NaNoWriMo RE: Advice for Self Publishing with LuLu
| lizbeth9106 |
Lulu??
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Official Participant
Joined: Sep 9, 2010
Location: New England
Posts: 13
Posted on:
Oct 23, 2010 – 19 02
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Does anyone else on here sell their writing on Lulu?? I recently self-published a short ( *very* short, about 13 pages long) non-fiction “10 Reasons to be Homeschooled”, on there and have only now a month and a half later sold my first copy. I was wondering if anyone else has sold their work there.
Thanks, God Bless!!
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It’s very, very, very, VERY hard to sell on LuLu, mostly because when the average person heads online to buy books they run to Amazon and ONLY Amazon, so not many buyers go looking for other places to buy books. Your best bet is to get your book listed on Amazon. Lulu’s top sellers buy the Amazon option.
While books are very hard to sell on LuLu, chapbooks (any book with fewer than 75 pages) are nearly impossible to sell ANYWHERE LuLu or otherwise, so your 13 page chap book is going to be hard to sell no matter who you have print it for you. Chap books can not be sold on Amazon, unfortunately.
It can be done and there are folks who do it, but they build a personal website put a lot of time and money into advertising and marketing their website.
There is unfortunately a harsh reality about publishing that few people will tell you about: books DO NOT sell.
The average book (traditionally published) sells just 500 copies. (at the average 4% royalty of wholesale price that averages out to : $1,000 – $1,500 total pay for you the author for the entire life of the book) (The average self published book is lucky to sell 100 copies.)
Rarely does a first book make over $2,000 for it’s author.
The average life of a book is 3 months. (meaning the publisher pulls it off the shelves and stops selling it just 3 months after it went to print)
In order to keep you book in print past those 3 months it must become a “bestseller”.
In order to become a bestseller, you must sell an astronomical total of 10,000 copies in that 3 months time.
Most publishers DO NOT promote your book. The books that become bestsellers, had an author that put a lot of their time and money into marketing the book themselves. Most books, regardless of publisher, sell only as many books as THE AUTHOR promotes. This is true wither you publish via Scholastic Books (with it’s 100 new titles each month, including Harry Potter) or Twighlight Manor Press and it’s 10 books every other year.
Basically all a book publisher does is list your book in their catalog and hope that book stores choose to stock it on their shelves.
Books (such as Harry Potter — traditional published— and Eragon —self-published—) get famous, not from the publisher’s promotion, but from THE AUTHOR’S having gone out there and told everyone under the sun how great their book was and paying large amounts of their own money (we are talking hundreds of thousands of dollars of the author’s private pocket money, money they already had BEFORE book’s release, in the case of such authors J.K.Rowlings, Palini, Steven King, etc.) for advertising in such newspapers as The New York Times. Eragon, a self published book, became an over night best seller because of a single one day full page ad in The New York Times, that cost Palini’s parents over $14,000! Within a few weeks he had big name book publishers begging to sell the reprint editions.
So you see. What you the author are willing (or can afford) to pay for a marketing campaign, is going to determine how many book you sell, not who you choose for a publisher. Keep in mind that when you see ads for book, either in newspapers or on tv, those ads were paid for by the author him-herself, NOT the publisher.
Most writers, once hit in the face with the harsh reality of these facts, never attempt to write a second book, which is why there are so many one book authors out there.
On the other hand a self-published POD book never goes out of print and you earn 100% of the profits off the retail price.
If you are willing to promote and market your book hard enough, you’ll make more money in the long run by self-publishing, because you can keep selling your book for the next 10 or 20 years.
The problem is that though your self published book will be in print longer, than had you traditionally published – it’s still probably going to sell less than 500 copies in your life time. THAT is the harsh truth of book selling. Which is why if a writer wants to actually MAKE MONEY at writing they have to write 4 or 5 books PER YEAR for the rest of their lives.
If you are serious about self publishing, than you need to get a copy this self published book on how to self publish http://www.squidoo.com/TheSelf-PublishingManual It was one of more than 270 self published books by this author, and to date at 16million sold it is his top selling book. He is the world’s most successful self published writer and tells you step by step what he did so that other writers can have success at self publishing too
These sites should also help you out:
http://www.squidoo.com/PublishingMethods
http://www.squidoo.com/PublishingStartUp
LuLu has additional problems besides being a printer for self publisher (they are NOT themselves a publisher) they are a PRINT ON DEMAND printer, which in some ways is a good thing (you don’t have to by the standard 2,000 minimum copies up front) but in other ways is a bad thing (cover price is nearly double the traditional standard for paperback books).
What about LuLu.com? Are they a printer or a publisher?
The answer to that is they do both. They offer two services: one is free and the other you have to pay for.
For their free service, they are a print shop, which you, the author and publisher hires to print up copies of your book. In this instance, you are the publisher. You are self-publishing a book. LuLu is simply the printer.
For their paid services they act as the publisher, provide an ISBN#, print their name in the book as the publisher of the book, and market your book for you on Amazon.com. In this case, they are the publisher.
In both cases, you, the author, keep all copyrights, and all profits. In addition, in both cases you never pay the costs of having your book printed. LuLu.com is paid by the customers who buy your books. LuLu.com takes a commission off the cover price of the book, which varies depending on if it’s a hardcover or paperback; has b&w text or color pictures; is 4″ x 6″ or 8″ x 12″. For most books, they get $4 – $7 per book. You the author get to pick your own commission. How? LuLu’s commission is automatically in the cover price; your commission is determined by how much you decide to sell the book for.
Example:
Let’s say that for the book you have chosen, LuLu takes a $4 commission, yet you decide to sell the book for a cover price of $9.95. When a customer buys the book, LuLu takes their $4 and you get the $5.95 extra.
Should You Self Publish?
Only you can answer that question. There are hundreds of reasons to self publish your book. Likewise there are hundreds of reasons NOT to self publish your book.
I self publish, and people always are asking me if I recommend it to others, and you know what? They get shocked when I don’t! Why? Well, for me, self publishing works, because I write in a very tiny niche, for which there is almost zero interest and is next to impossible to find a publisher for, simply because my niche is “not marketable enough”. I write chap-books (too long for a short story, too short to be a novel), short story anthologies, plays, and niched non-fiction. So, for me it works because the sales market is so small, that I’m able to personally market to pretty much every one interested in the niche. It is pointless for me to even attempt to traditionally publish my stuff, because there simply is not enough demand to warrant it being mass produced.
However, if I was going to write something that would cover a wide audience, I’d send it out to traditional publishers, because they are better equipped to reach the mass market.
Of course the other thing is, I don’t as a general rule write novels either. There is a huge world of difference from self-pubbing plays, anthologies, and small niche non-fiction books, and trying to self publish a mass marketable fiction novel. Self-pubbing fiction is very hard to do and not recommended (by me) to anyone seeking a wide readership.
As a general rule, self publish only if you are writing one of the following:
a short story anthology
a book of poems
a technical journal (which will only be read by a 100 or so college professors)
a non-fiction niche market (alien abductions interviews; sky-diving how tos; etc.)
a local history book or local travel guide
a play
a memoir
a church/business/family cookbook
The reason for sticking only with these types of books, is because these are not going to sell many copies to begin with, thus traditional publishers won’t bother wasting their time on them. They’ll sell 10 to 100 copies per year at best, even with a traditional publisher’s best marketing team promoting it, and because of this, they are best suited to small press or self publishing instead.
So, if your book does not fall into one of those categories, than avoid self publishing it.
I do recommend, however, that you self publish a book, before you go on to anything else. It doesn’t have to be anything much, maybe just a 30 page book of poems which you will only hand out to your cousins at the next family reunion, and try to sell a few copies of off of your MySpace page. The reason I recommend this, is, because it gives you a first hand “feel” of the actual publishing process and will help you to better understand the inner workings of what a publisher does to get your book, typeset, printed, and marketed. Think of this “first book” as a sort of test run learning exercise to see if you really want to self publish your other books later on, and not as a book that will make you rich and famous.
Remember, when you self publish, you are very unlikely to ever become either rich or famous, and you will have an extremely difficult time traditionally publishing later on, due to the “invisible rift” that causes many editors to not look kindly on any author who ever self-published a book, regardless of their reason for doing so.
(IMPORTANT: Never “test run” a book which you plan to “later” traditionally publish, because once you’ve self published it, traditional publishing houses won’t republish it. It is very hard to convince them that they should REPRINT your book, if you didn’t sell thousands of copies within the first few weeks of it’s self published run!)
If you really want to get your book selling DO NOT rely on LuLu’s storefront. Instead write up and PLAN A MARKETING CAMPAIGN. This will change over time and should be rewritten at least four times per year (quarterly). You need to plan a marketing campaign if you want to be a successful publisher. Knowing your ideal customer is not enough; you must plan how you are going to get your business out there for them to actually become your customer. Research what other publishers are doing. How do they advertise their business? What bookstores carry their books? How did they get their books in their customers reach?
Also know that by self publishing your book and having hired LuLu as your print shop, you are now a small business owner and need to start treating your new job as a job and work at it every day to see it bring in an income.
Is self-publishing the same as working at home? Yes it is. You own the company and you run it out of your home. Self-publishing is a home business.
The most important part of starting any business be it a restaurant or a craft shop or a publishing house, is to have a business plan. If you do not have a plan, than you could easily get side tracked from your original goals and lose your focus. So step one is to sit down and write up a business plan. This is easy enough to do.
Business plans will vary, but most will include a list of the goals you want for your business: immediate goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, yearly goals, and at least one goal that says where you plan to be 5 years down the road. Once you have decided on your goals, next you need to make a plan as to how you should try to reach those goals.
Some businesses have a short five or ten page business plan; others may write up 30 or 40 pages, some may just have a one-page list. The length of your business plan is not important. What is important is that you have a plan that tells you where you want to go and how you will get there.
If you are serious about selling your self pubbed, LuLu printed book, your next step is to FIND A DISTRIBUTOR
Most publishers are not equipped with the ability to hire a sale representative to travel across country to visit each of the 100,000 plus bookshops and peddle your books to them. This is where a book distributor comes in. Distributors, take sample copies of your book and head out to shops promoting your books. There are dozens of book distributors out there. Some are huge national groups, other deal only with local bookshops, some deal only with libraries, while others deal only with schools. Your job is to research each of the distributors and determine which one is best suited to promoting your line of books.
Publishing is easy, selling marking, advertising, distributing, so you can get that first sale and keep sales coming in, is hard long, slow, and very expensive. It can be done, but know that it’s a full time job.
I’ve been self publishing since 1978, due to the fact what I write is very outside of the mainstream and no publisher in their right mind will touch it. I know self publishing very, very well, and it’s a lot of long hours and hard work.
And yes, I use LuLu btw, I’ve been with LuLu since 2005, I have several books on there, I have yet to sell a SINGLE COPY directly off the LuLu website. Every copy I have sold I have sold off my own websites.
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