Lulu is only for someone who can properly format a complete book manuscript for publication -- headers, footers, pagination, margins, gutter, table of contents, section breaks, paragraph and heading styles, fonts, and so on, and with the technical skills to upload files and manage the other steps required.
I played around with their site yesterday - I have to say, it's a very good, functional website, but as you've pointed out Ken, you need to know what you're doing. I specifically started using a document where there would be issues such as chapter names at the bottom of pages, loads of orphan lines and widows which just look silly when printed, and I can see what you're saying - the time investment can be substantial, provided you know what you're doing to start with and that you pay attention to detail.
Following on from my posts over the past few days, after visiting many sites, we are not really offering any that others aren't already. We’re not re-inventing the wheel, but what we are doing as a company that comes from a strong custom publishing background is offer high-quality services to authors in important areas such as editing and design. We have a great, award-winning team, and we have recently secured the additional services of two excellent book editors with years of experience, and our editorial panel is also high-qualified.
In addition to the editorial, we have an award-winning art director that is working on inside page layouts, and an area that we will focus on intently is cover design. I am of the opinion that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you’re twice as likely to pick it up off the shelf and buy it if the cover design is enticing and representative of the book. Coming from a magazine background, I know how important covers are to the overall success of over-the-counter sales.
On the topic of printing – we have a reputable digital printing press that we use for smaller projects, but we are now also engaging in talks with our offset printers to undertake smaller print runs for us. We only work with ISO-certified printing presses, so all the books that are produced will adhere to the highest standards. To quickly address differences in pricing, it would have cost you $15.50 to print two books if we’d printed it (90 pages, perfect bound with full colour cover). Where you saved though, is in the area of design where you did that yourself, and couriering these books to you from the UAE would have been an additional $20 (approx).
At the end of the day, we’re just providing a service, providing more quality perhaps, than many others are offering, and we realize that we are not really going to make a dent on the US market purely because of the distance game. Why pay more to get stuff shipped from the UAE when you have these services in the US right?
The area that we will be focusing on as a result of this is to offer authors the opportunity of getting their books published in the Middle East, where such services do not exist, and there are two ways that we are thinking of tackling this:
- There is a massive Western expat community living in places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Jeddah, Riyadh, Manama, Doha, Kuwait City, Muscat, etc. The Middle East as a whole is starving for entertainment, and reading is a big pastime amongst expats, and the book shops are always looking for new, fresh material. We already have a distribution network because of our other business activities.
- Our reputation in the local market has been the quality of our Arabic team, which is why we are the chosen publishers for companies such as Chanel and Cisco in the Middle East on the back of this – the Arab world, especially in places such as Saudi Arabia where they don’t even have cinema, is very much geared towards reading. What we will look at doing is translate existing materials into Arabic (and we have an unmatched team in this year that does excellent translations), and get them printed for the regional market. Needless to say we have Arabic designers. This will allow authors in places such as the States and Europe to get their books published in a different language that will allow them to pass their work onto a new audience that they previously would not have had the opportunity of reaching.
In closing, these posts are getting longer and longer, I would appreciate it if the people involved in this topic could pop on to the site,
www.leadingbrandspublishing.com/bookshop, and just have a quick glance at the three models (under Getting Published) that we’re offering to our prospective clients. Please bear in mind that the site is not yet finished, and is being set up, but all insights and feedback would be greatly appreciated.
