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Hugo award-winning author Ron Miller of King George County uses an on-demand publishing company to produce some of his work. Date published: 9/16/2006 By CATHY JETT By CATHY JETT Author/illustrator Ron Miller's agent was having trouble interesting publishers in one of his book proposals because they couldn't visualize how it would look. So Miller, who lives in King George County, decided to use a new service that's becoming increasingly popular. He e-mailed a mock-up of the book to on-demand publisher Lulu.com, and ordered two copies for the agent. "It really helped," said Miller, who has an international reputation for his award-winning science and sci-fi books and illustrations. "I thought, 'Holy smokes! I should do this As he and thousands of others have discovered, new print-on-demand sites such as Morrisville, N.C.-based Lulu.com are making it easier than ever to self-publish everything from calendars featuring family snapshots to the next Great American Novel. All they have to do is upload their material, select a binding and pick the amount of profit they want to earn on each copy. Lulu.com calculates the retail price, which includes production costs. Printing a 6-inch by 9-inch hardcover book, for example, runs $14--or $15 with a dust jacket. Lulu.com also will list books, calendars and other products on its Web site if desired, and takes 20 percent of the profit on sales. "I couldn't be more pleased with the quality," said Miller, whose illustrations have graced the covers of such magazines as National Geographic and Sky & Telescope. "I have some books printed by Lulu.com sitting next to books in my office that were printed by a New York publisher, and they look just as good." Miller discovered the company while surfing the Web for information about on-demand publishing. As the name implies, on-demand publishers print items only when they are ordered. Bob Young, a former chairman of open-source software company Red Hat, founded Lulu.com in 2002 as a way to apply some of the principles of open-source software to the publishing industry. The name comes from an old-fashioned term for a remarkable person, object or idea. Today, Lulu.com has more than 50,000 titles available online, and authors publish around 1,500 new titles a week, according to company spokesman Stephen Fraser. The company also publishes and sells such things as software, DVDs, calendars and photobooks. Recently, a group of Lulu.com programmers also launched Lulu.tv, a video-sharing site.
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