I participated for the third year in a row and . Now that I’m somewhat rested from that huge disgorgement of verbiage, let me explain the photo that accompanied my blog entry about NaNoWriMo, which showed me reading a copy of the book I wrote from November 2006 through February 2008, including two 50,000-word-long NaNoWriMo sessions.
The day I finished the first draft of the book, I decided I wanted to have something tangible to commemorate my accomplishment. But more than that, I wanted a few trusted friends to read what I’d written and tell me the truth, good or bad, about what I had written, so that I could make the second draft of the book better.
Rather than print out hundreds of pages of manuscript on my printer and run it down to Kinko’s, I decided to take advantage of a print-on-demand book service. For various reasons (including familiarity, since we used it to provide print-on-demand services for our very first ), I used .
Lulu provides a wide selection of book types to choose from. For my first draft I chose Lulu’s Pocket size, which is slightly larger than a mass-market paperback (and printed on better paper than one): 4.25 inches by 6.9 inches. Lulu provides margin settings and even a blank Microsoft Word template so that you can get the size of the book just right.
The author attempts to hide his gruesome disfigurement behind the limited-edition paperback of his novel's first draft.So I exported my story text from and opened it in Word, created a custom paper size, set all my margins per Lulu’s instructions, added headers and footers, and then printed to a 435-page PDF, which I uploaded to Lulu.
The total cost for those books, including shipping: $17 per copy. Not cheap, I know, but I was willing to splurge in order to have a real souvenir of the process and give my readers something that felt like a real paperback book. My order shipped within a few days and in a few more days, the books arrived. I passed them out to my readers, including one friend and colleague who is a remarkably good editor—she marked her copy up like a college student frantically marking up a textbook. Her comments were invaluable.
I realize this process isn’t for everyone, but I had such a good experience with it that I repeated it once I had finished my book’s second draft. This time I ordered a larger size, Lulu’s U.S. Trade (6 inches by 9 inches), which made my book 318 pages long. I think maybe I prefer the smaller trim size of the first book, but it was fun to experiment with a different look for this book that may or may not ever actually be published by a reputable book publisher.
And if my novel never gets published, no big deal—I’ve got two tangible editions as souvenirs and I’ll find a way to release it on the Internet for unsuspecting people to stumble over. I might even podcast it as an audiobook. Who knows? Anything is possible. Now to finish that other novel, the one I stopped at 50,000 words in late November just as it was getting good…