Lulu Self-Publishing

Amazingly FREE self-publishing site. People order your book and it is printed on demand, making it extremely low-cost for you.

Tool Categories: Publishing

Audience: Librarians/Educators/Students

How It Works: You write, design, and upload your book to their site, where it is converted into a PDF file. You maintain control of all aspects of the book. Once it is uploaded, an initial copy needs to be printed, for you to check your changes, etc. Once that’s done, you can make it available to the public, via the Lulu website, which has a very similar feel to Amazon and Barnes & Noble online. As people order the book, it is printed and shipped. There are no huge overhead or printing costs. The people ordering your book are the ones paying for printing–which is built into the price of the book itself. If you want an ISBN you pay $35. If you want to be listed on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, you pay $135, otherwise, there is no cost to create the book. You can also create CD’s and DVD’s to sell here.

Uses: Publish class anthologies, teacher workbooks, books to accompany training, and pretty much any kind of book or audio/video product you want.

Why Use It? It’s extremely low-cost, very professional product, and allows you to collect your student’s work for them, their parents, and other venues. Makes it possible to publish professional books that would otherwise be very difficult to find a publisher for, if there isn’t a large audience for the book.