Lulu services

A couple of days ago I mentioned Lulu.TV as one of those services that pay you for your content. That post caught Xeep Review's attention and they blogged about it. But Lulu has more services than just Lulu TV, and in this post I'm going to talk about them.

The first time I knew about Lulu, a couple of months ago, I got really excited about their service. I didn't heard about them by reading about it on a blog or something like that, I just saw an ad to their site from Merankorii's website, which is a positive point both to Lulu (because they really know how to bet in advertisement) and to Google Ads (because, that time, they really reached the objective - posting relevant ads to people that probably want to click on that particular ad).

So, what is Lulu, after all? Well, it's the easiest way I know to publish and sell books, CD's, DVD's, brochures, calendars, images and lot's of other kinds of digital media. Notice that they aren't into stuff that there are better players in (which is good, they knew how to create their own market): no t-shirts, posters and stuff like that on Lulu. You have no set-up fees, no minimum order, you have the rights over your published stuff and printing is done when ordered (so you never have excess stock).

Notice that Apple, for instance, has a service to publish photo books, and yet you see inside people excited with Lulu. Since I haven't see a complete review on Lulu, I decided to do it myself...

Generaly the idea behing Lulu is genious, and they got to acomplish right well. As a matter of fact I'm not one of their clients just because of one single factor: they are and ship from USA. So, if I wanted to print a CD there, and order something like 50 copies (which is exactly the scenario I was thinking), customs would quickly stop that order and make me pay as hell for that CD's. Hopefully they'll grow up and open an European subsidiary... But let's examin their serveral services, one by one...

	Books: With Lulu you can upload a book in 32 different digital formats, and they'll turn it to a real book. Besides having all kinds of help and tuturials and templates to make your book design enjoyable, publishing a book can't really be easier than this: you just have to upload, give some info about it (like title, author,...) and that's it! Prices vary with the book format (and you have lot's of formats), number of pages and number of copies, but, for my standards (and hey, I'm not into this business) I think it is cheap. Oh, you can choose from paperback or hardcover.
	Brochures: Quite similar to the Books publishing service, brochures are just like books, but without a cover. Color only, stapled, the thing I don't like in this is that brochures can only go to 20 pages, and books must have at least 32, so in some cases you might have to publish two brochure volumes instead of only one (or a thin book)...
	Discs - CD's and DVD's: And then you have the most exciting of all (IMHO), and the one they're really the only ones doing it that I know of: publishing CD's and DVD's. You can publish Data CD's, Data DVD's, Audio CD's, Audio DVD's and Video DVD's. Disc pricing starts at $5.50 for CDs and $7.50 for DVDs. You will be given a discount on larger orders of discs. Unfortunately they don't come with UPC codes, but they're working on that.
	Calendar: Making yourself a calendar is cool when you can choose the pictures featured there, and even cooler when you can add special dates (like having there printed your wedding day and giving that calendar to your wife - that kind of romantic stuff) :-P Well, Lulu lets you do that, in two types of calendars (Standard and Premium), and this service have been used mainly by photographers.
	Digital Media: In the same fashion than the rest of the Lulu services, they let you publish digital media. That includes music, audio, video, software, images, e-books, and virtually anything. Image and e-book publishing have their own service, and video publishing is so popular that they've spinned it off from Lulu and created Lulu.TV. To a review on that just read this...