POD print-on-demand

Section 153 Entry 0001. Date: 2005 July 13 Wednesday.
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I'm planning to publish two books via POD (print-on-demand) in the next twelve months, one being the novel BAMBOO HORSES, which I'm currently proofreading, and the other being a medical memoir, CANCER PATIENT, which I'm writing as fast as I can live my way through the plot. (I'm rather hoping it has a happy ending.)

I've provisionally settled on lulu.com as my print-on-demand outfit because Lulu's entry costs are low (initially zero to sign up and get started, and for your initial investment of zero dollars you get some free space online which you can customize and, if you so choose, use as an outlet to freely give stuff away), because I don't need much in the way of hand-holding (I'm hoping to get away with nothing), and because one of the people associated with lulu.com was at one stage involved with Red Hat Linux (it's nice to have at least a vague inkling of where the people you're working with might be coming from.)

Also, the lulu.com approach strikes me as being pretty flexible and informal, which suits me fine.

At this stage, of course, I am a published novelist with a track record of twelve published books, and I do know how to do basic things like proofread. I also have my own web site, which is currently averaging about 276 hits per hour, which gives me a certain amount of foot traffic to which I can advertize my wares.

(This has really been a great morale booster in recent months, when I've been lying in bed with a chemotherapy drip running in my arm for hour after hour, thinking that, "Well, I may be here, temporarily deleted, but the web site is up there and running." Meaning that I'm still alive and well, after a fashion, out there in the masquerade of shadows which these days passes for the real world.)

I figure, then, that I've sorted out my product and my marketing strategy, and that I can afford the initial capital outlay. I haven't calculated the dollars exactly, but a lulu.com book with the all-important ISBN number costs ... the data is here somewhere ... don't hold your breath, this could take a while ... costs US $149.95.

Actually, to buy an ISBN via lulu.com costs you (at this writing, July 2005) US $34.95, but if you want a bit more then you pay US $149.95 for something called "ISBN Plus", which means that your book also shows up on the database of US book wholesaler Ingram, and it becomes possible for retailers like Amazon to sell your book.

I'm aiming, then, for "ISBN Plus" for whatever books I publish via lulu.com, and I figure that even the most extravagant publishing program that I could possibly put together in the next twenty-four months or so could scarcely be expected to cost me more than two thousand American dollars, an affordable sum.

(On top of a novel and a cancer memoir, I'm thinking of publishing the OCEANS OF LIGHT fantasy trilogy which I actually wrote back in the 1990s, plus a poetry collection under the title ARC OF LIGHT, plus a short story collection with the title THE SUCCUBUS AND OTHER STORIES, plus, possibly, the first novel in the projected TALES OF OOLONG MORBLOCK series, all this, conceivably, by July 2007.)

I'm more or less happy, then, with my product, my marketing strategy and my finance (as English teachers measure money, a couple of thousand bucks is not the kind of investment for which you need help from your bank), but I'm still confused about the mechanics of getting started.

Why?

Maybe because the primitive Third World Internet connections here in New Zealand have made it a bit frustrating for me to browse my way through the lulu.com site. To give you an idea of how bad things are here in New Zealand, I read an article by someone who writes about computers and was struck by the fact that he said that it is "normal" for there to be occasional outages in broadband connections.

That may be "normal" here in New Zealand, just as it's "normal" for the fire to flicker when the wind blows directly into the smoky cave where we're all sitting around trying to cook the chunks of moa meat which we just went and hacked from the carcass with our flint knives. But it's sure not "normal" in Japan, where my Internet connection is as solidly reliable, 24/7, as the local train connection.

(Here in New Zealand, the embarrassing truth is that Those Who Try can't even get the trains to reliably run on time, which is really pitiful given that there are so few trains - more than two, I think, but not many more than two - running on the city's toy train set at any one time.)

Add an element of fatigue and brain damage to Internet frustration, and then throw in the fact that the lulu.com site is not (in my considered opinion) a model of lucid design, and you end up where I am, which is puzzled.

So I've decided to plunge in and upload something.

For this purpose, I've chosen the long poem "Cicada Sun", which I wrote in my high school days, and which I plan to give away for free in public document format (PDF format - those documents opened by Adobe Reader) via the free space which I signed up for months and months ago, and which I haven't yet even looked at, far less personalized. Looking in my secret code book, I find that my "storefront link" is

people.lulu.com/users/
index.php?f
Homepage=123384

[Later I changed the above to:-

lulu.com/hughcook

... when I got round to personalizing my storefront.]

Anyway, the first step was to prepare the text of "Cicada Sun" so it would be ready to upload.

I did as follows:-

(i) Take an existing HTML copy of "Cicada Sun" and use my text editor's search-and-replace facility to strip out the HTML code. (My text editor is UltraEdit-32 from www.ultraedit.com.)

(ii) Run a spell checker over the resulting plain text file, just in case. My spell checker wants "Pinter's" to be "Painter's" and "Nazgul" to be "Nag" but is overruled. I decide to keep the New Zealand English spellings "grey" and "maths" (and a few others) rather than to opt for their American alternatives (e.g. "gray" and "math"), the reason being that this poem is, for me, a historical document, dating back to a time in my life before America had really impinged much upon me. (In the course of seven years spent in Japan teaching mostly American English, often with American colleagues, America ended up impinging quite a bit.)

(iii) Add in a "What's this?" note, a couple of URLs, an e-mail address and a little more publication detail.

(iv) Copy the plain text file into a Word document and format the result to my satisfaction.

(v) Open the Word file with OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 and use FILE -> EXPORT AS PDF to make a PDF copy.

(vi) Open the PDF copy with Adobe Reader to check that the bloody thing actually opens okay. (I've occasionally come across items that were alleged to be PDF documents where that basic step was obviously skipped.)

(vii) Just for kicks, listen to Adobe Reader (version seven) read some of the thing aloud to me (VIEW -> READ OUT LOUD -> READ TO END OF DOCUMENT). (When you still live in caves, scratching at eczema scabs and struggling with smoky carbon-based Internet connections, you can still be naively impressed by small things like computers which can read aloud to you.)

So far so good.

The next step will be to get online, maybe on Friday, and see if I can upload my PDF version of "Cicada Sun" to the lulu.com site and make it available to the wider world for free.

Section 153 Entry 0002. Date: 2005 July 17 Sunday.
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In the end I failed to do what I was trying to do on the lulu.com site, which was to upload a PDF file in such a way that it could be downloaded free by anyone else ... and maybe it's not possible to do that on the site.

However.

I did end up getting enthusiastic about pushing ahead with the proofreading of BAMBOO HORSES and (as soon as possible) uploading that novel (maybe within the next six weeks or so, depending on how I go).

I also managed to personalize my shopfront and open up my lulu.com blog.

And I found out a bit of technical stuff about covers: "If you upload your own image, files can be JPG, PNG, or GIF with a minimum resolution of 300dpi." This is worth knowing, as I'd somehow got it into my head that cover art had to be in TIF format.

I also found that at the upload stage there is free cover art available for a back cover if you don't want to design your own back cover. I've already done a front cover, which is maybe enough, so I might possibly go for a free back cover.

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