Lucie Pereira, from Lulu, the global self-publishing company, reveals how you can publish a book and sell it on the web without spending a penny upfront.

Lulu was founded in 2002 by CEO Bob Young, who was also the co-founder of Red Hat, one of the world’s leading open-source companies. "Lulu" is an old slang term for a remarkable person, object or idea.

Self-publishing is the art of publishing yourself — doing it all yourself, rather than needing extra hands that might make will changes and alterations to your book. So it’s all about empowering authors to publish exactly what they want, without having to worry that their content will be scrutinised or altered without their consent. It’s basically DIY publishing, in the sense that you are responsible for everything from coming up with a title and checking for spelling errors to fixing the price and promoting the product.

With Lulu, authors have the autonomy to shape and mould their documents according to their taste. They can choose or design a cover, select their favourite trim size, even write the whole thing in pink if they want to. The principle is that nobody dictates to you what your book should look like. Obviously, as a result, not all the books on Lulu are masterpieces; the quality varies and if authors don’t proofread their drafts carefully, spelling errors and typos will be printed.

The way Lulu works is that you upload your documents onto the Lulu site, where they are converted into a print-ready PDF. You then choose the format of your book and choose or design your own cover, and then we work with professional printers located in the US, Spain and the UK, who turn your documents into printed books, CDs, DVDs or calendars, depending on what you want to create.

After that, you can choose to make the project ‘just available to yourself’ or ‘available to everyone’, and you decide on how much money you want to make on each sale after the printing cost. You keep 80% of all profits while Lulu takes a small commission of 20%.

The great thing about self-publishing is that it allows authors with very niche interests to be published, and they often find a significant readership for their book — so, for example, book on fly-fishing may generate a lot of interest among fly-flishing enthusiasts.

Print-on-demand services, such as that offered by Lulu, allow you to get as many copies of your book printed as you need. This technique allows for no excess inventory, no books piled up in an attic. You don’t have to place a minimum order with Lulu either, so you can just buy one copy for yourself or 100,000.

There is a basic printing cost, which varies depending, for example, on whether you want a hardback or softback, colour or black and white. The author then decides how much money they want for each copy sold. Lulu then pays the author every time there is a sale — payment is by Paypal or cheque in dollars, as suits the author best.

Of course, you don’t have to use Lulu to make money. It is possible to create a personal project available only to you. For example, if you wish to purchase only one copy of your project, you would only pay for the basic printing and postage costs.

Unlike a lot of other self-publishing companies, Lulu does not charge anything for you to convert your file into a book. There are no set-up costs and no minimum order. You could, if you wanted to, sell your work online to other people without spending a penny yourself.

The marketing and promoting of a book are also the responsibility of the author. Typically, the books are first sold to friends and relatives of the author but many people are aiming to sell their book to as many people as possible. Some authors are, of course, better at taking marketing initiatives than others, but there are some very simple techinques that are worth adopting. The title of the book is very important, as it is referenced on Google. For example, a UK author wrote a book on the Boeing 737 aircraft and entitled it, quite simply, The Boeing 737 Technical Guide. That book is now one of our bestsellers, mainly because it can be found easily by anyone who is looking for it or has an interest in the subject.

Because Lulu is not the publisher, the author is, it allows for a market in niche books that traditional publishers would probably reject for not having a wide-enough audience. We, therefore, have a lot of unusual books: for example, in France, someone wrote a book entitled My House Husband, about a man who stays at home looking after five small children while the mother goes to work and observes and writes the story.

One of Lulu’s great success stories is actually a book about a very sad subject. The book Finding the Can in Cancer, written by four former cancer sufferers, has sold 40,000 copies in the US as it was bought and distributed to a great number of pharmaceutical companies.

A recent UK success is What Janet & John Did Next, the scripts from the Janet & John stories as broadcast on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show. But the subjects are so wide — we’ve had a book for owners of Havanese dogs, The Havanese, which is one of our bestsellers partly because the author successfully promoted her book at the various dog shows she attends.

These titles are just some examples. We have over 100,000 recently published titles, with more than 2000 new titles added each week, created by people in 80 different countries. The website is also fully translated and localised for the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy.

The beauty of Lulu is that the public decides the sort of books they want to publish. It is a question of an individual’s taste and interests that determines whether a book is worth reading or not, and, as on Amazon, the books are regularly reviewed on the Lulu site to give potential buyers an idea as to its popularity and quality of the writing.

The Lulu marketplace and community are also unique assets. Lulu does not just allow creators to print their books but to sell their content online to the world, so you are empowered to sell and distribute your story — it’s not just about printing something for yourself.

And we have a thriving community that allows our authors to connect with other artists with similar interests and who live in the same country. Our forums allow our authors to promote their works to others and discuss, for example, the publishing process. We currently have forums in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy the Netherlands and Portugal. Author meet-ups are also regularly organised and that’s a great way of allowing Lulu staff to meet the authors in person.

Authors also get a personal storefront on the Lulu site and a blog that allows them to interact with other people. This community aspect plays an important part in keeping creators motivated and passionate about their work, as it allows them to share their thoughts and talk about their creations.

Some authors who have met in the forums decide to collaborate together. We have, for example, the case of two French authors, one a writer and the other a singer, and the collaboration has resulted in the creation of some very poetic songs.