Print on demand - Part Two

The nitty gritty of using free online publishers to market your students' work

by Gary Clites

Originally published in the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s Adviser Update, Summer 2008

Print on demand is a fairly new technology that gives users the ability to produce and sell books, CDs, DVDs and much more via the Internet. It can allow anyone to become a publisher, including a communications teacher or journalism class at little or no cost.

In the last issue, I talked about publishing my father's book, “Ridgeley and Carpendale, West Virginia From 1750: A History,” using print on demand technology and discussed the potential uses of POD for communications teachers. This time, a look at the process of publishing books using the online system.

There are a number of POD publishers available online, the largest being Lightning Source, a company associated with Amazon.com, the massive online bookstore. Most operate in a manner similar to brick and mortar publishers, in that before beginning a project, you request a quote to set the cost of publication, the price adjusting based upon the number of copies purchased. Further, most are designed to sell copies in bulk to the publisher, requiring you to front the money for books.

One POD publisher operates somewhat differently, and in a way which may appeal to most educators. Lulu (www.lulu.com) allows you to publish whether you plan to sell a thousand copies or just one. Further, if you choose to sell your product at cost, Lulu takes no profit beyond their stated printing price. If, however, you do plan to sell at a profit, Lulu expects a 20 percent cut of that markup.

In the case of my father's 196-page book, selling single copies through the Lulu Marketplace (more on that later) at $15 a copy, he makes a profit of just over $5 per book. Pretty good. 

The first step in publishing through Lulu is to set up an account with the company. This is completely free and should only take five or 10 minutes. Once you are a member of the "community," you can begin creating projects. I set up two, a 6 X 9 softcover of my father's book and a 6 X 9 jacketed hardcover. Our plan was to sell mainly the paperback through outlets like Amazon, local bookstores and on Lulu itself, but we knew that some relatives and friends would want a hardcover. Since there is essentially no cost to using Lulu, why not offer that option.

The most common type of file uploaded to Lulu is Microsoft Word. The Web site offers a template for each type and size of book it publishes (and there are dozens of variations in both black and white and color). Once you've downloaded the template, you copy and paste your content into it, and you are halfway to completing the interior of your book. Careful editing and re-editing are suggested at this point as Lulu is a completely computerized system. No one will be looking over your project before it publishes.

You also need to remember things like the blank pages that are standard at the front and back of most books, the fact that some things (the title page, dedication page) are traditionally printed on the front (thus odd numbered) sides of pages, etc. Adding page numbers can be particularly tricky as you probably won't want every sheet of paper in the book counted, but will want to paginate from the beginning of the book's real content onward.

Further, traditionally page numbers do not appear on chapter heading pages. Dealing with this requires breaking the document up into multiple sections and setting up pagination within each section.

Luckily, Lulu offers a copious Help section to make this and other parts of the job easier. There are, for example, clear instructions available on how to handle pagination along with FAQs on pretty much every subject you could imagine. Better, free live chat help is available 24 hours a day. When I got stuck working on a revision, a Lulu assistant was there to help me in seconds.

Once your interior content is ready, you'll want to work on the cover. Lulu offers two main options here: a two piece cover wherein you build separate front and back covers for the book and they match the spine; or a one piece wraparound cover that flows around the book. In either case, the site offers templates for covers that make the job easier. They also offer pre-made covers you can simply change the copy on and use as your own.

Being creative people used to building our own publications, most journalism teachers will choose to create their own. For my father's book, I created two wraparound covers in In Design and turned them into PDF's to load onto Lulu's system. It is important you remember that the cover is essentially a full-bleed document which will be trimmed in the production process. The site provides information on required trim margins.

Once all your files are created, you click on the name of your project in Lulu, feed in information on your book (including sales copy that will later appear on Web pages offering your books for sale), and upload first the interior copy file then the cover file to their site.

Once the files have transferred, you click a button and a feedback PDF comes back looking just as the pages and cover will in production. Once you approve them, your product is available for purchase. Before you inform the public, however, it's advisable that you order a galley copy to check for problems. Despite my own copy editing skills, when mine came, I found I had misspelled a word on the back cover. How embarrassing if that'd shown up in the local bookstores in my home town.

Once everything is loaded and approved, you need to decide how you are going to sell and market your product. Lulu will sell you, as the creator, copies wholesale (with serious discounts for bulk purchases) which you can then sell locally. Further, they will automatically set up a sales page for your book in the Lulu Marketplace through which you will earn full royalties.

If you want to market your book through online bookstores like Amazon.com, Borders.com, etc., and to have it available as a special order at bookstores nationwide, you need an ISBN number (International Standard Book Number) and to be listed in Books In Print. Offering your product for sale through the major online bookstores is exciting, but each gets their cut, radically lowering your profit margin. In the case of my father's paperback, the profit margin drops from over $5 for copies sold through Lulu to $1.66 for copies sold via Amazon.

For $100, Lulu offers two services (you can read the specifics online) which generate an ISBN number for your book and get it listed in all the right places. One thing, you cannot buy a distribution service till you've uploaded your files, but then you must add the ISBN to both the cover and copyright page and upload the new versions as a revision. Further, once you finalize your project with an ISBN number, you cannot revise it again without incurring an additional fee.

All of which sounds really complicated, and there is a serious learning curve in becoming a POD publisher, but the product is well worth the effort. Print on demand offers you and your students the opportunity to create anything you can think of, from a pamphlet to a DVD, and make it accessible to the whole world at little or no cost. It is the kind of technology that creative journalism instructors will use to publish exciting new products that none of us had even thought of before POD.

© Gary Clites, 2008