Monday, September 7, 2009

Book Publishing using Lulu

A few years ago my father wrote down his memories of his experiences in Italy during World War II. I had typed it, scanned in some of his pictures and documents, inserted them into the narration, printed it, and put it into a notebook. I've always wanted to test out one of the publishing sites that will take your document and turn it into a book. So for my Dad's birthday I uploaded the document to Lulu to be published. It was fairly easy to do - it took maybe a couple hours to figure out some of the settings. I turned the Word file in to a pdf (it saved all of my formatting) and made a high resolution jpg in Print Shop that could be used as a cover. It took less than a week to receive the books. Here is the end result:


The cover is shiny and very professional looking. The pages were exactly as they looked in my Word Document (only in black and white - didn't want to pay the extra for color pages as only a few of the images were color). I ordered 2 books - the cost was under $20 total, including shipping, which I thought was very reasonable. It was printed in paperback form, but there are options for hard covers and various sizes.


The page below shows the telegram that was sent to my dad's parents to let them know he had been wounded in combat:


Click HERE to see how the ordering page is set up at Lulu. I love that if my Dad wants additional copies of his book, it will be a piece of cake for me or anyone to order them!

2 comments:

peggy said...

Karen, that is the nicest thing, I know your Dad is so pleased that you did that.

Liz said...

Wonderful. I've been looking to do something like that. Thanks for sharing the link.

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