Friday, August 28, 2009

For Those of You Who Want It in Treeware



Okay, so just for fun, I went to Lulu.com and did a POD version of Master of Pamor. If I cut my profit down from five bucks to three, I can sell it at $12.99. Be interesting to see if I get any hits on it at two and a half times as much. (And that's not counting the six and half bucks for shipping ...)

Here's where you can get it: Master of Pamor

Printed: 209 pages, 8.5" x 11", perfect binding, white interior paper (50# weight), black and white interior ink, white exterior paper (100# weight), full-color exterior ink.

Description:

A fantasy novel of martial arts and magic, set in 1850’s Java. Rated "R," for sex and violence.


But I'm telling you, buy the PDF and print it out yourself, put it in one of those plastic covers with a clamp down the edge, you save money and have a cleaner product. Five bucks the PDF; buck and half worth of paper; maybe a dollar or two worth of ink for your printer. Two bucks for the cover. Call it twelve dollars, total. Take less than an hour to print.

The on-demand book is $12.99, postage just over $6.50, and the layout is readable but not as nice as a PDF using twelve point Georgia font.


I'm just sayin'.


7 comments:

bourgon said...

Lulu sounds much better in theory than practice, at least as a consumer. I've been looking at a different book from Lulu, and the thing that's put me off of it is the shipping. I can justify $13 on a POD book, but another $7 for shipping? The term "highway robbery" comes to mind.

Steve Perry said...

No question in my mind on this one, either. You could download the PDF, print it, and stick it in a nifty clamp cover for less than you'd pay at Lulu, cost of paper and ink and cover included.

But I got folks telling me that they don't like reading ebooks, and it doesn't cost me anything but a few minutes to set it up for POD, even though I don't think those people who allowed they'd buy it there are really gonna ...

AF1 said...

You know what, I'm purchasing something at Lulu already so I'll just throw this book in the cart along with it.

You're welcome!

(I like ebooks just fine, except that I feel my eyes suffer more from reading computer screens for a long time than they do paper.)

Steve Perry said...

I appreciate the business ...

Steve Perry said...

Still waiting on Amazon.com to put it up for the kindle. Must be a big glitch here, but nobody is talking about it ...

Jeff Mott said...

Going for the PDF, thanks for putting this up :)

Steve Perry said...

Finally showed up on Amazon.com as a kindle title.

Twice, actually. I took one of them offline, but it still shows up.

Sold a couple copies on Lulu. Sold several off the blog. Will see what happens with Amazon.