Lulu or Smashwords?

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inkkognito

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I have a guidebook that I am going to self-pub because it's very timely and I have a built-in audience and platform. Originally I was planning it just as an ebook but since it's a guide, I'm thinking people might want to bring it with them. Thus I have looked at both Lulu and Smashwords and am feeling pretty overwhelmed. Any advice on the following is appreciated:

-Which is a better ebook medium, Lulu or Smashwords? SM seems to be in more "stores" but not Amazon yet, while Lulu is at Amazon but seemed limited overall.

-Can I do the print book at Lulu and the ebook at SM if they are better? It looks like I can and like they need separate ISBNs, but I'm not 100 percent sure I'm interpreting that correctly.

-I cannot do frequent updates, correct? That would be the ideal since things at this destination change, but it looks like that would affect the ISBN so I would need to do a totally new edition.
 

thehairymob

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Yes you can get the printed book from Lulu and use SM form the ebook if you want. Not sure of the quality of Lulu's ebooks but their printed work is quite good.
 

wilhem spihntingle

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My experience with Smashwords (e-book) has been excellent. Going with Createspace for the print version. SM also offers Wordclay as a print partner. No expereince with Lulu. With SM, the most important thing is getting the MS in the correct e-book format. SM provides a guide on how to do this. Good Luck
 

malone

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I found the Smashwords process limited and a bit amateurish. I have my InDesign-formatted book, my pdf from Indesign, an ePub file generated by InDesign then tweaked in Oxygen, and Smashwords wants a .doc file? Seriously? I had to go download Open Office and copy paste the novel into it and save it as a .doc. The Smashwords conversion came out looking more like a highschool report than a novel. Maybe I could spend alot of time in Word working on the formatting, but after all the work I put into Indesign and ePub file, I'm not enthused at that idea. I'm not charging for my book anyway, and put in on Smashwords thinking the service was like Scribd and just for sharing writing. I wasn't aware they listed the stuff on stores.

They did handle the page breaks nicely in the conversion. When I made the epub myself I had to save each element I wanted on its own page as a separate document then export the book. Smashwords seemed to handle that for me. There's no way to go in and tweak the XML through Smashwords, though, which turns me off of them.

But you can update the content through Smashwords. They even give readers the option of which updated version they would like to download.
 
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