Following the announcement in the forums that his cookbook Beyond Soul Food: Modern American Heritage Cuisine was under consideration for an Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award for excellence, I asked the author to share some of his self-publishing experiences with the Lulu community. We hope you enjoy this author-to-author advice.

-Glenn, Lulu Community Forum Manager

How I Rediscovered Myself through Self-Publishing by Richard Petty

Writing a good cookbook can be a daunting endeavor, even for a seasoned pro. My name is Richard Petty. I am a successful chef and now the author of Beyond Soul Food: Modern American Heritage Cuisine, which was recently awarded an honorable mention as a finalist for the 2012 Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award for excellence in publishing. This recognition is a high distinction for first-time authors and publishers.

Like most people, writing a book was always a dream of mine. Since I was between jobs I had the time, but the challenge was how to do it. For my book, I chose some of my favorite recipes from my long career as a chef, included a little history about the origins of each dish, and presented it in an easy-to-read format suitable for both experienced and novice cooks.

After about 36 months of hard work, I decided to use the technology and services offered by Lulu to publish the finished product. I worked closely with the Lulu team to create a clean professional look, but that was the easy part. Once I had my completed book, I began thinking “How do I market a cookbook?”

I needed help, so I enrolled in courses. One that stood out from the crowd was Inktree Marketing. They specialize in small press book marketing and have a downloadable course including step-by-step plans for retail readiness, formatting, and tips on proven marketing techniques. From that course, I learned that self-publishing is a business. You are not just an author – you must also be a marketer and salesperson. You must also be willing to invest time and money publicizing your work. In order to reach a broader audience, I invested in a marketing campaign by purchasing the Lulu Marketing Pack that included the US Review of Books, which resulted in a very positive review.

With a great review in hand, the decision was made to submit the book for any awards and reviews for which it qualified. Lots of complimentary copies of the book were also given away to the media. There were book signings and silent auctions for charity events where attendees could bid on a four-course dinner with wine pairings prepared by the author that included a copy of the book and an eReader.

I also enlisted the assistance of Steve Harrison, a publishing coach, who made it all happen. Without his guidance and direction my team and I would not have been able to do all the things required for success.

Sales were achieved by focusing on exposure rather than direct book sales. To spread the word, I did Internet radio shows, and I was invited back twice for two different shows. This strategy paid off in that the media are always looking for good stories and sometimes they have deadlines to meet, so reporters’ connections were used to pitch my cookbook – including a recent pitch to the Dr. Oz show for a healthy cooking challenge.

These are some of the techniques used to gain exposure for Beyond Soul Food: Modern American Heritage Cuisine. One of the most important things I’ve learned is that you really need a business plan. Without it you will not reach your goals. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and build a team around yourself. As a result, my cookbook has been on the Amazon Best Sellers List – Kindle Edition for over 21 weeks.

Happy publishing and good luck on your projects!

About the Author

Richard Petty was fortunate to be born into a family of great cooks in the American Midwest. Later in life, he discovered a passion for cooking while traveling in the South that eventually lead him to the California Culinary Academy. Following his studies he worked at One Market Restaurant (San Francisco), Pinot Bistro (Los Angeles), the Beverly Hills Inn, and Wolfgang Puck’s Café. Prior to authoring his first cookbook, Petty was Executive Chef at Reign Restaurant in Beverly Hills. For more information about the author, go to http://www.beyondsoulfood.com.

To get your own copy of his award-winning cookbook, check out Chef Petty’s Author’s Spotlight page on Lulu.com.

The Lulu eGames provides an opportunity for student entrepreneurs from all disciplines to present their business ideas in a competition format.  Students, either individually or in teams, compete for prizes totaling up to $30,000.  The competition includes several rounds of judging each spring where participants present executive summaries, business plans and prototypes for their ideas.  Bob Young’s support of entrepreneurs in the Triangle has led him to make a donation to the eGames for the next five years.  In recognition of his gift, the eGames are now branded The Lulu eGames and will serve as a great opportunity for us to build our brand on campus and in the local community.

The Lulu eGames has 3 different competitions:  New Venture Challenge, Design & Prototype Challenge and Arts Feasibility Study Challenge.

The final round of judging for all of the competitions was Monday, April 30^th.  The winning teams were announced at the Awards Banquet that evening.  Our own Bob Young served as the keynote speaker for the event.

Many thanks to the Lulus that served as judges in several rounds of competition:  Swapna Manne, Arjay Hinek, Anna Davidson, Rachel Braynin, Ryan Bloom and Tom Bright.

To learn more about the winning teams, please visit http://ei.ncsu.edu/lulu-egames-winners-announced/

10 years ago our founder and CEO Bob Young had a vision that would change the publishing industry forever. Spawned from his own frustrations traditionally publishing his autobiography Under the Radar, Bob foresaw that “there had to be a better way to publish.” He wanted an open, affordable, and public solution that aspiring authors could use to share their knowledge and ideas with readers more easily than ever before.  Thus in 2002 Lulu.com was born.

Since 2002, we have been working hard to tear down barriers of entry for publishing and help authors sell more books, and we’ve been succeeding. Here are just a few of our most important milestones in the last 10 years:

2002: Lulu.com was founded
2003: Lulu’s first best-selling author publishes and holds the title for three years.
2004: Publicity was on the rise for Lulu.com. Site traffic more than tripled.
2005: Lulu offers publishing services (editing, formatting, etc). We also began globalization by adding a marketplace for the UK.
2006: Lulu expands international reach by providing our site in six languages Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian.
2007: Lulu introduces the Lulu studio making photo book and calendar creation available. Lulu wins the Web 2.0 Award for Books and becomes the first place where users can publish a single ISBN for a book.
2008: Lulu sees 38% growth over 2007.
2009: Lulu adds over 200,000 eBooks to its catalog and sees more and more traditionally published authors such as John Edgar Wideman turn to Lulu.
2010: Lulu opens doors to developers and businesses with the release of Open Publishing APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces).  Lulu becomes one of only seven companies able to distribute to the iBookstore. The Wall Street Journal names Lulu one of the “Stars of Self-Publishing.”
2011: Lulu simplifies eBook creation with a new free ePub converter that takes a word doc to eBook in minutes.
2012: Lulu raises the bar in self-publishing again with a new eCommerce platform and major site upgrades for registration-less checkout, and a faster-than-ever publishing experience. Lulu becomes one of only 20 companies invited to launch an app with Google’s new Google Drive platform.  The Lulu One-Click Publishing app takes works from collaboration to published in one-click.

We started small by offering basic print-on-demand services and over the years worked up to being able to distribute author content all over the world in both print and digital formats. In our first 10 years, we have partnered with some of the biggest names in the industry, such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, and Google in a effort to make Lulu the definitive one-stop shop for all your publishing needs.

Since our beginning, we have been leading the self-publishing industry and we do not plan to stop anytime soon. We will always strive to provide the best self-publishing solutions for our author base. We greatly appreciate all the support we have received from our authors over these past 10 years. We thank you from the bottom of our heart for choosing Lulu for your self-publishing needs. Without you we would not be here helping to pioneer this amazing and new industry. Thank you for the past 10 years of success; we hope to bring you many more.

We hope you’ll help us celebrate our 10-year anniversary by taking advantage of our site-wide sale. Simply visit Lulu.com to see your savings coupon!

Cheers,

David K.

• What was the best piece of advice your mom ever gave you?
• What is your favorite thing about your mom?
• What is your favorite memory with your mom?
• When was a time that your mom saved the day?
• If you could give your mom a superhero name, what would it be?
• If you were going to write a book about your mom, what would the title be?
• What successes have you had in your life because of your mom?
• Why are you thankful for your mom?
• What is something that you’ve never told your mom, that you think she would be happy to hear?
• Create your own!

On Wednesday of next week (5/16/2012) we will pick our favorite entry and award the winner with $100 Lulu bucks. Happy Mother’s Day!

A less-known fact about Sendak was his distaste for eBooks. If you’re trying to find “Where The Wild Things Are” on your NOOK, you would run into a problem: none of his work is available in electronic form. Sendak was pronouncedly opposed to eBooks — going as far to tell Stephen Colbert last year, “I hate those eBooks. They cannot be the future. They may well be. I will be dead.”

Even though he staunchly opposed the form, other authors working on children’s books have readily embraced it. Right now on Lulu, you can find great electronic children’s books like OwlCat: The Cat Hoo Thought He was an Owl, Gunna’s Adventures – Gunna Daydream, and Gino The Giant Slayer.

Children’s authors have used eBooks to not only spread their work farther than print, but to also enhance it. Many have chosen to create special features that help make their book more interactive. Some have even used new technology to make older works more fun. A version of Alice in Wonderland that came out for the iPad allowed readers to have Alice grow and shrink depending on how they moved their tablet.

This is all not to say that children’s books need to be augmented to keep children’s attention. As Sendak demonstrated, all you need is a great story and a wild imagination. Still, as more and more readers are raised on eBooks instead of print books, some think it would be a shame for Sendak’s work to get lost in the transition.

In a Mashable article titled Maurice Sendak Had No Love for EBooks, But They Would Love Him, writer Lance Ulanoff says, “with Sendak gone, his legacy may fade along with him unless future generations can access his fanciful tales via colorful eBooks.”

Whether you believe that or not, it’s nice for authors to at least have such a variety of formats to chose from when they publish.

What are your favorite Sendak quotes, characters or memories?

You have worked hard writing, editing and publishing your book. Now, show off your accomplishment by boasting about it on a brand-new t-shirt of your design.

We are hosting the first-ever Lulu Author T-Shirt Contest. What do you want your author t-shirt to say? Enter your submission for the tagline on the shirt. Tomorrow (May 11) is the last day to enter, so get your entries in now. You can have up to 15 entries. Then, the voting round begins, so tell your friends, family and readers to come vote for your tagline. Voting lasts from the 12th-16th. The five shirts with the most votes win. As a heads up, we will moderate the entries that make it to the voting round, ensuring that they are family-friendly.

Winners and Prizes:

The people who submitted the top five taglines will each receive a free shirt with the tagline they entered. Each winner will also receive a Professional Book Cover Design Service worth $450.00 USD.

Enter now by clicking the image above and enjoy!

*Contest is open to the US-only.

We have created a comprehensive explanation of the top 10 reasons why your eBook was rejected and posted it in our Connect Forum.

There is more information in the Connect Forum post to explain each of these, but here are the top 10 Reasons in case any of these look familiar to you:

1. Styles, NCX are missing
2. Headings improperly ordered

1. Title link/entry improperly styled
2. Improper capitalization
3. Metadata mismatch
4. Incomplete metadata
5. Poor image or cover image quality
6. URL/email on cover or description
7. Title/author name unnecessarily duplicated on your cover
8. Page numbers on the Table of Contents page

And, since we fully understand that most people don’t speak our eBook jargon, the post also defines and explains:

1. What is an NCX?
2. What are headings?
3. What is metadata?

To kick off the month, we pose a question: What’s the last thing you want to read after publishing your pride and joy? A bad review, right? We hate reading them too, but we know that, much like sunburn and forest fires, they are preventable! The remarks below are from actual Clarion ForeWord and Kirkus Indie reviews, with identifying details removed.

“… the book yearns for a good editor. It is rife with missing words, punctuation errors and other grammatical mistakes that impede the narrative flow and distract the reader.”

“It’s not merely a matter of how polished the prose is; rampant sloppiness inhibits rhythm, fluidity and pleasure that might otherwise be derived from the narrative.”

“Syntax is convoluted to such a degree that sentences often require multiple readings.”

“Ultimately, frustration wins out as the writing proves too rudimentary for even the most disciplined reader.”

“Teachers, in particular, may be bothered by the numerous grammatical and usage errors in the text. …young children may not notice, but they likely will be learning (or reinforcing) bad habits.”

“ [The] imagery is spirited and strong, … but the majority of his work is cluttered with clichés, odd phrasing, and typos. Some of the poems use overly poetic phrasing, and a few of them feel slightly inauthentic to the writer’s voice. Occasionally, the line breaks seem awkward, and it’s clear that the words have been arranged to support the rhymes. … The text is riddled with grammatical problems, such as incorrect capitalization in the title, tense issues, and gratuitous apostrophes.”

Reviews like these are disheartening, but they go to show that, even for children’s books and poetry, having a skilled editor go over the manuscript is crucial for a book that you want to be successful. A lack of editing shows that the author didn’t care enough about it to do the hard work—and if the author didn’t care, why should the reader?

Ready to start polishing your manuscript? All Lulu Editing services are on sale this month!

We recommend starting with an Editorial Quality Review; this service provides an objective, analytical review of your text by a professional editor, who will then provide a sample edit and suggestions for going forward with a full copy edit. Request a free consultation for more information about Lulu Editing services!

Selling your self-published book through Lulu and other online outlets feels good. Your book is now available to anyone, anywhere in the world just by downloading or ordering it through the Internet. But there might be something missing. What about being able to eagerly browse the shelf at your local independent bookstore and coming across your book there?

Independent bookstores have considerable trouble stocking self-published titles. First, they’re not often able to sell the book back to the self-publisher if the product doesn’t sell. As such, bookstores need to be pretty sure the book is going to be purchased before they buy it.

But fear not! There are quite a few ways to get your physical book into bookstores, just by starting small. By forming a relationship with your local bookstore, presenting yourself as an author with a stake in the community, independent booksellers are more inclined to take a chance on your title. Even offering to sell a few copies of your book at a steep discount (and at a loss), just to gauge the market, and to prove to the bookseller that your books do indeed sell, is completely worth it.

While the eBook market is growing, the majority of readers still rely on physical books, and many still shop and browse at bookstores.

Another tactic to getting your self-published book into bookstores is by holding a successful reading at your local bookstore. By packing the house and selling more than a few copies of your book to attendees (a percentage of the sales going to the bookstore itself), you can demonstrate the value of your product to the store. While it’s all very personal and grassroots, these kind of gestures are what get booksellers interested in selling self-published books.

Once you’ve established a reputation with one bookseller, its not a given that your book will be in demand at other stores, but it’s possible. Still, for anyone looking for that feeling of genuine satisfaction when you see your book on the shelf, neatly wedged and bounded by its alphabetical peers, a few creative steps are all that’s needed to make it a reality.

But a bookstore doesn’t have to be the be-all end-all for marketing your book in person. Lisa Jennings, author of Seven Splinters, has this advice for a non-traditional marketing campaign,

“Have a long chat with yourself about your goals for your writing career and who you want to read your book, write down a game plan, tell yourself ‘I can do this,’ and then set a date for your first book signing and work towards that goal. Pick a location appropriate for your book’s targeted audience (does not have to be a bookstore), call and negotiate an event. If they turn you down, shake it off, and try another venue. There are options. Be creative and open minded, untraditional.”

Lulu author David Jones made inroads with local media,

“I found if you research your local radio/television stations website, sooner or later you come across a contact that is willing to speak with you. Local interest stories tend to work on slow news days. Afterall, these people have time to fill within their daily programs and local interest peices are easy to fit in.”

Another path to promotion is by printing some posters for your book.

Anyway you spin it, promoting a work takes energy and creativity. But, seeing as how you’re already a writer, you probably have those qualities in abundance.

Is it ever too early to start publishing your own books? We think not. We see talented, young authors use open-publishing platforms to publish every day.

Instead of waiting for a publishing house to take a chance on a 14-year-old’s novel, teens are publishing on their own (with their parents help). A recent New York Times article described the attitude of some of the youngest self-publishers, “The young authors themselves, raised in an era of blogging and equal-opportunity Twitter feeds, take the notion of self-publishing in stride.”

Parents fund their children’s work, and, sometimes, actually make their money back. Either way, parents view it as part of the learning and maturing process. A Pennsylvania superintendent, whose teenage daughter self-published a novel, said: “What do you do with something you’re proud of? You want people to see it.”

Some established authors are more skeptical of these young authors.

“What’s next?” asked the novelist Tom Robbins. “Kiddie architects, juvenile dentists, 11-year-old rocket scientists? Any parent who thinks that the crafting of engrossing, meaningful, publishable fiction requires less talent and experience than designing a house, extracting a wisdom tooth, or supervising a lunar probe is, frankly, delusional.”

While I won’t argue against the difficulty of writing fiction (I can testify to it), I would challenge Robbins assumptions about young writers. Several famous writers got their start while still in their teens.

Arguably the most prominent young author is S.E. Hinton, who wrote The Outsiders when she was only 15 years old. Another young author was Christopher Paolini, whose Inheritance Cycle has sold more than 33.5 million copies worldwide. Paolini wrote the first book of his series, Eragon, when he was also 15. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was only 18. Anne Frank wrote her tragic diary when she was only 13.

When did you first know you wanted to write? What was your inspiration? Which young authors do you most admire?