Day: February 22, 2009

Readers here know some of this already. But let me recap.

I’ve used Lulu, a Print On Demand vendor, that will allow any book to be ordered on Amazon and such. The upfront cost is zero. Which, of course, why I liked it. Lulu offers an e-book option. The printed copy will be ~$40+ and the download is 5$.

In a prior effort, for example, I printed 35 copies of my blog book last year. It was a book of all my blog posts for a year.

(It was a vanity effort. I gave the first copy to my Mom for mother’s day. She was tickled. I sent friends copies. I’m told it made a great doorstop! LOL!!)

(One friend gave his two kids each a copy in lieu of a Christmas present. He had me write a personal note and sign it as a “first edition” of a future famous writer. He tells me that you had to see their expressions. He later relented and gave “real presents”. He goes into spasms of laughter every time we talk about it.)

In my spare time, I wrote a novel: “It Started In Church – October 19, 1962”. 700 pages; just under a half million words. An hour a day every morning for a year. It’s an alternative future history of what I might have been, if the Cuban Missle Crisis had ended differently. Khrushchev pushes the button, bad things happen, and, children practiced, I and my classmates wind up in a shelter. And, stuff happens from there. All that illustrates how we have “low expectations” for children. Yeah, I know corney. It’s a story I have had in my head for 50 years. Better late than never. I wrote the novel more as a goof, but I got tremendous feedback on the Frugal Squirrels web site. The more I got into it, the more it took on a life of its own. I’m very pleased with it. Now, it’s my opus.

“It Started In Church – October 19th, 1962”, or more simply “CHURCH 10●19●62” will have a link through http://www.itstartedinchurch.com/ into Lulu.

The novel on Lulu is about 600+ pages which has to cost more than $40.

That wouldn’t be SOOOO bad, BUT, (there is always a big butt), the print is too small.

I printed it at Kinkos for 50 bucks, and the result was very readable. Two iterations thru Lulu are much smaller. The first iteration was very light and barely readable. (Right Wacki?) The second iteration was better but, based on feedback from our “Rutgers Basketball Game” friends, it’s STILL too light and small. So Lulu is a little cheaper, produces a better “finished product”, and can get it into Amazon. BUT, Lulu is not without it’s challenges. Lulu has an absolute page limit of 700 pages for the size I’d like to use and 740 for the size I tried.

Argh!

So kicking and screaming, I’m forced to split the book into tow volumes. Bump up the font size and try some more.

Thus far, I’ve spent $150 and don’t have a great result.

ARGH!

Lessons Learned: What I have learned is that for “specialty texts”, like IT specialty topics, where you could sell copies at 50$+, that you could have a working business model. I think that it would be possible to “produce” topical texts that the big publishing houses couldn’t address.

Just learning about a different kind of “technology”. Next I’ll be consulting on scribes and amanuensises.

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