A mention of Lulu

If you put www.lulu.co.uk into your browser you'll get a the life history and discography of that mighty ageless midget of the pop business, Lulu (just how can she still look that good after all these years?), but of course as a writer this is probably going to offer limited opportunity for progress. No, you have to put www.lulu.com in the address bar (I bet the singling Lulu is kicking herself for not registering all the domains!) and what you get is a veritable Mecca of self-publishing, print-on-demand opportunities.

Now I'm not here to promote the Lulu site but I have used it and it's great! (no promo there then). Basically, write your stuff, upload it, Lulu fiddles about with it (don't start getting that visual again), and then it's available for you and the rest of the world to buy as a real book, yes real - lovely paperback, hardback, ISBN etc etc.

Books are only printed as ordered and you automatically get a cut of the cover price and you even decide on the cost and eveything. As I said it's great.

I've got one book up there at the moment the Dark Tales thing - you can see a preview by following the links. I thought I'd put my Lulu ranking on the right for all to see, 26,000 odd whoopee!.

Lulu is a really useful tool for seeing how your work would fit together in book form - you don't have to buy anything if you don't want to but it gives you a warm tingle inside to get that "real" book in your hand through the post without having to shell out hundreds of pounds to some vanity publisher.

I've also used it to create personalised calendars for presents which actually are really good quality for about the same price as you'd pay for a pop star calendar in the shops (I always get a Kylie one as a Xmas present from my kids!).

No, I don't have shares in Lulu but if you have any interest in writing I suspect this would also be of interest to you.

I'd be interested to hear other people's experience also.