Season of Blood~New Cover!

I did up this new cover for Season of Blood. So what do you think? Well, at least I had a good time doing it.

As an update for the Lulu.com post. I still think it has good and bad features...

Good... Easy to work with. The live help was wonderful when I had a stupid question. The mature audience screening is very good. Projects can be deleted or unpublished without much trouble. Tracking sales is accurate (so far as I can tell) and fast. Ordering was not hard, even though they don't use paypal. If you buy a download but don't have time to download it right then, Lulu holds it in your account for you.

Not so good... the print pricing is high because of initial set up costs. I haven't yet found a way to link two accounts easily. The storefronts are difficult to cutomize if you don't know html code very well. They don't use paypal.

I ordered Curse of the wolf in print so I will soon be able to say how that part of the process is to work with.

Shannon
frantically procrastinating at finishing my contest entry, but very happy to have fixed my printer... listening to old rock tonight which makes me want to writing Dead Men's Nails.

A New Playground! I'm playing ar Lulu.com

After bringing up a discussion with a friend over the positives and negatives of self-publishing, we both came up with Lulu.com, which seems to be a leading self-publisher. Before we could conclude one way or another, I offered to publish a short story with them. This way we can determine what the reality is of their process.

I cleaned up my 10K manuscript of "Curse of the Wolf" and set it up on Lulu. My initial thoughts about Lulu are very positive. Sign up is free. The website is easy to navigate. It's also easy to set up a store front to list all you have available. The uploading process takes only a few minutes. The author is given almost absolute control over the details. I was able to easily upload my own cover art. The site also allows for offering a blurb and a preview of the work.

So far, I only see a few things that I see and down sides including... The pricing of the print books is quite high because of printing costs. The base price for a 300 page book is over 8 bucks even before the author adds on any for a royalty. I know some people may still be willing, I'm not likely to buy a self-published book that costs more than one published by a NY publisher. The only other negative that I see right now seems to be the sales and marketing. The author is completely responsibility of marketing the work.

Well, time will tell, just how good or bad an option Lulu.com will be.

Shannon