Lulu is a great way to move into the world of professional publishing - but the printing/publishing process is not without its difficulties.
PRISM – Exiles was my second Lulu publication, the first being a ‘giveaway’ ebook (The Cookie Tin) that I used to trial the service. Everything went smoothly, so I set up a project for my first full novel, and here I made the classic mistake of not reading all the FAQ pages first. Don’t make the same mistake! It led to delays, and many, many help requests on my part. Here I’d like to personally thank Hillary and all in support for their patient and persistent help.
Now, if you are writing a book that only uses the standard Lulu-approved set of fonts, then .doc files are not an issue. You can load them to your project and Lulu will translate them to the necessary format for their printers. However, if you (like me) need to use special fonts (I created a font myself, expressly for my book) then it’s a different matter. MS Word .doc files can use custom fonts only if the font is resident on the PC reading the file, but Lulu’s printers don’t have access to such fonts. They need the file in a raw state. To create such a file you must convert it to postscript. You can then load the postscript file up to Lulu, but PS files are HUGE, and take for ever. A better option is to produce a PDF from the PS. This whole process is called ‘distilling’.
Distilling is the arcane art of preparing your book for Lulu in a form that the printers can handle. I originally thought this would be a simple process of converting my MS Word .doc into a PDF file, then uploading it to my Lulu project area, but there’s more to it than that. PDF files are ‘portable document format’ files, and promoted as being transportable across any electronic medium, which may generally be true . Unfortunately, when it comes to printing, PDF files are problematic for high-speed digital printers.
Anyhoo, the good news is that there is a simple solution. All you need do is visit Don’s web pages at http://www.athleticaid.com/yaquinapress/PDF-FAQ.html. The website explains everything you need to do to create a Lulu-friendly file for uploading. Once you’ve followed all the instructions, the rest is easy. Finally, I want to give a great big THANKS to Lulu for providing the means to publish denied by conventional publishers.
I did it. Why don’t you?
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