Lulu’s Policies
First, visit Lulu and read the Lulu Basics FAQ to learn about author rights, royalties, etc. Also check out their requirements for Global Distribution, which is what you’ll be using to distribute your book. Their instructions are very straightforward. However, if you have further questions, you can go to their forum, once you sign up.
The First Step in Creating Your Book (Once You’ve Written It)
In this segment, I’m going to talk briefly about editing, as many of you have talked about this subject in your own blogs in the recent past. Make sure your manuscript has been edited before you begin. Because any changes you make can affect the layout of your book.
Lulu has an excellent Editing Checklist. I recommend that you print it out first. Then read through everything in the Book Formatting FAQ. They base their instructions on the assumption that you use MS Word to write your books, so most of you should have no problems with PDF conversion. They give instructions on how to convert Open Office documents.
Next, download their book templates. Since you are writing a novel, download the 6×9 template for your manuscript and your book cover. At this point, I created a folder for these files on my computer to separate this project from my original manuscript.
Open the manuscript template and paste the contents of your original manuscript into the template. Save your new file as a .doc or .rtf and place it into your project folder.
Now, you are ready to format your text. I’ll cover that in tomorrow’s segment. In the meantime, if you have any questions (or suggestions, if you’ve published through Lulu), feel free to post a comment or send me an email.
Related posts:
- Self-Publishing Through Lulu: Your Book Cover I read somewhere that a writer shouldn’t be a designer...
- Self-Publishing Through Lulu: Uploading Your Cover Lulu has updated its book cover interface since August, which...
- Self-Publishing Through Lulu: Binding and Colors This page is self-explanatory. Select black and white for the...
- Self-Publishing Through Lulu: The Final Layout Procedure This is where I screwed up. Lulu requires your page...
- Self-Publishing Through Lulu: Buying the Global Distribution Service When I first signed up for a Lulu account last...
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I would just add the little disclaimer: The first step in creating your book (assuming you’d already written it
This is great Deborah. So useful. Thanks.
Thank you, Melly.
As always, I appreciate your feeback.
Ah, I’ve missed all these posts on Lulu, but it doesn’t matter, I’ll be reading them all.
Alhough the reading prior to publishing with Lulu is necessary, and probably not as bad as it seems, that’s the one area that puts my off. My attention span is short. But…if I really want to try this out, I’ll have to remedy that, won’t I.
Reading through all of Lulu’s tutorials isn’t nearly as bad as trying to wade through the WordPress Codex. Still, I find that I can only read in small chunks.
[...] For now, if you have thought about self-publishing, but know nothing about it. Deborah Woehr is writing posts on her experience with publishing with Lulu. The first post, Self-Publishing through Lulu: The First Step in Creating Your Book gives tips on getting started. This post is followed by many others. I’m positive you’ll find the series interesting to read. [...]