Self publishing stuff

Seeing as I made a big song-and-dance of self-publishing my poetry book in my responses to Nic VeryLikeAWhale's 10 publishing questions (see post below), I think it's only fair that I post a link to an excellent blog which deals exclusively with POD companies.

The blog is called PODdy Mouth - daily dirt on POD and self-publishing, and its posts are jam-packed full of details and data about the main POD and self-publishing companies you'll come across if you're ever tempted to consider publishing your own book of poems. Please note that this PODdy Mouth is not the same as the late, lamented PODdy Mouth run by girlondemand which reviewed POD-published novels. This is a different PODdy Mouth. You have been told.

If you spend more than a few minutes browsing the blog, you'll soon realise that this new PODdy Mouth is not a great fan of lulu.com - the company I published my poetry book with. S/he compares lulu.com to McDonalds in terms of the product and service - and surprisingly enough, I agree with that assessment. lulu.com are cheap and cheerful, and you get what you order from them without added extras like tablecloths, cutlery and waiting staff.

As I've mentioned a number of times on this blog, I'm happy with the lulu.com service because it meets my (very specific) needs. I researched a number of self-publishing businesses before deciding that lulu.com were the company for me. I've had some exposure to book design, layout, typesetting, etc and thus didn't feel the need to have someone else do that work for me. This helped me keep down my outlay for publishing the book.

Quite simply, if you want a quality product but don't know what you're doing, then lulu.com is probably not the place to go for your self-publishing needs. If, on the other hand, you're as cocky and headstrong as me about your product: go for it!