I know that with this blog and my others as well as Twitter this will be seen by 2-3000 people a day so I want to make it absolutely clear that I would NEVER recommend Lulu.com to anyone wanting to publiosh a book let alone publish a comic.
On occasions in the past I have recommended the Print On Demand company They are often called "the oldest POD company" and that is true. The thing is, either through sheer incompetence as a company or just hoping too many things do not go wrong, they also have the oldest system out there. More than ten years ago I tried Pothi in India. At that time their system was far superior to Lulu's. Lulu has never updated its system,.
Now if you want to upload a Word doc manuscript to be made print ready it had better be something like Word 2003/2005 because anything newer the Lulu system rejects.
What you do not see as uninterested individuals is what I -and I am sure there are others- have to go through to get a book onto the online store. I have published 6-7 prose books using Word 2005. Those books are on the online storefront but nothing new can be added and I will come to that further on.
I recently published Black Tower Super Heroes (BTSH) nos 2 and 3 and Come On Steve. Each book took up to 7 attempts to get published. Firstly the Lulu system rejected the files because "we do not accept pages of varying sizes". Error? Try again. Nope, rejected. Thios kept happening and I contacted the Lulu 'customer support' and the person there checked the file -"the file looks perfectly okay". Then they checked with their tech (I think that is someone sleeping rough in a basement). Here is what I got:
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."
Now here is the program I used and the settings -exactly what Lulu.com want and then adjust to....I've lost my patience after three days and I was working on this until 03:00 hrs so forgive me when I say fuck up totally and completely,.
On occasions in the past I have recommended the Print On Demand company They are often called "the oldest POD company" and that is true. The thing is, either through sheer incompetence as a company or just hoping too many things do not go wrong, they also have the oldest system out there. More than ten years ago I tried Pothi in India. At that time their system was far superior to Lulu's. Lulu has never updated its system,.
Now if you want to upload a Word doc manuscript to be made print ready it had better be something like Word 2003/2005 because anything newer the Lulu system rejects.
What you do not see as uninterested individuals is what I -and I am sure there are others- have to go through to get a book onto the online store. I have published 6-7 prose books using Word 2005. Those books are on the online storefront but nothing new can be added and I will come to that further on.
I recently published Black Tower Super Heroes (BTSH) nos 2 and 3 and Come On Steve. Each book took up to 7 attempts to get published. Firstly the Lulu system rejected the files because "we do not accept pages of varying sizes". Error? Try again. Nope, rejected. Thios kept happening and I contacted the Lulu 'customer support' and the person there checked the file -"the file looks perfectly okay". Then they checked with their tech (I think that is someone sleeping rough in a basement). Here is what I got:
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."
Now I was not taking this bull-shit so I made it very clear that I was using the same program that I had used for 90 plus other books on their site. I was then told that my pdf was new and their system could only handle older Adobe pdf. I also sent a screen shot of my document page open and the program indicating the format size -EXACTLY what they wanted. I then pointed out that Lulu.com needed to get a new system since even an Indian company had better and more up-to-date systems than they did ten years ago.
I then got the old familiar "our system is old but we intend to update it in the near future".
Thiosis how it goes with Lulu: the customer is always to blame and load of techno garbage is spouted but if you persist you are given that "our system is old but we intend to update it in the near future" bull-shit.
The Come On Steve book, like the AOP Journal, took...just checked: 8 uploads until the Lulu system accepted it! With BTSH 2 and 3 I used the Word doc format which is an internationally accepted format: this is supposedly what Lulu.com wants and the settings are there so no messing about. Rejected. 7 times I uploaded no.2 and 6 times for no. 3.
Now Comic Bits took a week to put together and then edit. Some 80pp and in the Word doc format. The files had to be "adjusted" and that means images, text and more were shifted about which they should not be because this is a standard template,. This is what those adjustments do at their "best"...
I have now altered page sizes, text and even image sizes but the same thing every time resulting in unusable files. Oh, I actually downloaded the Lulu.com A4 template and guess what? "adjustments" had to be made and the file on all three uploads was ruined.
Lulu.com response? "Even though this is an automated response, your inquiry is our top priority. One of our agents will email you back. Depending on support case volumes, responses may sometimes take up to 2-3 business days" but normally it takes 5-10 days based on past experience and if a company are having to deal with that many issues something is very wrong.
Now I cannot believe that it is just happening to me. The odds of that are truly unbelievably astronomical. And it is NOT just me. I've heard from others with similar problems and guess what -the issues all revolve around people publishing comics or graphic novels. Are comic publishers not the type of creator Lulu.com wants -is there more money and prestige in prose authors?
Is that coincidence? I do not think so. If all my files are the correct size and the correct (old) program Lulu.com requires that WTF are they messed up -I have tried uploading Comic Bits 20 times now and every single time the adjustments screw everything up.
Here is the message I sent Lulu.com:
"There is still a problem with your system. I have now attempted around 10 uploads of my project Comic Bits 2 but I get the message, once it has uploaded and gone through making a print ready file, that adjustments have had to be made to make the pages 20-99 x29,70. I open the downloaded pdf and images are out of place and text moved.
Let me make it clear that I have produced seven prose books and a lot of other books using the same system. I even took screen shots of my file while opening which shows the page size. It is all perfectly correct. I even used Lulu's template and it was "adjusted" Your system is obviously not up to much at all and to be honest this has gone too far now. constant rejection of files that have nothing wrong with them -I'll send the screen images. Lulu needs to move into 2020. As soon as I find a new POD I'm going."
Oh and you know the page size they insist on of 20.99x29.70 and keep rejecting? I used their template and its seyttings are 21.00x29.70...yeah, they rejected that one, too."
I am expecting the usual response of "It's all YOUR fault" followed by "Our system.." Considering that the company takes a good percentage you might think they could buy a 2018 laptop and do a better job...though that might be too advanced for their system to cope with.
"Thank you for providing me with that feedback. I completely understand your frustration, and I agree that our system is definitely outdated. The good news is that we are releasing a new, updated website within the coming months that should resolve most of the uploading and conversion issues that authors have on our site. Hopefully that update will make our site easier to use and more user-friendly."
DO NOT EVER USE LULU.COM FOR COMIC PUBLISHING.
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