publishing through lulu.... kids and teen books

Lulu is a reasonable digital printer. The costs involved make it difficult to impossible for you to get your books into many bookshops, as do the issues with quality and production times: but it does allow people to produce print editions of their books without involving publishers, so there's that.

I've found Lulu useful for producing print editions for my family and friends, and for seeing how my books would be when printed. But the costs, the quality, and the problems with distribution, are not to be ignored.

I'll move this to Self Publishing, where it should get a better response than in General Publishing.

Lulu is straightforward and good at what they do. What they do is print, with reasonably good quality, what you send 'em. So, basically, the quality of what you get from them really depends on you. I have produced a number of out-of-copyright hard-to-find books through them. Nothing of my own work, and it's largely a hobby exercise, but I enjoy it, and am happy with the results.

BUT, to get those results, you need to be damn diligent about your own editing and design production. Garbage in, garbage out.

Lulu has been around now for quite a long time, and they do what they say they do, pretty well.

caw

I think the economics of Lulu make them pretty close to obsolete if you want to reach the general public, but okay for personal and family project type stuff. They are basically an up-charge from Lightning Source with a more user friendly interface. Personally I would go for Createspace.

The main advantage Lulu has over CS is that they do hardcovers. CS doesn't--at least, not yet.