Lulu - one man's journey through the difficult terrain of blogs & netiquette
A process that seems to have taken
as long as time is now virtually complete.
My first experience with self-publishing utilised Lulu.com
As a mandatory unit at degree level, I'm glad we had the chance to call on the expertise of our tutor
Paula and also Louise Forrester (currently designer of
LiP Magazine) - many thanks to both.
Learning mostly online through practical demonstrations and experimentation on various related websites with self-publishing and online collaborative rubrics to assess our projects provided a new experience, for me at least. The printed handouts on prepress fundamentals for InDesign were very useful too, as most of the class had not used this software previously.
Like many others in our class, I found publishing our work online and making it available for anyone in the world to buy a very exciting aspect of the unit, and probably one which we would be keen to explore in the future. Publishing on Lulu however does put our work in with thousands of similar pieces, some interesting pieces and some rather less well put together. It would be good to find a more specialist online publishing site for our photobooks & photomags, however this would mean losing the huge numbers of visitors to Lulu. It's a trade-off I guess.
Publishing our work whilst we are still students brings about more questions about the established way of working in the media. Not dissimilar to the way in which anyone can report news events from their mobile phone, it feels as if we have somehow cheated and got somewhere we shouldn't yet be! This is great!
Independent publshing provides us with almost free-range over the design and content of our work. This is especially useful in my case, as I think I would struggle to get my book published with its less than mainstream content and relatively few pages.
The support of the group was very helpful, especially the ability to post questions to the online forums and answer other's queries very quickly.
It was vital, however to first overcome the contraints of POD websites. Most are designed to be 'quick and easy' for the majority of users. However this can lead to many frustrations with limited options for design, layout etc.
Luckily, with Paula's help, we were able to overcome these issues by designing in Photoshop for example rather than using the provided basic online editors.
Lulu.com has much more of a social side to it than most other self-publishing websites. Whilst the design of the site is at the very least questionable, it does for the most part work well if you have the time and patience to figure it out!
Though not always an enjoyable one, Lulu does seem to have worked for us this time. Now I just have to wait and see what the printed book looks like...there may be an edit to this conclusion!!
Paul Lincoln
December 2007Opinions expressed are those of the author and are designed for information purposes only. No liability shall be claimed for innacuracy of the above content.
