Friday, 14 March 2008

Lulu lied to me.

I had a little dream.

No not the weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllllll Scottish singer http://www.lulu.co.uk/ but the "print on demand lot" www.lulu.com I was so excited when I discovered the whole self publishing gig. I could publish my own professional looking book, as and when I needed it. I spent days formatting it to their exacting standards, sending it, and sending it again and again. PROBLEM UPLOADING FILE It kept saying again I tried. Spoke to some body called Micheal F or Brian M (not their real names) can I help you? your welcome! Have a nice day live chat . I ordered it I waited one week, two weeks, three weeks. It arrived God I am so EXCITED My work in a book, I can pretend I'm a photographer with a book, I can open a separate section on my website, BOOKS it will sell and sell Robert Frank's The Americans all over again!

It arrived OH MY GOD in a packet like what you get from Amazon........... I tear it open.................

I didn't even want to show it to my cat. It looked like it had been printed at the local library. Talk about banding. The pages weren't even in the right order, In short it was just a £10 piece of papery crap...........

I'm going to take two days off blogging to lick my wounds............................

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tosser.

Anonymous said...

uh-oh....I had a similar experience using blurb.com for a photobook. Although not as bad as your effort, the printing was just so-so (no punch) and the paper stock used was very disappointing - it made the whole thing scream cheap!

I've just been offered a free trial at yophoto.com, I will let you know how I get on.

mark page said...

Thanks for that Martin. And thanks to you ANONYMOUS posted I note at 10:43 on a Saturday Night!

Anonymous said...

I've found Lulu excellent in terms of print quality for photography books. They simply print what they get sent, without any hand-holding - so it pays to pay a lot of attention to the guidance from photographers on their forums. Louviere+Vanessa have their exhibition catalogues printed by Lulu, and JPG magazine is printed by Lulu.

mark page said...

No amount of attention on behalf of the photographer is going to stop "banding" or them printing on "bog" paper. Pages printed out of order ie 78 79 82 83 80 81 etc, I have also recieved emails from other UK photographers who have had the same experiances, if not worse including tobacco between the vinyl and paper on the front cover!