Yesterday I was really excited to receive delivery of my daughters first published ‘book’ in time for her 10th birthday party this weekend.

She has always been a HUGE book lover, and from the moment she cottoned onto the fact that I have the ability to turn one of stories into a real book (since she was about 5yrs) she’s been begging me to do it just about every year since, so I’ve finally done it!

Below is the finished article ready to be gift wrapped:

As you can see the cover design is heavily illustrated. I wonder who did that? Me of course.

The story is about two girls who become friends; one is a vampire the other not. My daughter is very influenced by Darren Shan, one of her favourite authors. It’s only a short story really rather than a book, as not many 9yrs olds have sufficient attention span to write a full sized book

Not only is she a book lover and aspiring writer, but she’s a keen entrepreneur too – she plans to sell as many copies of her book as possible!

The book was printed by print-on-demand publisher www.lulu.com, who are market leaders in the self publishing arena. I’m exceptionally pleased with the print quality inside and out, and it arrived within about 5 days of me uploading the files to the publisher, so all round I’m mightly impressed.

You can see from the original artwork image below how well the cover has printed faithfully to this. I hand drew the cover illustration and then coloured it in Adobe Illustrator.

all about lulu
If you are interested in self publishing, as I said I heartily recommend Lulu, this is my second experience with them and both times I’ve been more than happy with the price, speed of service and final result.

The Lulu short run print on demand system is relatively easy to get to grips with. If you can create pages in PDF format, you can create a book. Before creating your PDF, check the book sizes available through Lulu to ensure you document matches as they have specific sizes to choose from.

PDF is their standard format, however Lulu do also accept other file formats such as rtf, wps, ps, jpg, gif, and png, which their wizard then converts to PDF.

Then you simply upload your completed document to their website (you create the cover separately from the internal pages and upload this separately), set your sale price and click publish, it’s as easy as that.

Published books can be purchased directly from the Lulu website by individual customers if you wish, or you can keep the purchase page private for your own orders only. You can also order as many copies as you like to be posted in bulk (no minimum volume) – you may want to sell some offline, or simply have a copy or two of your own.