First impressons - lulu

As before, please keep in mind - anything I say in my first impressions is only an impression before actually committing to anything -including the upload of the actual manuscript. Results will be reported on down the line. I'm still in the process of deciding on things.

Lulu's been around for more than a decade now and seems to be doing really well. Publishing with lulu is free and is available both in digital as well as print format, distributing books on their own website, Amazon, B&N and Ingram from what I could gather. I'd say it could be considered a high-end self-publishing service, as it allows the user to purchase almost any service from formatting through editing to promotion. If you do decide to go with the purchase of such services, you will quickly realise that publishing a book on a professional level is very expensive. I don't really blame lulu for this - it's a very time consuming job that demands a lot of expertise and high prices for such are not uncommon. Thus to help you out, they do offer service packages that can get you the basic services at a much lower cost, which for a limited time seems to include limited promotion in the form of a press release that is send to a plethora of news agencies.

Sadly, the bundles don't apply to me well, becase I've already invested time and money to get the basic formatting done already, thus the packs are much less viable for my purposes.

... but some of the promotional tools still look tempting.

First impressions - Smashwords

Please keep in mind - anything I say in my first impressions is only an impression before actually committing to anything -including the upload of the actual manuscript. Results will be reported on down the line. I'm still in the process of deciding on things.

Smashwords is purely an eBook publisher with an impressive reach, covering  Amazon, B&N, Apple and a plethora of other retailers, including their own store. They don't seem to offer any paid services, sans a few DYI books (as far as I saw at least, I am fairly drugged on cold meds these days), but they offer a ton of free guides to publishing, videos and free literature. A good portion is meant for preparing your book for a Smashwords release, but they also do tips for marketing and the non-sense surrounding it.

As such, even if one would not want to publish and E-book, browsing through the free material Smashwords has to offer would not hurt, just to get a feel of for the industry. Personally, I feel that the owner overestimates the future growth of eBooks just a bit, but there's no denying that it's a rapidly growing market worth getting into sooner rather than later.

It's also worth noting that Smashwords apparently keeps a pool of artists one can commission for covers. As I'm not looking for one as of the moment, I have no made use of this service, but it's great to have a go to place when in need of a cover.

So what is this nonsense about anyways

In order to keep record of my writing endeavors, this exists now. Here I will try and jot down what I did how I did it and, maybe even why. My hopes and dreams. My aspirations and opinions. My everlasting love for cheese… may or may not be discussed here. My hope is that whoever finds this will learn from my mistakes. And joins in the cheese worship.

The current status:

I have a written manuscript. I have a silly story. I have already been rejected by usual publishers. I have the stubbornness of a granite block. And I have a very limited budget, but I already have a cover done. I’m currently in the process of choosing publishers. The selection was narrowed down to Lulu, Createspace and Smashwords. I will give my first impressions on all in the following posts.