Remember all those books that your teachers made you read? You read books by Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others. Did you know that you can publish those books yourself? It is a thing called Public Domain. Don’t you just love this Country?
You can make it hardcover or an eBook. The choice is up to you, and what you intend to do with it. If you just want to show that you can do some basic editing, market an eBook or something like that, then keep it simple.
Let’s make us a book and send it out to the world. Our book will be able to be printed on demand or read as an eBook. The title I have chosen is “The Art of War.” I have found my text of it, so I go to lulu.com and pick out the template I want to use. I will do a 6×9 edition.
I will then input the text into the template, do some cleaning up, make notes, or a foreword, and save the document on your computer as the title name.
Go to lulu.com, choose publish then the paperback button. Of course, you will need to set up an account if you do not have one. It is free and easy to set up. Once you have chosen Publish, it will give you options. Click the Paperback button. It will open a page that asks for the Title, Author, Description, Keywords, and Publisher (You can put your company name, but technically Lulu Publishing is your publisher.) It will also ask for the ISBN, which if you provide allows you to be the publisher. To make life easy, let’s leave it empty. Finally, who is your book for? Is it for everyone or is it just for adults because of sexual themes.
With our book, we have put everyone, since Art of War is really a generic book on leadership skills. Click the Save and Continue button and it will take you to the page to upload your book. It will browse for it on your computer. Once you have selected it, it will upload it and convert it to a PDF file. You can view the PDF file to make sure that things are as you wanted it. This will also give you the genuine page count. Your book must be divisible by four for printing, so if not, there will be blank pages to make up for the difference.
Next, you can choose your cover. Lulu has lots of covers to offer, so find one you like and look at it in preview. What you will see is the Title, and if you chose to put some writing on the back cover, then it will show as well. Now, after all is to your satisfaction click save and continue. It will then convert the entire book.
Lulu has given their base price for the book. You decide how much you want to make in royalties and set the price according to that. It could be as little as $.25, but you have to set the price at the level that the market can bear. You can also set a price for it to be downloaded as an EBook. When you are finished, click the button and your book is now available to the world. Lulu even gives you a specific URL for your book, so you can advertise it.
You have now published your book at no cost to you. You can order a copy at the base rate. Lulu has tools for marketing, like basic press releases that you can use. If you would like to add the book to Amazon and other bookstores, you will need an ISBN, so get one through Lulu or another company.
The book that I used as an example was the Art of War, which is in public domain. You can do the same thing and just be a publisher if writing is not your thing. You will enjoy the lucrative publishing world if you do it correctly.
