sirram
Senior Printer
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money
Posts: 269
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Post by sirram on Aug 13, 2020 9:44:43 GMT
Well I thought it about time to own up to some of the books I've written or edited. See www.hatfieldhistory.uk/publications/. My first book (co-authored) on Lulu was The Ryde Remembered. If you look at the front cover, you may spot why I go by the name sirram. That was in 2012, which seems an age away. I used the old Lulu cover-design wizard. This book has sold around 250 copies so far. An interesting project was the Hatfield and its people series of booklets, published originally around 1960 but long out of print. We decided to republish them as facsimiles. I firstly scanned every page from the originals (five or six hundred pages, as I recall). I then fed the scans through OCR (optical character recognition) and saved the outputs into Word documents. Volunteers then proof-read to look for any OCR errors (my OCR program was thankfully surprisingly accurate). The next stage took forever. In order to make the new versions facsimiles of the originals, one needed to use every trick in the (MS Word) book to replicate the original page-layouts. Every line had to be identical to the originals - I learned a lot about "kerning", I can tell you. I then had to hunt down original photographs and sketches to scan those as well. An interesting (for me) editing exercise was Hatfield at War. This time, the author provided the text and photos and I put the whole thing together. Most of the other books on our website predate Lulu. .
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Aug 15, 2020 0:47:29 GMT
A very worthy site, and good looking books. I see you operate direct ordering. Do you actually carry stocks of books? I see they have ISBNs, can you not have links to Lulu or Amazon and let them process and ship the orders?
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sirram
Senior Printer
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money
Posts: 269
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Post by sirram on Aug 15, 2020 13:41:29 GMT
A very worthy site, and good looking books. I see you operate direct ordering. Do you actually carry stocks of books? I see they have ISBNs, can you not have links to Lulu or Amazon and let them process and ship the orders? Thanks about the site. I built it from scratch using WordPress a couple of years ago. One of our committee members chose the colour scheme and, although the colours do seem to contrast well with each other, I do from time to time wonder if I have been a bit over-liberal with the red. Re: the books, our more recent publications (e.g. the "Hatfield and its people" series) all have ISBNs. It was at the start of that project that we decided to register our society as a publisher and buy a couple of batches of ISBNs. So yes, our more recent books can all be bought via Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc. But we also keep stocks locally to fulfil orders that come in through our website. I would say that orders via our website's contact form are three times as many as from Amazon etc. Our oldest publications are not yet digitised. For them, we use a local print shop when we need more copies.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Aug 16, 2020 12:25:24 GMT
Re: the books, our more recent publications (e.g. the "Hatfield and its people" series) all have ISBNs. It was at the start of that project that we decided to register our society as a publisher and buy a couple of batches of ISBNs. So yes, our more recent books can all be bought via Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc. But we also keep stocks locally to fulfil orders that come in through our website. I would say that orders via our website's contact form are three times as many as from Amazon etc.
Is there much of a difference in price and shipping costs? The books on your site are remarkably cheap, if POD.
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sirram
Senior Printer
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money
Posts: 269
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Post by sirram on Aug 16, 2020 13:15:26 GMT
Is there much of a difference in price and shipping costs? The books on your site are remarkably cheap, if POD. We are a not-for-profit society and only seek a small margin (to keep our bank balance healthy). Internet sales all make a small profit. For local sales, we usually wait for a Lulu offer (15% off etc.) before ordering a further batch. And we usually order a sufficient quantity to benefit from a bulk-order discount. For each book, I built a book-sales spreadsheet (loads of Excel formulae) to figure out how many we need to sell before starting to make a profit. The spreadsheet allows me to plug in all sorts of up-front costs: cost of the ISBN, proof copies, shipping costs, give-aways (e.g. to contributors, editors, indexers, reviewers etc., who are given their copies for free). In the UK, the copyright libraries DEMAND free copies by law. There can also be other costs - e.g using a digital camera in a county record office, cost of gaining copyright permission for photos etc. With one of our recent books (published in 2016), based on a proposed sales price, I calculated we would be in the black ONLY after selling the first 51 copies. Obviously a risk therefore - which was left for our committee to decide upon. They went with the risk and it has sold many more than that.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Aug 16, 2020 23:51:09 GMT
UK Copyright libraries?
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sirram
Senior Printer
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money
Posts: 269
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Post by sirram on Aug 17, 2020 13:34:32 GMT
Six major libraries are entitled, by law, to a free copy of every book published in the UK. A better term for the six is, "legal deposit libraries". The six are: the British Library; National Library of Scotland; the National Library of Wales; The Bodleian, Oxford; Cambridge University Library; and the Trinity College Library, Dublin. OK, the last one is no longer part of the UK but is still included for historical reasons. These libraries are similarly entitled to a free copy of other items such as magazines, music, maps and so on. Six free copies may not seem a lot but, for small-scale publishers, it represents a significant cost (including the postage). Actually, I am all in favour of this tradition, which was started by Sir Thomas Bodley (1545 – 1613), founder of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Even a book that sells only one copy (if it has an ISBN and was published in the UK) will be safely preserved for posterity.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Aug 17, 2020 14:35:27 GMT
Six major libraries are entitled, by law, to a free copy of every book published in the UK. A better term for the six is, "legal deposit libraries". But not every book carries a copyright, and they may be entitled by law to get books, but I don't think there's any law to say that people have to give them a copy. There's also no need to, and nothing in law, at least in the UK, that says a copyright has to be registered. It's automatic, by international agreement, as soon as a copyright is typed or written on to a page, even a page that's not published. The six are: the British Library; National Library of Scotland; the National Library of Wales; The Bodleian, Oxford; Cambridge University Library; and the Trinity College Library, Dublin. OK, the last one is no longer part of the UK but is still included for historical reasons. These libraries are similarly entitled to a free copy of other items such as magazines, music, maps and so on. Six free copies may not seem a lot but, for small-scale publishers, it represents a significant cost (including the postage). But what is the point? What good does it do you? Apart from having your books stored for future reference there? Like some form of time capsule. I notice in some books, not many, some thing relating to such things, but I have no idea what use it is, unless it's for the use of general lending libraries.Actually, I am all in favour of this tradition, which was started by Sir Thomas Bodley (1545 – 1613), founder of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Even a book that sells only one copy (if it has an ISBN and was published in the UK) will be safely preserved for posterity. Well, I suppose so. But you could do the same thing in your own cellar, or even digitally.
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sirram
Senior Printer
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money
Posts: 269
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Post by sirram on Aug 17, 2020 14:46:50 GMT
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Aug 17, 2020 14:58:48 GMT
They hardly seem to police that. There must be 1000s of self-publishers of all manner of things who don't give them even one copy.
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sirram
Senior Printer
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money
Posts: 269
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Post by sirram on Aug 17, 2020 18:01:52 GMT
They hardly seem to police that. There must be 1000s of self-publishers of all manner of things who don't give them even one copy. Our local history society is a registered publisher with Nielsen in the UK (equiv. to Bowker in the USA). We bought blocks of ISBNs from Nielsen and, each time we publish a book, we update that ISBN record within our Nielsen account (e.g. book title, book blurb, front-cover image). This helps us because smaller internet book sellers (unlike Amazon who deals directly with Lulu) can get book-info for their websites from Nielsen. The UK legal deposit libraries presumably keep an eye on Neilsen because, soon after we published our first book (with an ISBN), one of our committee members received a letter requesting us to send free copies for the legal deposit libraries. The letter was addressed to the committee member whose name & address is given as the society's contact person on our Nielsen account. Each ISBN uniquely identifies both the publisher and the book title - so, once we had updated the ISBN record at Nielsen, there was no hiding place. On the other hand, a book we published in the early days without an ISBN would be unknown to Nielsen and, hence, unknown to the legal deposit libraries. There must be numerous such books out there with no ISBN. Interestingly, this book (with no ISBN) does show up on Amazon including an image of the front cover and the name of the author (but no book blurb, price or any way of ordering it). Amazon just says "Currently Unavailable". Presumably Amazon got the info about this book from Lulu. As a third example, when I published my own family history last year, I decided to use a free Lulu ISBN as I am not a registered publisher. So, in effect, that book was published by me in the USA (and therefore, I presume, falls outside the UK legal-deposit net). However, assuming Lulu gets its supplies of ISBNs from Bowker in the USA, I do wonder whether, at some point, I'll be chased by the USA equivalent of the UK's legal-deposit libraries. I assume there must be one. I have already received a Withholding statement from the American tax people, but I've still not got around to filling in a W-8BEN form.. I can't guarantee the above is completely accurate as the Nielsen website is a nightmare in terms of online help.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Aug 17, 2020 22:44:37 GMT
They hardly seem to police that. There must be 1000s of self-publishers of all manner of things who don't give them even one copy. Our local history society is a registered publisher with Nielsen in the UK (equiv. to Bowker in the USA). We bought blocks of ISBNs from Nielsen and, each time we publish a book, we update that ISBN record within our Nielsen account (e.g. book title, book blurb, front-cover image). This helps us because smaller internet book sellers (unlike Amazon who deals directly with Lulu) can get book-info for their websites from Nielsen. Yes I understand what you are saying, but Lulu also buy ISBNs in bulk (to give away) so in principle Lulu are the registered publishers of our books, but I doubt they give a free copy to anyone anywhere, if they did they would give us a CIP code or whatever it is.The UK legal deposit libraries presumably keep an eye on Neilsen because, soon after we published our first book (with an ISBN), one of our committee members received a letter requesting us to send free copies for the legal deposit libraries. The letter was addressed to the committee member whose name & address is given as the society's contact person on our Nielsen account. Nielsen's database is no doubt in direct contact with them.Each ISBN uniquely identifies both the publisher and the book title - so, once we had updated the ISBN record at Nielsen, there was no hiding place. So how does it work when we apply a Lulu ISBN to our books? Lulu's software applies a unique ISBN that carries the details of each of our books just as you say.On the other hand, a book we published in the early days without an ISBN would be unknown to Nielsen and, hence, unknown to the legal deposit libraries. There must be numerous such books out there with no ISBN. Interestingly, this book (with no ISBN) does show up on Amazon including an image of the front cover and the name of the author (but no book blurb, price or any way of ordering it). Amazon just says "Currently Unavailable". Presumably Amazon got the info about this book from Lulu. It's unusual for anywhere but Lulu to list a book created at Lulu that has no ISBN. Applying an ISBN at Lulu kicks of their Global Reach activity. Are you sure you are listed as the publisher at Amazon? There are quite a few ripped off books around. As a third example, when I published my own family history last year, I decided to use a free Lulu ISBN as I am not a registered publisher. So, in effect, that book was published by me in the USA (and therefore, I presume, falls outside the UK legal-deposit net). However, assuming Lulu gets its supplies of ISBNs from Bowker in the USA, I do wonder whether, at some point, I'll be chased by the USA equivalent of the UK's legal-deposit libraries. I assume there must be one. One would expect so, and yet I have been using Lulu for around 10 years, with their ISBNs, and have heard nowt from such places. I have already received a Withholding statement from the American tax people, but I've still not got around to filling in a W-8BEN form.. As far as I know it's Lulu who send those out. (With Amazon it's a simple online form to fill out). In the USA any company has to declare what they have paid to third parties such as us and deduct income tax from it. It does not matter if we are not employed by them, it's taxed at source, unless you prove they have no right to it. Unlike most other countries like the UK who 'trust' us to declare earnings from wherever, and cough up.I can't guarantee the above is completely accurate as the Nielsen website is a nightmare in terms of online help. Written by lawyers no doubt, and only understood by lawyers.
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sirram
Senior Printer
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money
Posts: 269
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Post by sirram on Aug 18, 2020 10:08:11 GMT
When I used a free Lulu ISBN for my family history book last year, I contacted Lulu to ask who was therefore the publisher. They replied that I was the publisher. This is explained in a Lulu help page help.lulu.com/s/article/Lulu-FAQ?language=en_USSo, on the copyright page, I put: Published by <my name> Printed via www.lulu.comCopyright © 2019 - <my name> Then came the usual "All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced ... without the written permission of <my name>" And finally came Lulu's supplied ISBN.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Aug 18, 2020 18:23:49 GMT
Well, in theory we are the publishers, but in reality, just the creators. I use Lulu ISBNs and it results in this >> www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0244315809/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tu00_p1_i0Scroll down to the details. Or I can just C & P Publisher: lulu.com (27 Dec. 2018) And to be honest you do not have to mention Lulu at all within your book, especially seeing as Lulu do not print them and via my just confuse.
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Post by Do Tell on Aug 18, 2020 19:16:08 GMT
Lulu Press Inc merely facilitates printing, since it ain't an actual printer.
Registering a copyright in the US requires you to send a copy of the work, physical or electronical, to Library of Congress, the deposit copy analogue of UK system.
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