Sunday, August 07, 2005

Discovering LULU!

I just discovered LULU, an Internet publishing program that does books for free,
and since I had a few book-length manuscripts on hand, and no publisher were knocking down the doors to my house, I published them on LULU. When you know how to use LULU, it only takes twenty minutes or so to publish a book. Amazing. And it's free. You pay according to the number of pages and the amount of a royalty you want
for each book.

So, in just a few days, I published a memoir (of sorts) of mine, EXCULPATORY EVIDENCE and two mysteries: THE RASHOMON CASE (which deals with different ways of analyzing the film Rashomon) and TERMINAL PAPERS (which is about writing compositions).

You can get an ISBN number for $34.00 and then it will be listed on Amazon.com
and other Internet booksellers.

The problem with publishing books on LULU and competitors such as IUniverse
is that you don't have distribution and have to figure out ways to market your
books. But it costs around $500 to publish a book on IUniverse and Xlibris
and it's free to publish a book with LULU.

LULU has published something like 15,000 books...all available as
Print-on-Demand books. LULU represents a revolution in publishing...it seems
to be a completely automated system that enables you to publish a book, as
long as you have it on a file.