They say that everyone has a good novel in them, but without wanting to burst any bubbles, that’s not what we’re talking about today. Lulu (www.lulu.com) is one of many POD (‘Print On Demand’) companies currently at work on the internet, and its job is simply enough described. It’s a printer. You provide your book as either a PDF or a DOC file, set the details, and anyone can then buy a copy. Print On Demand means that you don’t have to pay any upfront fees, never have to keep a stock of books, and if nobody ever orders one, you’ve lost nothing except a bit of your time.

We’ve chosen to take a look at Lulu because it’s honest about what it does. It doesn’t promise to make you a millionaire, and it doesn’t pretend it’s a publisher, because it’s not. It’s a printing service, and doesn’t make any kind of play for your copyright. Indeed, upload a new project as being private, and nobody else in the world ever has to even know it’s there. It’s one of the few POD companies that even publishing cynics speak highly of: when a group of sci-fi authors wrote their own ghastly novel ‘Atlanta Nights’ to expose a particularly infamous US publisher’s purchasing habits, it was Lulu that they turned to when converting the awful manuscript into a book that the thousands of amused onlookers could put on their shelves.

To get started, you’ll need a decent sized document. The three basic styles of book you can make are perfect bound (look at any paperback), saddle stitch (smaller books) and coil (school jotter). These can be either black and white or colour; although needless to say, colour will cost your readers a small fortune. With POD printing, you don’t get to take advantage of bulk orders; it’s one book at a time, making the cost of your final book rather higher than you might like. Pricing is based on several important factors, starting with a base price for a book of your size, then being increased further by the amount you want to be paid for each copy sold (your royalty). One advantage of Lulu is that once you’ve got a book on the site, you can also turn it into an online eBook, where the prices come down considerably.

Making it sell
As you can imagine, fiction is largely a no-go area for self-publishing, POD or not. You can certainly create a book this way, but it won’t sell. Just take Atlanta Nights itself, a self-admittedly ghastly book, but one which quickly soared into the list of most popular books on a wave of gleeful authors and write-ups in everything up to the New York Times, and still only netted around 350 sales. POD fiction publishing is anathema to both money and readers.

However, you can certainly turn it to your own use. Say for example that you’ve written a new program, and want to make the manual available as something other than a pile of HTML files. A pre-prepared coil bound book is a much easier sell than having your users reformat everything for a local printer to take a shot at. Likewise, if you run a website, it’s a good way of offering up the archives – or potentially even having a look at a book you intend to submit for publication in the form you hope it will ultimately appear as. There are plenty of uses. As a first sale basis goes, the publications to consider are niche titles that people can’t get elsewhere.

Formatting your work
In Lulu’s case, everything kicks off with a free downloadable template. This plugs into Word and lays out your book in a form that will work, but probably not look particularly pretty. The most important part is controlling the margins and text per page, altering the default font to something more suitable to your own book, and providing a good looking title page and spine. By default, everything comes stamped with a Lulu flag, but that can be removed as you continue. Images can be uploaded straight from your computer and slotted into place: either something generic if you’re just making a book for yourself, or a full Photoshop-laced masterpiece in hopes of catching attention.

The wider world
ISBN numbers (note to pedants: yes, we know) are one of the few confusing elements of creating a book, and as such, get heavily worked over by vanity press publishers and scam-artists. In a nutshell, having an ISBN on your book makes it available to bookstores around the world. It does not however mean that actual copies will be on actual shelves – simply that anyone who goes up to the desk and manually orders a copy will be able to get hold of one. If you only plan to sell via Lulu’s storefront, don’t bother. They may not be expensive, but their overall usefulness is debatable. Lulu also offers a $149 ISBN service which will have your book listed on Ingram, and by extension, usually Amazon. Bear in mind that you only get a royalty for each copy of your book, not the whole purchase price, and people seldom break out their credit cards on spec, and you can see that you’ll have to be a genuine sales dynamo to make your investment back. Be sure you can.

On the virtual shelf
You’ll notice that we haven’t mentioned many of the individual steps of getting yourself in print, and really, there’s not much need. The actual process is easy enough, leading you gently by the hand from start to storefront. It could be with Lulu, it could be CafePress, or it could be any other POD company – some others may go through editors, more through ‘editors’ and some may try to charge you an upfront fee.

The key thing to keep in mind isn’t computing, it’s the laws of publishing. By going in alone, you make yourself an easy target for the scum of the universe to try and squash your dreams for a quick shot of cash. They won’t phrase it like that, of course – more likely you’ll be asked to invest in your future, or help share the risk or some other such nonsense – but this is the first law of writing: money flows toward the writer. If you pay to have a book printed, you know exactly where you are. Any copies you want to sell, you’ll have to sell. Usually that means selling to people you know, or at best, to an already receptive audience.

Making it work
That’s the part of the self-publishing market that has a real chance of achieving success – most of the big success stories you’ll hear, especially in the new POD world, genuinely define the term ‘exception to the rule’. Most self-published books sell a handful of copies, at best. If you think your work is marketable, spending a few pounds on a copy of the Writers and Artists Yearbook will be a bigger step in your writing career than a hundred potential buyers. If you don’t, what are the odds that you’ll sell any yourself?

This isn’t intended to put you off POD: used wisely, it can be ideal. With Lulu, you’re in safe hands. The worst that can happen to you is that you don’t sell anything. There are no upfront fees, you maintain full copyright to your work at all times, you provide everything from art to editing, ensuring that you get your book exactly as you specified (for better or worse) and you choose how much it goes on sale for. So whether you’re creating a best-seller or just a personal copy, you know that you’re always going to be in full control of how you handle the sales and marketing afterward.