End of the Line for Lulu

For several years I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of Lulu.com for those wishing to self-publish a small number of volumes of their lifestory or memoir. I’ve posted several times about my experience publishing my preschool memoir, The Albuquerque Years on Lulu. 

Over the past five years, many friends and students have followed my advice and lead, using Lulu to publish their projects. I’m now recommending Amazon-owned CreateSpace, the no-fee Print-On-Demand provider of choice. Let me explain why I’ve removed The Albuquerque Years from Lulu’s website.

Without asking for my permission or notifying me, Lulu converted my document to ePub format and uploaded it to the Apple iStore and the Barnes & Noble digital catalog, setting the price at $2.99.

That was not okay with me! If that isn’t illegal, it’s certainly unethical. I immediately removed it from those catalogs.

I was never given the opportunity to review the conversion for formatting errors. The Albuquerque Years includes over two dozen embedded photos, which are notoriously difficult to position in ePubs. When I finally discovered how to download the ePub file, I noticed that the pictures do display between paragraphs, but not always between the ones they are relevant to. It needs some work before I re-release it, probably via Smashwords.com, as a free download.

I never added a “royalty” markup to the book, intending for any interested readers to purchase it at my wholesale cost, which has risen from about $2.79 five years ago to $3.99 today.

To my surprise, tens of unrelated people opted to purchase a paper copy. Today, if the book were still listed on Lulu, the “retail” price would be $7.99. I’m relieved that nobody (including me!) has ordered a copy since this outrageous inflation began. I certainly don’t want anyone thinking I caught the greed bug.

A LiveChat customer service agent (Lulu does not offer the option of phoning them directly, toll-free or otherwise) fed me some corporate line about “the stated current manufacturing price”, but was unable to explain why my wholesale price was lower. I can’t blame him. He’s just doing his job. I refuse to support the executive attitudes behind his explanation.

The free eBook (pdf) dowload link disappeared.

I intended for the pdf version to be free, as it was for over four years. Just before I “retired” the project (I discovered you cannot delete published projects), I discovered that the link to download the free pdf ebook was missing. I have fixed that. The link to The Albuquerque Years in the right sidebar now connects with my personal server for free digital downloads. (Click here now to get your own copy if you don’t already have it.)

Lulu’s pricing has become unpredictable.

Over the past year or two they have begun sending out a steady stream of “special offers” like 10% off, free shipping, 20% off, third book free, etc. Although I’m a die-hard bargain shopper, when I’m ready to buy a book, I don’t want to feel like if I waited another week, the price would drop, and I especially resent having retail prices inflated to cover this system.

By contrast, CreateSpace offers consistent pricing far lower than Lulu’s, free phone support, and they scan your uploaded document for typos and punctuation/grammar errors. Wow! The volumes I’ve seen coming off their presses are first rate in quality. Forums are full of great recommendations. Jonna Ivin is delighted with her experience using them to publish Will Love For Crumbs (see her guest post on this topic). I plan to upload a project myself to give them a whirl in the near future.

Write now: if you haven’t already done so, visualize a completed volume of your life story. It may take the form of a collection of individual stories or a memoir integrating those stories into a unified account. You may be writing more about family history. Perhaps your book will include lots of photographs. Let your vision grow and pull you forward. Set up an account at CreateSpace to add magnetism to that goal. 

Gift from the Heart

Are you among the growing number of people searching for ideas for more personal, low-budget gift ideas for people on your Christmas or Hannukah  list this year? Many are motivated by the sagging economy, others by a desire to cut down on frivolous consumption and a general shift toward sustainability.

One gift you can give, in place of or in addition to others, is the gift of story. If you already have a pile of life stories and you’ve been thinking about pulling them together into a volume, you have plenty of time to pull it together and place your order by Thanksgiving or shortly after to ensure delivery before Christmas.

If you don’t yet have a pile of stories, you still have time to write several. You could write a personal story for each recipient, recalling a favorite memory of that person and why they are special to you. You might write humorous or poignant stories about your own life or perhaps shared ancestors.You can include essays about your beliefs and values. The list is endless.

Many years ago Thelly Rheam, the original Story Lady from California’s Cardiff on the Sea, began writing short vignette stories documenting her life and lessons she learned, planning to distribute stories she’d written through the year to family members each Christmas. The year she began, she gave each child and grandchild a binder with labeled dividers for each decade in her life and an assortment of stories already filed. In subsequent years, they received envelopes with additional stories and instructions on where to file them in the binder. She has set aside funds and made arrangements for the collection to be printed in bound volumes upon her demise.

Writing a memoir, a rewarding though complex undertaking, is one way to organize your stories, and but it’s far from the only way, and no single memoir can encompass all the stories that come to mind.

In The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing you’ll find oodles of ideas for organizing collections I refer to as story albums. These can range from a random assemblage of miscellaneous memories to an compilation of family recipes including the story of each, or a composite of photos and the stories surrounding them. This khelpful book covers all the basics from inception of the idea to writing tips and prompts and layout tips for self-publishing.

Publishing options abound. High-end photobook publishers produce gorgeous full-color volumes, but options for accomanying text are limited, and price soars as page count rises. No-setup fee Print-On-Demand services like CreateSpace or Lulu,  are economical alternatives for commercially printed and bound volumes if black-and-white print is adequate. They can also handle color printing, though at a much higher cost. For special projects, you can print pages at home or a copy shop and put them in binders or similar alternatives.

Thinking outside the box, they don’t have to be printed at all. You could make your own eBook in pdf format, using one of  the free pdf “printers” such as PDF24. Smashwords is a free service that coverts print documents to Kindle and other eBook reader formats.  Or you could use the free Audacity software to digitally recording  yourself reading your stories for an audiobook. Going one step further, you could use the free Windows Live Movie Maker to  combine those recordings with photos and turn them into a movie. Similar applications are available for Macs.

Due to limited space in this post, I can’t expand on individual options. If you have questions about specific ones, please leave a comment and I’ll cover them in a future posts.

However you go about it, give your family the gift of story, for  their reading pleasure and to preserve a legacy of your life.

Write Now:  write a story to share with  at least one person as a gift this holiday season.

Financial Costs of Publishing a Memoir

Few topics are hotter among aspiring memoir writers than the debate about the value of going public with your story. Most of the debate centers around the issue of upsetting family and friends. That is a valid concern. Far fewer consider the financial cost, and far too many authors end up feeling discouraged and disillusioned as they bathe in red ink. Let’s take a look at the facts.

Publishing costs vary from one individual to another, and depend on a combination of your skills and your publishing strategy. For example, for The Albuquerque Years, I had the skills to do my own editing and layout and create a professional looking cover myself. Then I uploaded the files to Lulu.com and have finished books available without investing a single cent.

In contrast, I know people who have spent $2000 or more on professional editing and layout services, cover design, and press preparation. Some spent another large chunk of cash on a press run of several hundred or a thousand books and promotional aids. One friend invested over $5000 by the time all the prep, printing and publicity was done.

Is it worth it? For me it definitely was. I never planned to make money on The Albuquerque Years and didn’t add any royalty mark-up to the price. I purr like a kitten with a saucer of cream when someone orders a copy, and a gratifying number have done so.

According to a post on “Sales Statistics” in the blog How Publishing Really Works, average sales stats for most individual books, especially self-published one, are plummeting — hardly surprising, considering the glut of new titles. According to this post, in 2004, Publisher’s Weekly reported that only 83 of more than 18,000 iUniverse titles published that year sold more than 500 copies. It goes on to quote iUniverse VP Susan Driscoll’s admission in the New York Times that in 2008 most iUniverse authors sold fewer than 200 books. Author’s House titles did even worse, with an average of around 54 sales per title.

Let’s do the math. The least expensive package available on iUniverse right now requires the aspiring author to invest $599. Editing, promotion, and other services are available at additional cost. If you sell 200 books, that basic investment works out to $3 per book. It’s not easy to discover the royalty structure on iUniverse, but if you exceed $5-$6 per book, you’ll probably price it out of the market. If you add the cost of professional editing, you are unlikely to break even at the 200 book level.

If you need to pay for editing, layout and cover design help, even with a no-cost Print On Demand (POD) option like Lulu.com or Createspace.com, you’ll have to sell a huge pile of books to break even.

So, where does that leave you? If you feel compelled to write and publish a book about your life, go for it. Go for it with gusto. As you write, keep these factors in mind:

Forget any idea of making a profit. Focus instead on the pleasure of completing a project that will prove satisfying for the rest of your life. If you lose money, consider it an investment in personal education and gratification.

Write primarily for personal satisfaction. Think like a Visa ad: “Editing, $1200. Proof-reading, $300. Layout, $500. Holding your dream in your hands, Priceless!"

Be realistic in your planning. Don’t spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on editing services in the blind hope they will help you sell a book unless you can afford this as a personal indulgence or training. It may pay off occasionally, and it may help you land an agent and commercial publisher, but if you do land an agent and publisher, your per-volume royalty will average around $1 per book, and you are unlikely to get an advance.

Keep hope alive. Even knowing that the chances of having your book hit it big and sell hundreds of thousands of copies is akin to that of winning the lottery, some do. Yours could. Dream big, plan smart, and learn everything you can about marketing books.

There is a back door around these costs. Form a collaborative with other writers, local or on the web. Trade proof-reading services with trusted and discerning friends. Brush up your layout and formatting skills. (The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing has a chapter to help with this.) Join a writer’s group or take a class to improve your skills and get feedback on your plot, character development and other story elements. Use the online templates on Lulu or CreateSpace to design an attractive cover.

With these economizing measures, your writing skills will improve and you can have a book you’ll be proud of, your family will cherish, and you can promote as much or as little as you like. However you publish, please let me know you did it, so I can celebrate with you.

Write now: do some research and come up with a balance sheet on what your anticipated publishing cost would be with various alternatives. Then devise a plan for getting your story into print.

Write-It-Yourself Gifts

The holiday season is approaching approaching like a freight train, and legions of people are looking for inexpensive gift ideas this year. Here’s an idea for you: Give the gift of yourself.

If you have already been writing life stories, this may be the perfect year to compile an anthology of your stories, lay them out nicely in a single document, and upload them to Lulu.com or Amazon’s CreateSpace for printing. You can produce a fully professional volume in your choice of hard or soft cover for a fraction of what it used to cost. For example, a 220 page paperback in the standard “trade” size of 6" x 9" lists right now for $6.25 base price on Lulu.com.

I used Lulu.com last year to publish The Albuquerque Years, a memoir of my life as a preschooler. It is 88 pages, full of photos, a slightly larger, wider page size (7.44" x 9.68") to accommodate the pictures and it sells (without any markup) for $6.29 on the Lulu website. You can also download a free eBook version there.

If you are primarily interested in creating books for your own use as gifts, or for order at cost by family members and friends, I recommend that you work with Lulu. They will convert your file to pdf format for you (although you can easily do this yourself with the free, downloadable pdf conversion utility, PrimoPDF), they have on online cover creation utility if you need help with that, and they allow you to list the book in their catalog without adding a markup for royalties if you wish. You can even allow people to download your book as a eBook for free from their website.

CreateSpace also allows you to obtain copies of your book with no set-up fee, and they may be even less expensive than Lulu. I say may be, because quite frankly, I find CreateSpace confusing and a bit intimidating. I set up an account, but did not easily find information on pricing and related matters. Even though it is confusing, I do recommend CreateSpace for projects you want to sell commercially with a royalty. The direct link into Amazon is probably worth the hassle, and I have heard good things about the quality.

There are other Print-On-Demand services, but these are the only two I know enough about to comment on.

If you don’t have a pile of stories ready to be compiled, you may prefer to do a cookbook with favorite family recipes. Write a short story with a quick memory associated with each recipe, and include Cooks Notes about menus using the recipe, special modifications you make, who especially likes it, and that sort of thing. I haven’t checked this on CreateSpace, but on Lulu you can order your book bound with a comb binding, a nice option for cookbooks. The advantage of using Lulu is that you can select page sizes other than letter-size as you’d get at a local copy shop.

Since you can include an unlimited quantity of photos and other artwork in a Print-On-Demand book, you could also create an annotated photo album. Lulu can print in color as well as black-and-white, though the cost per page is significantly higher.

If you need help with layout to get your manuscript ready for conversion to a pdf file, I give step-by-step instructions for everything you need to know in the final chapter of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

So, there you have it — ideas for write-it-yourself gifts, and a referral to a production partners to make it happen. Get those fingers flying while there's still time, and delight the people on your list with a one-of-a-kind, write-it-yourself gift.

Write now: an outline of contents for a gift book for one or more people. But don’t stop with the outline. Keep your momentum going and create the file.

It's Never Too Late

In January I wrote about the Follow Me Home Initiative that involved teaching senior citizens how to use computers. That's a topic I know something about. For several years I was president of the computer club at our local senior center, and I helped launch the club’s popular class offerings and taught several classes. Most of my computer mentoring time lately has been spent with lifestory writers, and it’s thrilling to see how successful some are at turning to computers for telling their stories at ages many would not think possible. Several deserve special mention.

One is Paul Ohrman. Two and a half years ago, Paul signed up for a lifestory writing workshop I led at the Monroeville Public Library. He made a commitment to have the story of his first 85 years written by his 85th birthday, twenty-two months later. Paul had never used a computer, but after his wife showed him how to turn it on, within two weeks he had mastered margin changing, centering, changing the font, and all sorts of wonderful things many people never venture to try. Nobody taught him. He just clicked around and tried things to see how they worked.

Paul met his deadline, though it took another couple of months to finish the layout so he could order copies of his book for family Christmas presents. You can see the finished product, and even download it as a free eBook at Lulu.com. It's definitely worth a look. By the way, Paul got hooked on life story writing. His second book, about his World War II experiences as an Army photographer in the war zone, is well under way.

Grandma Julia is another amazing example. She lives in the Philippines and left a comment on the blog about Spelling, which has attracted attention from around the globe. She is ninety years old, and just took up blogging. She writes eloquently, with great passion, in English, her second language. I urge you to pay her blog a visit. Her tales are timeless, and heart-warming.

Aunt Ruth is another success tale. She had been using her local library for e-mail for several years before she decided, at age 89, to buy her own computer. Uncle Walter’s health was failing and it was becoming increasingly difficult to find time to spend at the library. We found a good buy on a laptop, perfect for her tiny apartment, and placed the order. A friend helped her set it up. She quickly discovered that she can have a virtual afternoon in Paris on a whim, listen to opera, and have all sorts of adventures that had become difficult in person.

Last, but certainly not least, is my father. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that he has more cool tech toys than I do. He spends a good part of his time taking digital photos, some of them digital stereo. He’s not at the top of this list, because he's been using computers longer than the others. He became an Atari addict when he found one at a garage sale soon after he retired twenty some years ago. Today he is taking increased personal responsibility for keeping his own system tuned up, because My Brother, the Computer Guru is very busy. So, even though my father has been using computers for a couple of decades, his interest in staying on the cutting edge, and continuing to learn new things, is a great example.

It’s never too late to learn something new — unless you think it is — and learning new things keeps your brain healthy and growing. Writing is one of the best brain exercises, and learning new things about your computer while you create a written legacy of your life is icing on the cake.

Write now: about your experience learning to use computers, whatever your age when you began. Write about how you keep learning. How do you feel about learning new things, and about technology?

The Season Is Upon Us

Sometime in the next couple of days I’ll have to venture out of my lair and into the commercial sphere. I know things will be changed. The Halloween decorations will be gone, replaced with red and green Christmas decor. It’s that time again!

This brings a couple of lifestory-related thoughts to mind. One is to urge you to write about holidays past. The focus right now is on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

You don’t have to write whole stories if you don’t have time, but as you think of them, jot some notes. Remember those index cards I keep harping on? Keep a few with you for this purpose. You might include a title line (which may change when the actual story is written, or not be used at all if you incorporate the memory in another story), and perhaps a few words or sentences to jump start the flow when you get back to it. Story idea lists are another option.

The other thought relates to gifts. A book of your stories would make a stunning holiday gift. If you haven’t started yet, it may be ambitious to envision one hundred polished pages printed by Lulu before December 25. If you already have a pile of stories, you may be able to weave something together by then, following the guidelines in Chapter 11 of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

Grandchildren may be among the most appreciative recipients, especially if the stories are about your happy memories that include them. They love to see lots of pictures, with themselves prominently featured.

If you need help inserting pictures in your stories, turn to page 264 in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing and follow the instructions. I do suggest you be generous in the sizing, especially if you are working with standard 8½ x 11 inch paper. It’s difficult to see details in tiny pictures, and they tend to look lost on the larger page. My experience with The Albuquerque Years proved beyond a doubt that it’s far better to avoid the temptation to resize the picture in Word or OpenOffice and use a photo editing program to resize it to the precise size you want in your document. None of the pictures I edited in the final document printed well, and I had to redo them, “the right way.”

There’s more to the gift angle than just your own stories. Nearly all of us have relatives who are so full of stories, everyone keeps urging them to “write those stories down.” They keep looking away and muttering. Wrap a copy of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing for them and place it under the tree. I know of several instances where this has worked to get the ink flowing. A typical comment:

Thanks for sending the copy of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. It was just what I needed to get a sense of how to get started and go about it. My wife and kids are thrilled that I finally got off the dime and urging me to stick with it. Thanks to you and Sharon for the nudge.

You better believe my little heart went pitty-pat when I read that unsolicited testimonal in an e-mail. Few things are as rewarding as confirmation that your writing hits the target.

Write now: about holiday memories through the years. Did you have an especially memorable Christmas? Get the gift of your dreams? Do any holidays stand out as flaming disasters? Write stories, jot ideas on index cards, or expand your story idea list. You needn't be limited to memory stories. Write about your reaction to the ever-advancing onset of Christmas. Remember when stores weren't decorated until after Thanksgiving? What about the super-sizing of gifts? Expound on your pet peeves and joys.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Project That's Finally Done

TA-DAH! The Albuquerque Years is finished!

This is the last in a series of posts about my experience with Lulu.com as I published The Albuquerque Years, a memoir of my life as a preschooler. The saga began with The Project That Just Won't Quit on August 30, and continued with Part 2 on September 2. In my Lulu Project Update on September 22, I reported on the result of my initial order.

Today, I posted the link to the book's own Lulu page. It will remain in the left column, just under the link to The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. I have chosen to list The Albuquerque Years with no price mark-up, so anyone who wishes to order a copy as an example of Lulu's product quality can do so at nothing more than the cost of printing and postage. Anyone curious to see an example of a project brought to completion by the process I outline in The Heart and Craft, can do likewise. I include a short afterward with an overview of the Lulu Experience.

Finishing this project has been a thrill on at least two levels. It's always rewarding to see something through to completion, but when it's the story of your own life, it's especially rewarding. I have a much stronger sense of the depth of my life's roots, and where the story began.

Beyond that, having found my way through the Lulu labyrinth, which you know from earlier posts wasn't all smooth, I'm in a much better position to give reliable advice to any who ask. And I hope you will. Here's a summary of what I learned:

• Use styles to keep your headers and other content consistent. (See Appendix 3 in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing for detailed instructions on using styles in whatever word processing program you use.)


• Once you decide on a page size for your finished book, set the page size in your word processing program to those measurements, and adjust margins. (See Appendix 3 as above.)
  


• Use a photo editing program to resize any photos or other graphics you use to the exact size you need in your manuscript. Save them in jpg format (not tiff) at 300 dpi in RGB color mode, not grayscale. Use the grayscale mode even for black and white pictures. It's also advisable to convert your color pictures to grayscale and adjust accordingly before you switch them back to color mode. They will look like grayscale and be printed in grayscale on the Lulu presses, but experience showed me that the pictures set in color mode printed better than the grayscale one. Ditto with jpg/tiff.


• Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to resize a graphic inside your word processing program. I guarantee you will not be happy with the results.


• Unless you are a real whiz with PDF programs, upload your finished manuscript to Lulu for conversion to PDF. This will assure that the process goes smoothly. Download the finished PDF and preview it carefully to make sure there were no formatting glitches in the process.
  


• Unless you are a real whiz with a graphics program and PDF conversion, use Lulu's cover templates.
  

If anyone gets snarled up in this process, please contact me with questions. I learn from your challenges right along with you! Likewise, I'd love to hear of your successes!

Finally, for a short time I'm making the ebook version available at no cost to those who request it. Just click that link above and send me an e-mail.

I hope legions of lifestory writers will soon join the ranks of proudly published authors. (No, this is not a paid testimonial for Lulu! Right now they are the only reliable operation I know of with no setup fee.)

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

Lulu Project Update

I arrived home yesterday from my great adventure in Austin to find The Albuquerque Years awaiting inspection. I’m pleased to report that it passes with flying colors.

The cover looks exactly as I expected — except — I got the title wrong on the spine! Can you believe it? This is why you should always order a preview copy of anything you do. I might not ever have noticed this fluke, and probably nobody else would either. I only noticed it when I inspected the spine to make sure it was exactly centered. I’m pleased to report that it is. The error is easy enough to fix, and I’ll simply upload the file again, so it will be correct for future volumes. I’ll also extract the stray comma from the middle of a sentence on the author bio page. Of course that's the first thing I noticed in there ... .

(Taking such pains to get the finished product as close to perfect as I can make it is a personal preference. We each set our own standard. You'd have to know the story of how my mother taught me to sew to fully understand what some may rightfully consider my nitpicky anality in this matter. I would not sneer at others who might choose to let them slide.)

At my urgent request, my husband opened the package to report on it while I was still gone. He was surprised at the size of the pages, which are larger than The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, a standard trade paperback (6 x 9 in.). This one is Lulu’s Crown Quarto page size (7.44 x 9.68 in).

“Why did you make the pages so big and such an odd size?” he wondered. “Why didn’t you make it the same as your other one?”

“Two reasons. Mainly, I wanted the extra width to give me more flexibility for flowing text around pictures. But I also wanted to keep the printing cost down. The smaller size would have added at least sixteen more pages, and at 2¢ per page, that adds up.”

He garumphed a few times and I reminded him that if he looks on my bookshelf, he’ll find lots of odd-sized books. I quite like this page size. I think it looks distinguished.

Looking inside the book, I’m pleased with my choice of header font. I looked long and hard through several free font sites to find one that approximates the handwriting of a beginning writer. Several “kiddie” fonts were available, but most were smeary, ugly, and hard to read. I finally settled on one called I Did This!.

There is one thing I’m not delighted with. The photographs are dim looking, and rather grainy, some more so than others. Fortunately I did store the specific version of the photo files in a dedicated folder. I purposely used three different file formats, jpg, tif, and eps. According to Lulu, jpg is best. According to the printer for The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, eps (encapsulated postscript) is best, and that’s the format that produced the exceptionally fine photo and graphics results in that book. In a few days I’ll go through and analyze each photo to see if I can identify a correlation, and let you know what I learn.

Even with this minor disappointment, I’m delighted with the book, and if this is as good as I can get the photos right now, they will do. Lulu receives 4.5 stars for product quality (I’m withholding half a star because of the photo quality), and about 2 stars for user-friendliness (I have no doubt this rating would be higher if you use their online pdf conversion and cover templates).

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Project that Just Wouldn't Quit, part 2

I’m pleased to report that I was finally able to upload my finished files to Lulu.com, and place an order for one copy. Perhaps this project will be the exception, but there are always flukes that show up in the first copy. When I’m satisfied that all is as it should be, I’ll post a link to the file on Lulu.

To my surprise, the process has been far more complicated than I anticipated. It sounds so simple to get your manuscript laid out just the way you want it, “print” it to a pdf file, and upload that to Lulu. Indeed it was that simple for the Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing manuscript (that was working with a traditional publisher, not Lulu). The challenge there was getting Word to behave with all the graphics I used.

This time, Word behaved surprisingly well, but getting the pdf right was another matter, and I even used Acrobat to “distill” it. I won’t elaborate on the details here, though I may post them to the Lulu user forums and elsewhere. Unless you are a serious Power User (I’m ready to claim that designation now), with a vast reserve of patience, I suggest uploading your document file to Lulu and letting them do the pdf conversion. There is no charge for that service, and you can download the pdf file to check details before finalizing your project.

Then there was the cover. I’m also a Photoshop fanatic, and opted to create my own wrap-around cover rather than using the online wizard. I discovered more gremlins here, and none lived in Photoshop. The Lulu spec page for document dimensions lists measurements in pixels, inches, and centimeters, and it specifies 300 dpi resolution. The stated number of inches and centimenters does not correspond with the designated number of pixels at that ratio, nor are the inch and centimeter measurements equivalent with each other. “Go with the pixels,” advised an expert on the Lulu user forum. The explanation for the inconsistencies was balderdash.

As if that weren’t enough confusion, when I uploaded my finished cover file, the size requirement was stated in points. Both Acrobat and Photoshop told me my file was the specified size, but the Lulu interface claimed it had other dimensions, and they were not right. I finally worked through that challenge and clicked on order. I’m about to leave for a couple of weeks to help out with the birth of grandchild number six, and presumably my finished book will be waiting when I get home. You will most certainly hear my thoughts on the quality of the printed product (of course the quality of the contents is impeccable . . . ).

At this point, I’m still recommending Lulu for personal, short-run printings, primarily because I know of no viable alternative, and you can’t beat Lulu’s price. Hopefully the inconsistencies and confusion will diminish over time. For now, I do recommend sticking with their converters. Perhaps I’ll tinker with the cover wizard next month.

I’m especially pleased with the picture I used for the cover. I have only three color pictures of myself between the ages of two and six, and they were not suitable for a cover shot. So I improvised, and used Photoshop to “hand tint” my favorite. It took way longer than I intended, but I’m elated about the final result:

Original photo

Final result

I’ll be sharing further observations regarding the personal value I derived from writing about this simple, sublimely happy time. You already heard about my foray into the deserted barracks. I also found a couple of family history surprises, and encourage everyone to dig around in their past, be it happy or less so.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

The Project That Just Won't Quit

I wouldn’t call it The Project From Hell, not by a long shot. No, this personal project I’m trying to finish as a test run of Lulu.com’s on-line Print-On-Demand (POD) publishing services is more aptly named “The Project That Just Won't Quit.”

The final result, The Albuquerque Years, will be the culmination of my very first lifestory writing adventure, the story of my preschool years, begun over ten years ago. As I explain in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, I began writing this story as a whim, to be able to share my own experience as a very little girl with my then preschool-age grandchildren. I simply sat down at the computer and did a memory dump, in a haphazard fashion, without much order or thought.

Toward the end, I decided I wanted to include photos, lots of photos. At that point, WordPerfect stalled out on files with more than a few photos, so the story began breaking up into a vast array of pieces. In frustration, put it away to deal with later.

A few months ago, I became embarrassed about the fact that I, of all people, have not completed a single finished volume with a legacy of my own lifestories. I pulled out The Albuquerque Years project, determined to see it through to print. OpenOffice and Word are up to the challenge now, and Lulu presents a way of having it professionally printed and bound at an astonishingly affordable cost.

As I launched into what I thought would be a couple of days of final touches, I was chagrined to discover that I’d only told, at most, half the story. Over the course of a few weeks, I’ve doubled the length to 76 pages in Lulu’s Crown Quarto page size (7.44 x 9.68 in.), organized the stories to flow more smoothly, added several details, and inserted over forty photos. I converted the file to a PDF, after wading through Lulu’s occasionally conflicting instructions. (The live chat function works splendidly for clearing up any confusion.) I’ve almost finished a cover design.

At the last minute, I decided to add an Afterward to give background on the project and explain the process of setting it all up to work with Lulu. Perhaps future generations will appreciate this insight, and it will certainly be helpful to anyone today who wants to use Lulu for their own story albums. I’d hoped to announce a couple of days ago on the blog here that the upload had succeeded. Maybe tomorrow.
The morals of this story:

• There’s lots more to do to complete a published project after you finish the writing. Things always take twice as long as you anticipate.
• There is always something else to be done when you are getting a book finalized, whether it’s a commercial publication or something as private and personal as this project.

But it’s not the Project From Hell. It’s more like my flesh-and-blood offspring, who all took at least an extra week to grow to completion. But they all three arrived, strong and healthy, and so will this book! Persistence will ultimately prevail.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal