5 Books I Got From Lulu

What is Lulu?

Lulu are a publishing company that has been around since the beginning of the millennium. They helped authors who struggled to get their work published through the traditional route. Before Amazon brought in their kindles and paperback option, the only choice, for many indie authors was publishing their book through Lulu Press.

Nowadays, there are a lot more options to publish your paperback. Kindle Direct Publishing does paperbacks now. And there is Ingram Spark, Draft2Digital, Book Baby, Blurb and I think Barns & Noble have started doing it as well. Lulu has a bigger choice of formats and layouts.

The site has changed a lot over the years. It’s a lot more expensive to produce a book on Lulu, than it is on KDP. Publishing the actual book itself is free, but the cost to print a book with Lulu is more than it is on KDP. Because of the higher prices and how work out the prices, books have a minimum price they can be. That’s why you will see book prices in Lulu’s bookstore and considerably higher than ones you’ll find on Amazon. However, I think the print quality on Lulu is better than KDP.

Lulu also have other author services, but I have no experiance with them. It also made me think about all those books that hav been published on Lulu. It’s been around for 20 years and a Google search tells me that 3 million titles have been published on there.

It makes me wonder how many people actually shop at Lulu‘s bookstore? As many authors there are that flock to publish their books on Amazon, there also others that avoid it like the plague. Some of the books I’ve purchased on Lulu are only available on Lulu. Some of them don’t even come up with a google search, and some don’t even have a Goodreads page. As somebody who’s self-published eleven books, I know how hard it is to get noticed.

The Ship Has Sailed... is an eclectic collection of poems. What I really like about this book the most is the illustrations. I think the illustrations really help bring the words to life. A great example of this the first age where Niburski turns the dedication into a piece of poetry itself on the flag on a ship. My favourite poems from the book are Fossil Fuel and Mornings in Sweet Grass.

This is a short story, but one that is very tragic. The mermaid of Montihilly could be considered a horror story. The short story works well as a nice little book. It’s a well written tale, but I can already tell what was going to happen based on the blurb. It would have been nice to add a surprise twist. But it tells you a good moral to be careful what you wish for. She killed her father and sisters to get turned into a mermaid, but she lives a painful life of regret.

This book is a hidden gem. It’s an anthology of poetry and short stories by many classic authors including some that I didn’t know. I found it really useful that the book had information about the author before going into their work. I also found it quite sad that a lot of the authors featured in his book had died fairly young. The work serves as a reminder to everyone that everyone deserves love, and to love who they want without society’s input. At the time these authors were living at a time where LGBTQ+ was strongly repressed.

This was one of the first books I found on the Lulu store that interested me when I was browsing around. A world without adults made me think of Lord of the Flies and the book really did have that vibe throughout of the pages. I think the concept was executed really well and I think fans of Lord of the Flies would enjoy it.

This was one those books I read in one sitting. There is no pun intended when I say that this book is a banger. Really is true to it’s title. I adored the exploration of different countries and cultures. With the school diary format, it made me think of a high-school romance you’d find on Wattpad. What makes it stand out is the really strong British flavour with the London setting. Holly becomes a Jihadi bride, burlesque dancer, computer hacker and a banger. Her husband is part of a thriller series by Charlie Flowers. I knew nothing about this series before, but reading this has made me intruged.