Why I chose Lulu and what this POD industry is all about.

The second option held more promise. I read several books on how to start my own small self publishing company. For a few days I entertained thoughts about how nice it would be to be able to control every facet of the publication and distribution of my book. But in the end I decided I didn't want to have to invest all of the time and training required to become a publishing company. It was not just the extra costs but also that I didn't want to want to tax my life with even more time consuming exertions which took me away from writing and the myriad of other activities which fill my life. All of the extra work to run a business, extra tax headaches, new software and systems to be learned and all that extra stuff just was way more personal time, expense and effort than I was willing to invest.

The third option was the one was for me. That option was finding a print on demand (POD) publishing company who could very quickly and cheaply get my book published. After all I didn't want to spend a boat load of money on my first book. So the range of options in POD publishers were essentially cost verses ease in getting the book published. If I spent more and expected less profit from the book, I could find many POD companies who could get it done for me. If I spent less and expected more royalty money, then I would have to do more of the prep work myself. Again the overriding factor was the out of pocket costs for my first time out. So after having read a zillion blogs and web discussion forums, I found only a single POD publishing house that was head and shoulders and much less expensive than and easier than all the rest. That POD publisher was Lulu.

For the cost of $50, I found they could publish my book and get it on the shelves in the largest bookstores in the world, which is Amazon and Barnes and Nobles of course. I found people who had already done it through Lulu this cheaply and now for free. I still had not dropped my requirement for not having to spend countless hours and days in doing the prep work though. That's when I hit on the concept to record everything that it took, step by step, and turn that process into checklists. This way, any of my future books would be quick, easy to publish and very inexpensive. A cheap, quick and easy way to land my books on Amazon's shelves was worth the investment of learning Lulu's prep processes. With them I still owned the material of my book after it was published and since I set the price of the book, the potential royalties were as good as any self publishing option or any POD printing company. Better in fact than most of the other options. With Lulu I didn't have to do anything in order to get the money into my account, as I would have to do if I had started my own self publishing company. They just mail me a check.

So worst case I am out what I classify as throw away money and best case I end up with these step by step set of checklists and documented procedures for getting a book for sale through to Amazon and B&N.

As someone who had never before been a published author, I was totally bewildered and frightened with all of the potential pitfalls, technical specifications and unknowns in getting a book published along with all the uncertainty of how much it would cost me personally. You may be more fortunate than I was because you did the research and found this site before you even started to write your book. I hope this is true. But even if it is not, this site will tell you exactly how to get it published and available for sale on Amazon and B&N.

As an unpublished author I did not have any illusions that any publishing houses would ever be interested in anything I wrote. Even if it was the greatest book ever written I was confident publishers would have zero interest. Allow me to tell you why. It was hard enough before the tremendous impact of the POD technologies in the publishing industry for an unpublished writer to get a book published. But after the POD tsunami hit the industry you can forget about that dream completely. If you are a world famous person or an author who has a lengthy and established track record, then the traditional publishing industry is a well oiled machine and maybe the best route for you to go.

The reason is that traditional publishers use offset printing presses, which are the least expensive and highest quality machines to print books in very large volumes. But unless the publisher knows they can sell most of those preprinted books that they produce, it is financial suicide for them to publish an unknown author. Then the perfect storm occurred in the publishing industry. First Amazon.com came on the scene and did the same thing for selling books that Wal-Mart did to the retail industry. Amazon, in building such a huge volume based retail business cut the profit margins for the publishers to razor thin margins. Without the profit cushion that they had previously enjoyed, they did not have the finances to take flyers on unknown authors. As the POD technology took root in the industry the incentive for a publisher to take a chance with an unknown decreased even more dramatically.

POD publishers with their type of giant copy machine technology undercut the offset publishers for books that do not sell in huge volumes. How? They do it because they only print the book and ship it to Amazon after someone has ordered it. There is no cost to carry inventory. Particularly inventory that has an unknown amount of sales waiting for books stacked in a warehouse somewhere. This may sound like terrible news for you as a prospective author but it is actually just the opposite.

With POD publishing you can now very inexpensively have a book published. Not only that but you can build a track record of sales going the POD route so that if you do write that best seller, you now have the market data to actually have a conversation with a traditional offset publisher if that's what you seek. In reality POD has opened up possibilities to the many where it used to be only for the select few. You can now write a book, have it published and see if the world is interested in what you have to say without hocking everything you own. Without having to wait for "no thanks" letters from the traditional publishers, that is, if they even bother to respond to your emails and letters at all.

They say everyone has one book in them. If that is true then this site could be very useful to all the everybody's out there. So let's get that book of yours on its way to the shelves at Amazon!

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