Moho Forum

Lulu is absolutely free.

It works great. I've used it to print one, hard back book as a mother's day gift. 200 pages... full color slip cover on a hard back book...

only cost me TOTAL... $19.00. And the book looks FANTASTIC. There is no way you can tell it wasn't printed "professionally".

They get a cut of your markup price after the cost of publishing each individual book. As a publisher you can buy as many books as you like at cost.

If a book you plan to publish on lulu would cost $7.00 to print you mark it up to $15 say... lulu gets about 20% of the $8.00 markup... $1.60. Not bad. A ton more than a publisher would ever give you... and you have total control.

They also offer national/international distribution and ISBN's (for a fee of course). this includes an ISBN number and listings on Amazon and B&N etc... I think the international distribution is a one time fee of about $99. The US national distribution with ISBN is like.. $40.

I laid out my book myself and uploaded a PDF. You can also use MS Word.

Book publishing is going in this direction I think.

Someone on the Animatiion:Master forum published a technical manual in a similar way. No upfront costs... no pre-printing... no money wasted if you don't sell all the books.

He would not have been able to publish at all without this. AND that manual is fantastic.

-vern

Ok, several posts....

DVTVFilm wrote:I'm all for having posted tuts centralized as well as a monthy AS newsletter wiih links to user tuts. Let's hope this is something the Forum Admin people will begin quickly. I've run into many issues with AS5Pro that are not covered in the "help guide" --which makes using this excelllent program quite frustrating for anything serious.

Yes, Here the call is for E Frontier people. Actually they should be the ones creating the newsletter. They could even set some guidelines for creating the tutorials right now. As mentioned, we can create tutorials by category: Basics, advanced features, Tips and Tricks, Pitfalls, etc...

7feet wrote:I think, unless you want to do something free, who does the work and how is the profit divvied up? That's pretty fundamental, and now that the app is getting some proper exposure, something useful to discuss.

Here the problem is profit using AS Pro name, should be discussed with E Frontier. It could be a matter of E Frontier granting the authorization to allow the publishing of a compilation of writers, where these authors will invest in time (writing of course), and E Frontier may obtain something setting a royalty, fee or just name promotion of the product in Amazon

7feet wrote: I remember the group quite fondly, got a lot of good info out of that sucker, and remember waiting for the first beta of Moho 5 with baited breath. Wmartinez, perhaps a straight up call to renw that call for authors? If a reasonable structure for hooking them up when it's done could be worked out, I would be more than happy to contribute. There's more than a few users here who know the program inside and out and might contribute the time if it seemed like something might come of it. I would. Do you have editorial experience? Somebody has to define the guidelines (like style, not me, my ex said I have the graphic design sense of a naked mole rat) and provide a structure for the process. Maybe a new (Yahoo, whatever) group to hash it out? The potential is clear, the interest seems clear, and the potential to make a few hard-earned bucks is there for the people with the knowledge. I find that a lot of cool projects like this fall by the wayside because I have to pay the rent, but I've put the time into many if it seemed like there was a (speculative is fine, if its realistic)shot it might help keep a roof over my sorry ol' head.

I'm completely behind the idea of creating a book. Any other takers?

The only editorial experience I had was when I wrote a book about Planning and Evaluation of IT projects, the base book for the IT Management courses of State university here at Costa Rica. I had an editor that made us change the Table of Contents a couple dozen times, so I'm afraid I can help but not too much.
About the Call, It seems this thread is the one, but we need E Frontier's blessing.
About becoming millionaires selling the book,:shock: if authors add up to 10, 20, it seems not much realistic. The other question is who will buy the book: beginners, medium, advanced users? How many of them are out there? That analysis is required to decide themes, deepness and feasibility.

So, 7Feet, I echo your call: Any more takers?

heyvern wrote:Lulu is absolutely free.

It works great. I've used it to print one, hard back book as a mother's day gift. 200 pages... full color slip cover on a hard back book...

only cost me TOTAL... $19.00. And the book looks FANTASTIC. There is no way you can tell it wasn't printed "professionally".
(...)
They also offer national/international distribution and ISBN's (for a fee of course). this includes an ISBN number and listings on Amazon and B&N etc... I think the international distribution is a one time fee of about $99. The US national distribution with ISBN is like.. $40.
(...)
-vern

This sounds good. Other vendors of On-Demand publishing always asked money for my first imprints, and I could handle to see some money back after selling certain amount of books. An the prices were way over the top for simple books.

So, if there are takers, blessings from E Frontier, a good analysis and a feasible plan, I don't see why discuss further.

Will.

Will,

Just to be clear... any "test" printings to review the book do cost the base price.

Lulu doesn't give you a review copy for free. You still have to buy it.

However... let's hope you proofed it carefully BEFORE uploading it.

In my case the book had already been published as a paperback using traditional publishing and I just uploaded it so I could get a hardback version from Lulu. So that was my only cost.

-vern

Well, after two days no more volunteers
Nor E Frontier thoughts about it...

Well, oh well... at least I hit lulu and it sounds interesting. I will probably publish some Costa Rican spooky tales....

Will.

Well, the License Agreement (see the User's Manual) allows you to go ahead anyway, by my reading of it (I am not a lawyer, solicitor, barrister, etc).

The purpose of defining certain content as Restricted Content is to
protect the Company's investment, interests, and ownership of Restricted
Content. It is not the Company's policy to unreasonably restrict or inhibit
any third party's creative or commercial activities. The following are
Legitimate Uses of Restricted Content:
- Creating tutorials, books, or other educational materials using images of
Program interface for sale, distribution, public display, etc., provided
they are intended to educate users as to use of the Program, or when used
under the "fair use" guidelines of US copyright law. Any other use of images
of the Program interface must be approved by the Company's prior written
consent.

Regards, Myles.

Myles, You are right! Sounds permitted to me!
What we lack then is authors

Will.