Lulu.com and Other Self-Publishing Outlets

Eric, I know many Christian authors who use Lulu and as long as you do the marketing and promotion yourself, it a good deal. They make quality books for sure and open the door to many writers who otherwise would not otherwise have a publishing deal.

I agree Eric that there is a lot of poor stuff coming out, but a lot of these people (mostly fiction – mostly children’s) that I know are really good Christian writers with no finances or networks to get their foot in the door. Lulu allows them to get their feet wet. That’s what Publish America (a POD) did for me. Without getting a couple books out I would have never been signed by The History Press or Partiot Press. I look at these PODs as ways to get books printed – they have to stand (and sell) on their own after that.

The particular volume that I was contemplating today is a set of soldier letters, so I have to imagine it might be worth investing in, simply because it’s difficult to screw up the transcription of someone else’s written words.

Sorry, Eric, no way would I accept someone else’s transcription if I had access to the originals or copies of the originals. One thing I’ve learned is that you have to familiarize yourself with a person’s writing style. This is particularly true when you’re having difficulty making out a word that can change the meaning of a whole sentence if not the whole letter. It becomes even more important when dealing with letters written in another century with it’s own brand of shorthand and slang.

Teej

“Sorry, Eric, no way would I accept someone else’s transcription if I had access to the originals or copies of the originals. One thing I’ve learned is that you have to familiarize yourself with a person’s writing style. This is particularly true when you’re having difficulty making out a word that can change the meaning of a whole sentence if not the whole letter. It becomes even more important when dealing with letters written in another century with it’s own brand of shorthand and slang. ”

Amen, Teej. Good old Charlie Bates has really worked over both my eyesight and my dictionary, and his penmanship’s actually pretty good.

Reminds me somewhat of the comments by the mainstream media about bloggers, who (ahem!) don’t have those “multiple layers of fact checking.”

I did my own book because I couldn’t find anyone who was willing to do it my way. Publishing, like anything else, has styles and fads, and right now it’s the class/race/gender trinity. Or they may have just felt that there was no market for a book on infantry tactics. Personally I’m looking forward to your book on Ulric Dahlgren, but if I were a publisher I’d think twice about doing it since the market is quite limited. In fact a book like that — high quality, well written, but with a very limited market — is an ideal POD candidate.

The other thing you run into is when you try to publish something on a new subject. The publisher looks and it and sez, hmm, there are no books on this topic, therefore there’s no market. He’d like you to do yet another one on proven subjects like Antietam, Gettysburg, or Abe Lincoln.

As far as peer review goes, not everyone does it and there have been a number of scandals lately about fraudulent and/or plagiarized work in both academic and mainstream press.

So…everything has to be evaluated on its own merits. As an aside I’ve found some very good info in self-published genealogical works.

Great article! I just published a book through LuLu, but have wondered the same as you have (not about my own text of course!). The thing is, do editors fact-check? If so, what accounts for the errors we find in books published by non-POD’s?

I’ve seen some real whoppers come out of the Publisher’s Clearing House, and lately, have resorted to treating book-buying as a box of chocolates no matter where the material comes from. You just never know what you’re going to get anymore…