No New Books

As far as I am concerned, after 11  years of problem after problem with my Print on Demand company (Lulu), I am no longer publishing using it.

Apologies if I repost something from yesterday here:

Being paranoid when it comes to pdf files and page sizes, whenever I get completed books together I will double, triple and quadruple check every page and make sure the sizes are right.

I got sent a link to a free PDF converter and it only does pages in batches of 20s so an 80 book equals 4 PDF files that then get combined into one 80 pager.

Went through the New Project phase with my POD and then uploaded the file.....

Rejected because pages were of differing sizes.

WTF??!

So I checked all the pages and made the PDF from start again then uploaded.

rejected due to different page sizes.

Double checked and all pages are okay so tried up,loading three more times (Robert the Bruce would be proud of me). Failed.

So I contacted the site assistant who asked me to upload the file to My Files so she could check it. That upload was rejected every time for the same reasons. Then it uploaded. So off went the lady to check the file and I downloaded it to see if I could see a problem. Everything looked perfect so I wrote back stating this and she told me that the file looked perfect so she tried uploading it for me....failed due to page size difference. Now she is asking their useless tech people to open a case file and look into it.

Four hours wasted.

Remember when you slapped the art pages onto a photocopier platten and made your own comics without this crap?  Anyway, I was promoting the books until about 0200 hrs today and this morning I get this:

"Dear Terry,

"Thank you for contacting our support team at Lulu.com. My name is Julia and we chatted earlier this afternoon.

"Thank you for your patience as one of our print team members was taking a look at your file. She let me know that she had some trouble finding out what program you used to produce the file. She also suggested that you  open the file in the source program that was used to create it and manually set the size of the pages in that program.

"Here is a message from her:

"I would suggest exporting the file to PDF using our job options profile. I can tell he's publishing using the A4 size, which calls for 8.26 x 11.69 in. pages, and his PDF is sized at 8.35x11.81. Our joboptions save the PDF as version 1.3 which prevents transparencies from flattening with boxes, and basically heads off a bunch of issues."

"You can download the Lulu Job Options .zip file at the very bottom of this article. She also mentioned to me that your PDF version is of Adobe 1.7, which our system doesn't work very well with. Our system works best with version 1.6 or older, so this is another thing to keep in mind.

"I hope this helps! If you try these suggestions and are still experiencing problems uploading the file, please let me know.

Kind regards,
Julia D."

I have not changed or done anything different than when I have published every other one of the 90 plus books with the company.  These are scanned art pages of the correct dimension and size as always and I double checked every page of the document -as did their support agent and like her found everything was okay. 

So going through the document to re-size the pages to the size they are...?

Oh, and the Lulu Job Options pdf is basically a beginners guide and after 11 years I do not think that I need to learn how to do this again. I ought to point out that I do not need to flatten any boxes either....:-/

Lulu appears to have such an old system that it cannot even offer basic functions -I once asked about a stat counter to see how many visited the online store: "We are not considering that but if we upgrade our system we might one day".  Analytics? "No". 

Mysterious and Strange Beasts and Strange and Mysterious Beasts (same book but different size formats) were published in 2018 but Lulu's programming listed it in the store as "Only ships from North America". The thought of international postage put people off and when I realised what was going on I contacted Lulu support. They promised tech support would deal with the matter as it was a problem with their system. Two years later after repeatedly asking for this to be dealt with...nothing.

I will point out again that the books are printed "locally" to where the person ordering lives. There is NO INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING involved.

I think it says it all that their techie had no idea what system I used but then goes on to clearly identify Adobe but their system can only cope with much older ones.

I have 8 books each of 80 pages that, according to Lulu I am now going to have to re-size to the size that they are....but the books will still be rejected because their old system cannot handle anything but older programs.  The Green Skies is 500 plus pages....you know what Lulu can go and do there!

Here is an example of how old Lulu's system is: back in 2010 I opened a similar Print on Demand account in India with a company called Pothi. At the time the printing was cheap and the intention was to buy in bulk but then the new shipping costs(it was international shipping) kicked that in the head.  However, Pothi was new and I made the mistake of uploading the wrong book file (I have a LOT of files stored so they all have unique IDs now!) and it had some pages that were the wrong size.  I got a message from Pothi that some pages were not the correct size...but they had adjusted the sizes and sent me the PDF to double check. 

HOW could Pothi carry out this Herculean task of changing pages that were the wrong size in a PDF???!!

It was explained to me that it only took a brief adjustment on their system and all the pages were then the right size.

Over the last decade or so a number of people in the UK have set up POD companies. They are all gone now as the businesses were profitable but involved much more work than they thought (I am not kidding as I just double checked the old emails from two of them). I talked to these people and varying page sizes in PDF came up as it was a common mistake amongst people producing their first comics. I was told "It just needs you to auto reset to the page size required and that's it".

Lulu used to -still does?- attend conventions pushing its 'product' and it has been doing this for a couple decades now yet has a system that throws up so many problems and is so old and always notes how it is the document creators fault -as in the current case even though their own support person checked the document and found no problems.

If you can put up with that sort of thing then go for it but if you upload the correct sized file and it gets rejected over and over and you are willing to take the blame for that then go for it. I just printed out the entire book and every page came out perfectly and I've a crappy old Canon printer not a hi-tech laser printer.

The Green Skies will not be published as intended. Too many problems and I have no faith in Lulu which should have updated its system LONG AGO. The 80 pagers? Ditto. And, yes, I did try uploading one of the previously accepted PDF to Lulu to check -it was rejected due to "different sized pages" (I once had a book rejected because the "image on page 43 is low res and must be at least 300 dpi to print correctly" -they were talking about a 300 dpi comic page and when I asked they referred to one panel on the page !! Their system misidentified the panel as an image in a prose book....my fault of course).

Until I can afford to get books printed by someone competent nothing new is going to appear.  The internet has proven itself to be useful but it's the people you deal with that is the problem.