Lulu Frustrations

I finished my book.  Got it all purdy and formatted and ready to go.  Followed all the instructions for making the fonts embedded, etc.  I decided I wanted a 9x6 book.  Their standard template is 6x9, but I read this on their site when I first started formatting: 

POD printers tend to print landscape pages sideways, so even if you are creating a wide format book (9 x 7), the uploaded source document page orientation must be set to Portrait, with page dimensions defined with the wider width than height.

Which lead me to believe that as long as I left it at Portrait, I could do a 9x6 book.  So that is how I designed my whole book.  When I got to the upload file part, it said I couldn't do 9x6.  A called, posted a note and sent an email.  Got a response saying that they don't do 9x6 and that I'd have to reformat my book.  So I spent 2 hours doing that.

Oh, I should also mention that after you do anything on lulu, it freezes and you have to go out and go back in.  I thought it was my computer, but I rebooted, cleared my cache and then googled and it's a common issue. 

So now my file is uploaded and I'm trying to create a cover with their "wizard".  They have a new Wizard and an old Wizard.  The new wizard is okay, but I'm not thrilled with the templates available.  And while they have links to the old wizard, I'm now on my second reboot of Lulu to try to get to it.  Hoping that it has better options.  Well, truthfully, I'm hoping I can even get there to figure out Old Wizard's options.

I really didn't think this would be the hard part.  I'm not computer-stupid and I don't have issues following directions.  I'm also not super picky about this book.  So I really didn't expect to get this frustrated.

I'd try Blurb for this, but you have to download a program and my project is already done in Word and PDF.  But I'm soooooo frustrated!

Lulu.com

Thanks for asking about the book. It's really not much, but it was fun to do and will make some members of my family happy for a few minutes. If you watched the YouTube video thing that I did, it's basically a long, long version of that without music.

It's also a good test of what it entails, since it's only 24 pages long. I'd like to get a few of the family lines into a book format, so this is a nice test.  I wanted a print-on-demand (POD) project so that I could just buy a few copies as gifts and then have it there in case any one wanted to order themselves.  With these, you can make the price anything you want as long as it's at least the cost the POD company has to make it.  I'll make my prices their prices, as it's really a way for me to put it out there. 

Anyway, it likely won't be fun for many of those who weren't there, but when I do it, I'll also have a free PDF version so that you can take a peak at it.

Right now, I am going to type in the changes I made yesterday (I can only edit in pen and it must be red or blue- why is that??!? Most people could just do it on the screen, I'm sure). Anyway, I have to make those changes to my Word document and then format it to a PDF in a special way so that the fonts and pictures are "embedded". It looked like a lot of steps, but I'll keep you posted.  Then I upload the PDF.

Then I have to create the cover. 

One step at a time.  I'll keep you posted.