About Sarah's World print copy

We recently published Sarah's World: The summer to remember on Amazon Kindle. We wanted to get the digital version out so everyone could see all the nice illustrations in living color! All Illustrations in our books are drawn by Noe, then fiddled with by me using Picasa software and various free fonts available on the internet.

But you know, a lot of us would still like to have a hold-in-your-hand print copy, so for the past few weeks we've been learning all about that. Lulu seemed to be a good place to go, because they will make your book available for sale in various places, and seemed pretty easy to do. Sounded like they'd be reasonably priced, etc.

Once we got started, though... wow! First of all, we use Google Docs to do all our work, and they do have different sizes you can choose from to make a document. So I chose what is called B5 (6.93" x  9.84"), thinking that would be about the same as the 6x9 size I was trying to make on Lulu. But Lulu said that was not formatted right, that I'd have to choose another size for our book or resize the document. Then I saw Lulu had what's called the A5 size (5.83" x 8.27") and so does Google Docs, so I chose that.

Now, after having put in all the color illustrations, we downloaded a copy in pdf form (the kind Lulu asks for), and it looked really good. Then we went all the way to pricing, and for full color -- they said it would cost us about $33 to print!! And to sell, it would be about $44!! You see, the book turns out to be 100 pages long and there are 26 illustrations, so that must be the reason it would cost so much to print. Ok, back to the drawing board!

I began transforming the illustrations into black & white, but after downloading the pdf again, you could see that some illustrations came out pretty good, others really lousy. Back to the beginning again! Now I'm making them darker and with more "saturation" of color before changing them into black & white or sepia... I guess you kinda have to either know what I'm talking about, or be there so I can show you.

Anyway, that's where we're at with regard to making a print copy... still in the process. It's not that Lulu is hard to do, it's just that you have to learn how and then keep at it till you get it right. It's a journey, leading hopefully to a satisfying result. If you have any suggestions, do post them please.

UPDATE: We are not going to do this print copy ... sorry
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