Opinions on Lulu vs. CafePress?

[tldenmark]

I've used cafe press quite a bit for making my convention books. Particularly for small b&w art books to sell at cons. I've also recently used it for the new Dungeoneer role-playing game. I'm very happy with the quality, the printing is crisp, the grayscale is excellent, and the color covers are nice and just-heavy enough to be acceptable.

I've been investigating Lulu.com and it looks really good, but that may be just good web presentation. Does anyone have any experience with lulu? Is the quality better or worse than cafepress?


Thanks,
td

[Eero Tuovinen]

A recent thread about that:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13638

[tldenmark]

A recent thread about that:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13638

Thanks. That thread has some good info but it doesn't really give a side by side comparison.

It sounds like overall people are happy with the quality of lulu.

td

[Marco]

I'm very happy with Lulu. After having several problems with RPGMall, I was able to set up a quick and easy product through lulu and I'm very happy with the quality of the results.

JAGS-2 is now in print :)

http://www.lulu.com/content/85426

-Marco

[tldenmark]

Update:

I did some samples from Lulu.com, they are AWESOME!!!

I'm serious, you cannot tell the difference from their perfect bound books and an product that was printed on a press. You will be amazed.

I tried their saddle-stitch also, but he quality isn't as good. The cover is heavier than Cafe Press, but the image is not as good. The interiors are essentially the same quality, which is to say its excellent.

I'm having all my future products printed through Lulu now.

[Bardsandsages]

Lulu is far superior to Cafepress when it comes to book publishing.  

First, the pricing is cheaper per book, and there are greater discounts available for bulk purchases.  

Secondly, Lulu offers an incredible ISBN plus program to help you get your book available to booksellers.  I've used the ISBN Plus for the first book project.  They obtained the ISBN, registered the book, got it in BOOKS IN PRINT and the inventory of book distributor Ingrams.  The book is now listed at Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com, booksamillion and tons of other online booksellers.  For $149, that's a lot of work I didn't have to worry about and it was done quickly and efficiently.

The staff is also very knowledgeable about the publishing industry and between them and their forums you can get a lot of good advice.  

I have not seen the book quality of cafepress, but the quality of the books at Lulu is wonderful.  

I do use Cafepress, however, for merchandising such as T-shirts and such, and I love their newsletter feature that allows me to maintain a newsletter service without having to worry about the database.

And a not so understood aspect is that Lulu is technically classified as a publisher, not a printer.  So you can often circumvent the "we don't review books by self-published authors" problem with a lot of places, and it makes it easier to promote.  This isn't an issue if you're just publishing something to sell at conventions, but since not all my publishing projects are RPG related, its important to me.