My tether’s made of leather so I’m not about to fall here

[rolanni]

Well, I did a lot of learning yesterday, and I need to order a proof copy of the completed book from lulu.  My, my, aren’t they expensive?  And clever, too!

For those playing along at home, if you’re willing to do your own fulfillment, it really is worth your time to seek out a local printer and order up 200 (or wherever their Big Price Break Point lies).  Depending on the number of pages and extra goodies in terms of color that you want, you ought to be able to easily halve lulu’s price per.

The “distribution to Amazon, BN, and others!” requires the purchase of a “distribution package” — I haven’t tracked down how much that is, but the cost of that is added on top of the manufacturing cost of each book.  The manufacturing cost of Barnburner (130-page digest-sized perfect bound) at the moment stands at $4.48.  That goes directly to lulu.  If I (the, yanno, author/production department) want a piece of the action, I need to add $$ on top of that.  Plus whatever other extra costs are hidden in the small print.  Which starts to add up to an expensive little mystery novel.

So, that!

Regarding the Big List of Words, as requests seem to have petered out, and that’s Some Big list, I’m freezing requests NOW.  Steve and I will be thinking about how to proceed in a sanity-preserving manner.  I expect we’ll break the list down into little lists and post them as can.  Our intent is to at least begin before the end of the year.

This morning, the Cat Eating Machine and I have some bidness to conclude; I’ll order in that proof.  After lunch, it’s all George, all the time.

Hope everybody has a good day!

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

lulu

[(Anonymous)]

Sounds like Lulu went the great vanity press route... they sounded
so useful, long ago. sigh.
Bon Chance!
Nanette

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, you don't have to pay to get a lulu book on amazon, just let lulu list itself as the publisher.

I tried one book with them, but to earn any profit at all, I had to set the price point so high it was unworkable.

[alicebentley]

Thank you for reminding me that I need to spend some time creating fulfillment spreadsheets.

My before-the-math take on it was that Lulu was a good choice for books that the creator didn't expect to need more than a handful of copies for: your family gathering picture book, or a hardcover edition of an in-print paperback. Also handy for a book that the creator wanted available for some reason, but didn't want to handle anything above the production work (and wasn't expecting to make much money off of).

For everything else, it's worth paying for the offset printing, and then dealing with how the book makes it through the next hurdle: distribution.

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

One goal with this outsourcing is to have no fulfillment going out of our house, and no stock to handle, especially since the places we're looking to move to have about half the space this house does.

[ramblin-phyl.livejournal.com]

Did you scope out Create Space and Lightning Source? My informants in the back ally tell me they produce a better product at a cheaper price. Lightning Source gets into the Ingram's catalog.

[roseaponi.livejournal.com]

Look at Booklocker.com - they use Lightning Source & Ingram, and have a $99 special for authors who are unhappy with other PODs. I read the expose' months ago about Lulu's impossible specs and upselling for distribution.

I hope George comes together well for you - it'll be nice to get non-writing stuff out of the way so you can focus :)

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

I've looked at buying books that were available from Lulu a couple of times but never ended up buying any of them because the price was always more than the book was worth to me and/or more than I could afford at the time. If one of your books was only available that way, I'd most likely buy it though. (Some books are worth more to me than others. You have a proven record of writing books I really enjoy and read multiple times.)

[reedrover]

Awwww, and here I just thought of another word: prebatout. (How many toes should a prebatout have?) Is it pronounced with the French accent where you drop the last t, or not?...

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Why don't you hold a raffle... er, contest on the words? Put the list somewhere (I can help!) and let people put their very own little wav files up. Then all you have to do is listen, politely eliminate the incorrect but highly amusing mistakes, and designate those who have come close to the heart of the matter! Of course, listening might be hazardous -- you could laugh yourself into trouble :-) Still, it might be another way to play this game?

Actually, you could probably raffle off chances to play -- I'll bet some fans would pay a buck to try their pronunciations out on you?

Accent ?

[(Anonymous)]

When my brain was going down random paths, I recalled that Liaden, like most other languages, has different accents. I presume that the Solcintra accent will be used ? So other pronunciations can be attributed to other accents ?

Bob

[zola.livejournal.com]

I have a question that occurred to me when I was re-reading the series.

What happened to Luken's children?