Every Wednesday night I go to a writing seminar held by Canadian novelist, film critic and journalist, David Gilmour, who is the Writer in Residence at the University of Toronto this year. The seminar is made up of 16 aspiring writers willing to share and discuss their own pieces of fictional prose with tips and advice from Mr. Gilmour himself at the head of the table.
I mention this because these seminar discussions require that we first email our work to the entire group before we meet, some of which are sent in the PDF file format.
After a session one night, while on the topic of opening PDFs, editors, and publishing (people can actually talk casually about such things!), someone mentioned Lulu.com. So I decided to check it out.
It looks like Lulu has just about all the resources you’d need to publish and distribute your PDF content, whether you create your own PDF yourself or have Lulu do it for you. At Lulu, you can publish anything from DVD movies to photo albums.
Business wise, Lulu is a more heavy duty publishing site than Scribd is. For one thing, they accommodate both corporate and individual publishing. They’ve also got marketing resources that include sales tools and distribution packages that include ISBNs for your publications.
What’s more, when you set up an account with Lulu, you can make use of their print publishing tools and services that include help for formatting, layout, and binding, and even scanning services for converting hard copies into the PDF format.
As a community of user generated and published content, Lulu has a webpage with user groups and forums you can visit. Moreover, you’ll find the Lulu marketplace where you can where you can get your own publications posted up for sale as a download or printed book. You can also buy, share and browse their database of digital ebooks published by other registered Lulu users.
While this site sounds like the site that can get your work noticed, these are just the basics. For more details visit lulu.com.
