Thing 19: It's a Lulu of a deal

I've actually used a few of the 2.0 award winners which is a good feeling! It means I'm not as out of it as I think I am!

I've used Technorati (of course), 43 Things, Pandora, Flickr, Rollyo, YouTube, and Del.icio.us.

I spent some time looking at Lulu which is a free self-publishing site. I'm really not interested in publishing anything of my own (yet!), but it is interesting to see the types of material that other people are publishing. There was a pretty wide variety. Through Lulu you can publish books of all types, videos, calendars, music, and artwork. Lulu publishes "on demand" so the author is not required to have 100 copies of a book printed--items are printed as they are ordered. This seems to me to be a vast improvement over other types of self-publishing.

Lulu has a tutorial which walks the new user through the publishing process. The tutorial is excellent. It describes the type of materials you can publish through Lulu, how to publish an item, how to create cover art for your item and the pricing guidelines. The author sets the price which allows for great flexibility.

One interesting aspect of Lulu is that you can actually "publish" to a website that thus restricts who has access to it.

I have a friend who is writing a screenplay, so I'm going to point him to Lulu so he can publish it without cost or fuss.

Check out Lulu below:

http://www.lulu.com/