This time I try to turn my external world blog into a book via lulu.com and in one afternoon I have successfully created a book.  Am I now a legitimate published author?

I heard about lulu a few months ago through reading the booksmashup F2 blog.  After crashing and burning on Blurb, I decided to give lulu a try.  Again the process begins by registering with lulu.  I noticed in the menu, transforming a blog to a book was not explicitly listed.  I chose to make a hardcovered book.  Lulu then gave me a choice of sizes, 6×9 inches or ~8x~10 inches.  I chose the smaller format.  Lulu then opened an upload dialog box and suggested that the user change the page size to 6×9-inch in whatever editor the user is going to use.  This was actually rather nice.  Instead of re-inventing the wheel and giving the user a text editor, lulu uses a file the user provides.  Blogger is nice in that it allows you to copy and paste text from a blog, without taking the sides of the blog space with it.  This made for swift cutting and pasting of my entire blog into MS Word.  From there I was able to reformat my entire blog in 3 mouse clicks:  select all –> font Arial –> size 10.  I added in a few lines between entries and did a little proofreading (the proofreading actually took the better part of the afternoon) to complete my book file.

Uploading was pain free.  After I uploaded it, lulu tranformed my creation into a 2 up layout ready for the printing press.  The only place the processed hiccuped was during the creation of the cover, which was done using an online tool through Lulu.  It took about 10-minutes for the tool to fully load and once it did load, it worked very smoothly.  I created a simple cover and send it to print.  After this, lulu allowed me to adjust my book availability, set my intellectual propetry settings, and setting my pricing.  Yes, now the whole world can buy my lousy book for $20.97 hardcover ($5 goes to me) or $3.75 download ($3.00 goes to me).  The book is searchable, but you can’t actually buy the book because I’ve set some permissions for access.  A second edition will be published from home and put out to the public to see if anyone actually buys it.

I ordered a couple of copies of my new book.  I’ll let you all know how it comes out when then arrive.