposed “help” pages (written by, you guessed it, “David Woodward”). I challenge anyone to say they had a smooth ride with Lulu. Clearly, Zepfanman, you have editorial and graphics specialists at your beck and call, or else you would not have the results you show in your video. Perhaps you are a publishing pro yourself (like me); even so, I find this company, at this point, to be a laughingstock. Which isn’t good, because my book is not yet on Amazon, where I need it to be after all this work.

If this message disappears soon, I will know that you too are part of the conspiracy to keep Lulu going! Hahahahahaha…..

Rosamunda,

If I were you I would find an inexpensive editor beause we all make mistakes that we can’t see ourselves and an editor will alert you of these thing. For $1.50 a page, there’s a guy at AurthorsDen.com, Services Marketplace. Or if you can afford $2.00 per page, there are many to choose from in the back of Writers Digest magazine.

MT

Thank you so much.  I enjoyed sharing your excitement at receiving the book.  I would be interested in knowing about how many pictures you had in the book.  Any charts?  What did you pay Lulu per copy?  What would you do differently?

I’ll bet Grandpa and family are thrilled.,

All very good questions. I had 30 pictures at the end of the book, one every other page so the ink does not rub into the other pictures. I did not have any charts, but one thing I realized once I was all finished is that I could have converted to PDF BEFORE I uploaded the final document to Lulu. I initially thought they had some special processing to do, although the reason I uploaded in a word DOC was their warning that some fonts don’t work properly if you upload in PDF – not sure how significant the warning was, but I didn’t want to take a chance. I did not have any font problems uploading the DOC, but when Lulu converted it to print, there were a couple of page breaks that incorrectly spaced out the pages. If I had uploaded the whole thing as PDF, I would not have had that problem. Not sure how well I explained that, but it’s really the only regret I had. Everything else looked great. Oh, also on that note, I’m sure charts would look fine as lulu simply takes whatever you have in the final document you upload and prints it – it costs the same whether the content is a chart, photo, or just plain text.

252pp, $13.08 plus shipping; otherwise, no extra processing costs or anything like that. They do frequent deals and they also happened to have a free shipping deal when we ordered a reduced-price bulk shipment of 24 copies for $206.16.

For comparison, the initial draft that I printed had 163 pages, $7.76 per copy, plus shipping.

Hope that helps. Are you creating your own book?

My husband and I are doing personal histories. I have a novel. I have a short biography of my first husband.
I have a children’s book. (Now that we are retired you can see what we do with our time).

The novel is ready to go except for the cover. The others are in the pipeline.

Thank you so very much for the info. It is specific, and that is what we needed. Were any of the pictures in color?

We have had a difficult time deciding on a company. It’s all very confusing. Think I will do the short biography first. It is just for the cousins, children, and grandchildren. Lots of pictures.

In a message dated 12/4/2011 7:11:02 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, writes:

(http://disqus.com/)

zepfanman wrote, in response to CindiSell:
All very good questions. I had 30 pictures at the end of the book, one
every other page so the ink does not rub into the other pictures. I did not
have any charts, but one thing I realized once I was all finished is that I
could have converted to PDF BEFORE I uploaded the final document to Lulu. I
initially thought they had some special processing to do, although the
reason I uploaded in a word DOC was their warning that some fonts don’t work
properly if you upload in PDF – not sure how significant the warning was, but
I didn’t want to take a chance. I did not have any font problems uploading
the DOC, but when Lulu converted it to print, there were a couple of page
breaks that incorrectly spaced out the pages. If I had uploaded the whole
thing as PDF, I would not have had that problem. Not sure how well I
explained that, but it’s really the only regret I had. Everything else looked
great. Oh, also on that note, I’m sure charts would look fine as lulu simply
takes whatever you have in the final document you upload and prints it – it
costs the same whether the content is a chart, photo, or just plain text.

252pp, $13.08 plus shipping; otherwise, no extra processing costs or
anything like that. They do frequent deals and they also happened to have a free
shipping deal when we ordered a reduced-price bulk shipment of 24 copies
for $206.16.

For comparison, the initial draft that I printed had 163 pages, $7.76 per
copy, plus shipping.

Hope that helps. Are you creating your own book?

_Link to comment_ (http://disq.us/4g7zp6)

Yes, it’s no fun trying to wade through all the literature and different websites while you’re trying to decide what service and options to use. I just updated the link to the pricing page in the blog entry above: http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Product-Information/How-much-will-my-printed-book-cost/ta-p/33671

Basically, instead of $.02 per page, it shoots way up to $.20 for color (for every page in the book, not just the pages with color on them). As you’d expect, we opted not to do color.