Those of you who’ve perused my website’s main page with the tenacity of a caffeine-addled poodle with a telescope may have noticed that I sell my books using three different websites:
One is Amazon Createspace, a print-on-demand site that allows me to sell printed books directly through Amazon. Another is Kindle, Amazon’s digital bookstore. Middle Grade books don’t exactly sell like hotcakes on Kindle, but there are a few people who prefer digital copies.
But then there’s Lulu. I haven’t seen nearly as many sales through Lulu, and
I’m not surprised. Who wants to buy a book through some print-on-demand website they’ve never heard of when they can buy it through a reliable and familiar website like Amazon?
Even though it’s not quite as great for selling books as something like Createspace, Lulu is a fantastic tool for private book publishing that everyone who’s interested in seeing their words in print should take advantage of.
The biggest difference between Amazon Createspace and Lulu is that Createspace is used strictly for selling media. If you have a story or a song or some art that you’d like to make millions of monies selling, Createspace is the way to go.
But what if you want to produce a book that has meaning to you personally? What if you want to put your recipes into a cookbook to give to your family or make a book of pictures of your family and give it to a bunch of chefs? What if you want to take all of your love poems about Don Knotts and bind them together with a nice cover as a birthday present for your step-brother?
Lulu and sites like it allow you to sell books, but they also let you produce personal books, books you don’t necessarily want to sell. It’s perfect for personal projects.
If you’re not interested in selling your books, I recommend using Lulu to at least see your words in print. It sure beats using chalk to scrawl them on a penguin when the zookeeper isn’t looking.
Bob and the Cyber-Llama 