"Seven bums and fourteen legs,
a brazen ecstasy which begs
the question some of us are asking -
is Peter Goulding multi-tasking?"

Martin Parker, Editor, Lighten Up Online

Monday, November 22, 2010

Messing about with Lulu

No, sadly not the ageless Scottish chanteuse, but the self-publishing book wizard.
It was Sean Lyons who first put me onto lulu.com. He said it was the easiest way to self-publish. Naturally I did nothing about it.
Then recently I ordered a copy of Jack Hayes The Spring Ghazals and lordy me if it didn't come from Lulu.
So for the past fortnight, I've been messing about with it. My authorship has now gone up from 2 to 8 in the past two weeks!! I've published my World Cup Diary 2006, World Cup Diary 2010, my Complete Community Voice Musings, A history of the Republic of Ireland Football team in verse, Poems and Stories from the arse end of the year and a new book of humorous poems, The six gifts of womanhood.
Now I don't expect anyone to buy them but what they are handy for is for giving out as Christmas presents. Maybe, say, if you wanted to give your husband a special present, you could publish your poems under the title "Poems for my loving husband Sanjay" and shove a picture of him on the front and it'd cost less than a tenner for a 100 page book. Cheapo Christmas present and he'll think it cost a fortune!

7 comments:

  1. sounds cool, thanks, may have a looky

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  2. I agree, it does sound cool. Would like to know more about how Lulu operates, though.

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  3. You are hilarious!

    I'm nervous about Lulu for some reason. I can't put my finger on it. I just get edgy about sending a manuscript to some website and out of my hands. I guess I'm too much of a control-freak to let it go.

    On the other hand, I think it's cool that you've done this with your other great works and I'd like to see some links.

    Oh, and well done for ordering John's book. That's great!

    Kat

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  4. Failed utterly, won't accept my word file or pdf - embedding fonts problems. Anyone got a printing press for sale?

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  5. Hi Michael, I actually had problems getting photos onto the cover. I used Word doc for the interior, set the Page Set Up to A5. It seemed to upload first time but I always had one failure on the "Make Print Ready File" before the second one accepted.
    Kat, will put up links when I get the proofs back (got the proofs back on one so far and I had to alter a few things (my fault-not theirs!)
    Dave, I'd say she's operating on borrowed time at this stage.

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  6. we-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-llll!

    Do you remember Eddie Large's routine about famous people trying to start their cars? I can't think of Lulu without thinking about a car turning over on a winters day.

    I keep thinking about sites like lulu - especially now you only have to pay for what you buy

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  7. DFTP - you know you make me wanna...

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