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Some close friends of ours wanted to publish a book and they asked us for a quick solution. They wanted it to sell internationally but they did not know how to do that. They needed a simple publishing and online sales solution so that they could continue to focus on authoring whatever they create and leave sales to specialists.

The solution that worked and which is in the line of KISS (keep it stupid simple) principle is LULU.COM - Self Publishing.

With this company you simply register on their website and start publishing your works. You upload the documents, for instance a book, design the cover, describe it, etc, then you set the price and publish it.

What you can publish on Lulu.com:

• Books (in the form of: Paperback books, Hardcover books, Comic books, Dissertations, Cookbooks, Product Manuals, Sales proposals, Travel Guides, Presentations, Brochures, Yearbooks, Annual Reports, Textbooks, Training manuals, Course outlines, etc.);
• Photo Creations (in various types and formats like Photo Books, Wedding Books, Calendars, Portfolios, Posters, Artwork, etc)
• Digital Media (like: Images/Graphics, Music, Ringtones, Sounds/Midi Files, Movies/Videos, Fonts, CDs/DVDs, ebooks/Documents)

The website offers specific wizards for each type of publications and assists you step by step in uploading and preparing your creation for sale. You have choices like sell the book only in print or make it available for download also. You can describe it, set keywords, to optimize searches that will lead to your book. Once you are ready, the work appeares in Lulu.com Stores, available for browsing and buying.

That’s it. As simple as easy. Promote the book and adjust until you see sales starting and growing. Lulu takes care of everything from accepting credit cards on your behalf, printing the book or burning the CD on demand, shipping and handling. It’s a one stop self-publishing solution that, until now proved a good way of letting the authors do what they know best: authoring.

What did not work: we’re not based in the US and we wanted our book to be published under the “Published by Lulu” option, getting the ISBN from them. Looks like this is not possible, at least for us, so we got it by ourselves.

What you still have to do: you have to promote the book online so that the page on lulu.com gets visited. Spread the word online. There are numerous tutorials and tips on how to do that out there on the web. You can try googling for tutorials, of course but we will also try to gather some information in this direction in a future post for you.

Happy authoring!! Oh, and please drop us a note if this works or not for you. We want to know.

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