Publishing a Book on Lulu

I've been wanting to combine the texts of my two chapbooks of poems inspired by craigslist ads (I Meant to Say and Take It) into a longer book for quite some time now. I was going to do it in a more zine/book arts way, but then I thought, hey, why not experiment with Lulu.com?

It was a pretty smooth process for a non-designer such as myself. I mean, I like to make collages, but I'm no expert in design software, etc. Once you choose the size of book you want, you can download a Word template and paste in your text. Then they have book cover templates, and the process of working with the template was like an extended version of the template-maneuvering I do when I have postcards printed with Vistaprint. Lulu gives you text and cover proofs to download, and I felt comfortable with the layout process. In fact, when I had a little problem converting my Word document to a PDF file with the page size I needed, the Lulu interface converted my file for me.

Anyway, after some hours of tinkering (which included proofreading, etc), I completed a 42-page book and ordered some copies, so we'll see how they turn out! If they look good, I'd be glad to offer a special sale for friends of this tiny blog...

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Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

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