Lulu book

For my Lulu book, I reworked an older book. The first book I did on Lulu, Roast had a lot of issues. I didn't know much about any of the Adobe programs. I wasn't really knowledgeable about the world of self publication. I just knew that I wanted to put out my work. I did everything in Microsoft Word. I used the formatting from Lulu's website combined with what I had read about "industry standards" on various websites. You know the ones. They're the sites with the random Googled GIFs on books opening and feather quills scrolling across the page. They have too many words and read as though the author spent so much time considering book formatting that they had no clue about actual web formatting. They're the ones you should really trust.
So, of course, I trusted them. I took their advice on spacing and page breaks and page numbering. I made my pdf.

It looked horrible. There was so much white space on the page. The font was gigantic. But, I figured, maybe something is lost on the screen. Perhaps, when my finished book makes its way from Massachusetts, it will be peachy keen and I will be a happy man.
It didn't work out. But, it wasn't so bad that I reeled. OK. So I reeled a little bit, but I was also overcome with the excitement of having a professionally perfect bound edition of my work, that I just approved it and wrote off the issues. I didn't know enough about any of the programs I could have used to fix it to worry much about it anyway.

Luckily, as it turns out, the size I chose for the book is no longer available for distribution with Lulu and I had the opportunity to go back in and correct the issues that arose with the first version. And so that's what I did.

Utilizing InDesign, I fixed the page layout. I changed the font. I fixed the kerning and the white space. I ensured that every "chapter" start - for this piece, actually every "new POV start" - began at the same place on the page. I changed the size from a 5x8 to a 6x9. It also dropped from a 109 page paperback of short stories to a 74 page paperback of short stories, lowering the price (since I am selling this one) to a much more reasonable price point.
I also changed my cover. Slightly. As I was going in anyway to change the size of the cover and the barcode to reflect the new price point, I used my brand new Photoshopping skills to chnage the text, add additional text to the back cover, and add text to the spine. Which - wapow! - I did correctly on the first try.

Here is a direct link to the new version. I have it currently as "direct access" which allows you to pass out links for people to view or purchase it without having it available to everyone via Lulu's search engine. It's a good thing to do if you don't want to release it before the proof, but still want people - like this class perhaps - to be able to view it. The download on it is priced because I was already selling both versions, but since it's a direct link currently, I'll try to get back in there and change it to zero if people want to download a copy of the pdf. But it's a limited time offer. Once I approve the book for distribution again, I'll be pricing the download again. So act now!


As a bit of reference, here's a side by side comparison of the old versus the new: