Lulu.com

Lulu.com is a place where authors, artists and musicians can self-publish and sell their digital products and get paid in the process. This is not vanity or subsidy publishing but true self publishing as Lulu takes no money up front.

Lulu allows you to sell your book as a print on demand (POD) book and/or an ebook in PDF format. They tell you how much the book costs and any price you set over cost you get 80% of and 20% goes to Lulu. It's that simple. There are no hidden costs or fees and you still have the copyright to your own work. You also are left with the job of promoting yourself and your books but that is not much different than other small royalty paying publishers. They do have a fee service for getting an ISBN but it is fairly modest. They take care of fullfillment, collecting money, shipping books, customer access to downloads, customer service and more. This frees you up to write some more.

I have not published with Lulu but I have ordered both ebooks, POD books and music and I have been pleased. A couple of my POD book orders were messed up but an email to Lulu customer service got things taken care of very quickly and professionally. Lulu offers authors extensive help files, tutorials and help forums to help you with formating your manuscript for publication.

I really like the them offering both ebook and POD formats this is an important option. I do wish they had more ebook formats. PDF is sort of the defacto standard on a desktop computer but it has weaknesses on a handheld as it tends to be bulky and take a long time to upload to a handheld. It would be nice to see some handheld freindly formats added as options.

I did notice one thing missing: an affiliate program. Having a Lulu affiliate program would encourage people like me who have not published anything at Lulu to put up links on our websites to Lulu products.

There are a lot of good thing going on there so you really need to check them out. My advice is, avoid subsidy and vanity publishers like the plague - especially when you have services like Lulu there with no out of pocket costs.