At this point in the process, I can only say good things about Lulu (I have a post in the works about this). If you pay yourself the customary royalty and only use Lulu’s storefront, things price out the same as publishing through LS and listing on Amazon. The advantage with Lulu is that there are no up-front fees, no charges for revisions. Zero risk. If I sell even 50 copies, then it’d be worth looking into LS or BookSurge. But right now that falls into the counting chickens and crossing bridges department.

Alas, I’ve written a book in a niche for which there is no established market. It’s an outlier for non-Mormon readers, and the content also makes it an outlier for readers of “home literature” romances. I’m so far out at the microscopic end of the long tail that my primary motivation for the time being is the O’Reilly perspective. Plus, I can’t afford to do any “real” marketing. No POD outfit is competitive with large-volume offset, which reflects the proper price point for this kind of fiction.

So I’m counting downloads as a sign of success, not sales. As an ulterior motive, most of my current web content–and most of my traffic–is “secular” in nature. If I can use this to build out the more sectarian segments of my readership, I’ll consider it worth the bother. My next “Mormon” novel should present far lower hurdles to non-Mormon readers as well. At the end of the day, I’m only hoping there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

I think Eugene’s methods for promoting the book are, in general, right on. I too have read (and agree with) Tim O’Reilly’s statement that Obscurity is a greater danger than Piracy. [Although readers should be aware that Chris Anderson is talking about this issue mainly because of his forthcoming book, Free.]

I look forward to hearing from Eugene how well his promotion methods work. It sounds to me like the Japanese genre fiction market is ahead of the Mormon market in some respects — at least in terms of the use of the Internet. Eugene, if you are reading this, I’d love to see more details or ask more questions about how this promotion works.

I really only have one criticism — Lulu. It is meant for books that are not going to sell more than 25 to 50 copies, and its costs are as much as double what publishers can get from the POD printers used by the major US publishers, Lightning Source and BookSurge. Lulu, like most of the author services companies, actually uses Lightning Source for some of its printing! Unless you expect to sell less than 25 copies, I can’t see any financial reason for using Lulu. See my post about this from a couple years ago The Difficult Path of Self Publishing.

Regardless of what company Eugene uses to print his book, I’m very impressed by his effort, and I wish him luck!