Alan Hubbard's Storefront

A Note about Lulu

Whether you are interested in my writing or not it is worth browsing the Lulu site. The RevoLulution? Well, I think so...

Book POD (Print On Demand) arose from technical advance: electronic storage and control allowing the effective printing of individual copies as required. It was originally offered by a few companies within the traditions of mainstream publishing. The publishing house would make a genuine judgement (unlike the Vanity publisher) before accepting a manuscript. The manuscript would then be edited, designed, and formatted by the publisher, to be stored as an electronic file or files from which individual copies could be printed as required - a relatively small and honest charge for these services being made to the author. The publisher - there were only a few small houses originally offering POD - would then market the book, since his as well as the author’s profit would depend upon sales.

Unlike all previous POD publishers, Lulu does not select, edit and format the books it publishes, and deliberately eschews any charge to the author (other than for copies SHe may purchase her/himself). It offers completely free publication, but authors must write, edit, format, upload and market (to any extent they wish) their own manuscripts. Lulu will not assist in this other than to advise about electronic file formats and to provide and host an online storefront for the author. It makes no value judgements about copy - other than to rule out the illegal. Authors may withdraw their publications from Lulu at any time they please to publish them elsewhere. As to pricing, Lulu nominates a production cost, to which the author adds whatever royalty SHe may wish to receive - from zero to infinity! This becomes the price of the book as ordered from Lulu, to which will be added the cost of postage and packaging. (Manuscripts can also be offered as PDF downloads.) Lulu then takes twenty-percent of the royalty the author makes on any copy printed.Though conventional marketing via outside mail order and book shop sales will make an ISBN number essential, direct mail-order sales from Lulu do not require one.

Lulu free publication extends over music CD’s, comics, comic books, DVDs etc. Of course content is variable with a huge amount of rubbish making browsing the site somewhat frustrating. At the very least, Vanity Publishers should have been bankrupted overnight, though for reasons of author timidity or genuine inability to format for themselves, they will probably linger on.

But Lulu offers far more than that. Over large areas of non-fiction it is already publishing much that is worthwhile but probably would not have otherwise been published, as well as an increasing amount of material that would almost certainly have eventually made ‘mainstream’ publication. The fiction and poetry on Lulu is obviously much less likely to be up to the standard of the ‘mainstream’ - assuming ‘mainstream’ publication guarantees quality! - but some of it will be. You must judge for yourself into which category ‘Alan Hubbard’s fiction’ falls.

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Very simply, Lulu enables any writer to create his own book, whether as a personal entry into, or as a rejection of the commodification of everything which typifies and possibly dooms our age!