|
Ron Miller, a King George author, uses on-demand sites to publish some of his work. |
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.
Miller said he had so much fun using Lulu.com that he formed Black Cat Press to sell some of his titles that had gone out of print as well as classic science-fiction books whose copyrights have expired. He creates new cover art and illustrations for the latter, designs the layouts and e-mails them to Lulu.com to print. Orders can be placed either at blackcat press.com or Lulu.com.
"The space books are doing very nicely," he said. "I hit a chord with those. There are a lot of people who are space nuts, but the only way for them to get these books was through a used-book dealer--if you could find them. Now they can finally get to read them, and they don't have to spend hundreds of dollars to do it."
Miller also has helped Hal Wiggins, biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Fredericksburg field office, produce a field guide Wiggins wrote and illustrated with his own photographs called "Virginia Native Plants" using Lulu.com.
Going that route was a good move because the book focuses mainly on plants in the Fredericksburg area, and is regional in appeal, said Miller, who just finished working with Wiggins on a new book called "A Tale of Two Dams: From Salem Church Dam to Embrey Dam."
Still, Miller isn't planning to turn his back on big publishing houses entirely. Black Cat Press is a hobby; something he does as a break from writing his next two young-adult books, which are due to publishers by February. One is on digital art and the other is a biography of Cleopatra.
"Publishers take on a lot," he said. "When you look at Lulu.com, you think 'Gosh, I get to keep all the profits for myself.' But a publisher provides you with an editor, a book designer, advertising, marketing and distribution. If you self-publish, that's all on your shoulders."
To reach reporter CATHY JETT:
Email: cjett@freelancestar.com
