PAUL NEWMAN
In Defence of Lulu
(Large quality paperback, only fifteen UK pounds including P&P)
MY BOOK PUBLISHED BY LULU!
The Wonderful International Technology Firm that is
Providing a Safe
Haven to the Hitherto-Rejected Author
Bestselling author Jilly Cooper criticised the exciting international POD venture Lulu, saying that it will only ensure more rubbish is written and published. But that superficial classification is from time to time applied to her own sexy sagas and rather yappy efforts at non-fiction. Besides, what is most present-day, commercial publishing but a pile of commonplace, throwaway garbage? Spin-offs from television series, a gluttonous mash of cookery titles, journalistic profiles of the identikit nonentities of politics and finance along with ghosted autos of celebrities who have nothing to say and even less to write about. Similarly Lulu will bring out all kinds of unsorted material, from the technical manual to the dogbreeder’s guide, from the book of amateur photographs to novel or collection of poetry. The worth of much of it is purely subjective and disposable, but then it is often meant to be, dealing with something that will have a two-year or less shelf span.
Thus Lulu's output is as good or bad as any publisher's in the general sense. Yet it is also superior in a spiritual sense, in that it is a positive, welcoming, open house, letting in everyone, giving them frank, friendly advice and the technology to do the job. It sets before the customer the pros and cons of the firm straight away, telling them what service it will provide, and what are its disadvantages, in that it is not a marketing company but a technology firm who will physically produce the book as an artifact and, if desired, assist its promotion by advertising it on their website. Basically Lulu is a service that produces your book in a tidy, efficient way, offering a variety of styles, formats and 'generic covers', garish, subtle and quietly tasteful, whatever your taste happens to be.
Of course, Lulu would not have proven so spectacularly successful if established publishers were able to fulfill their roles: that is to simply read, report upon and publish MSS sent to them by the general public. Today almost everyone has a personal PC and printer to go with it. Everybody has the technology to produce a good-looking manuscript. So all those people who firmly believed that they had a book inside them have started to give birth at an alarming rate. There is simply a shortage of midwives to attend the baby and make sure it comes into the world bright and smiling and wearing the right jacket. Books of every specialization and quality are submitted to publishers by the million. Vast slush piles amass, as tall as Everest and even less scaleable. No one is brave enough to assail these slippery and terrible alps. So the publisher either leaves them, loses them or sends them back unread. That is my opinion at least, and I am a professional author, having lived by writing for over twenty years.
Desperation is the obvious reason why authors resort to vanity publishing or the far more attractive POD (publishing on demand) technology which allows the printing of just one book at a time. Now, if you want to have your book published by the POD process in Britain, the type of person you are almost bound to meet is a gaffer in a bowtie who will suggest you donate to him around £2000 so that he can ‘prepare’ the way for the process – what he means is pay the printer to bring out the book at a spectacular profit to himself. He is the stumbling block who gets in the way, for he does not want you to simply publish it yourself. He prefers to pretend that it is a complex, skilful process that needs expert help and advice. He is in fact the obfuscator posing as a facilitator.
Lulu, on the other hand, emphasize how simple the process of publishing is. Their basic approach is to say, “Fine, here are our machines – this is how you use them. Go ahead, publish, revise as many times as you need to, for we're charging you NOTHING for our service, only costing the paper, binding and asking for a percentage of each copy that you sell from our website.” The physical process of publication is set out in a lucid, flexible fashion of clear-cut stages (title, subject matter, upload, PDF conversion, binding and cover design), so that one gets to enjoy the progession from mere title to sellable product. If your book is not long or complex and has only a few illustrations, it can all be over and done with in less than seven minutes. Believe me, it's far more exciting and satisfying doing it yourself. Your understanding is enlarged by participation in the act. Seeing the image you have chosen for the cover swim up towards you and spread over the blank space like a an exotic fish coming to the surface of a pond is an exciting and pleasant sensation.
To return to the commercial world of publishing, hundreds of thousands of perfectly good books are turned down because publishers have not the time or will to read them. A few years ago, I won a literary prize for a novel I wrote called 'Galahad'. Before that, I'd written around ten books, all of which had been published commercially. Then, about three years ago, I had a letter from a friend who told me about a remarkable woman whose background should be investigated. As what she told me linked up with a current project of mine, I decided to undertake the research. What I uncovered was a truly gripping ‘occult mystery’ that I decided should be turned into a book. After years of research, I completed the project and summarized it thus in the blurb I prepared for my commercial publishers:
THE TREGERTHEN HORROR
Aleister Crowley, D. H. Lawrence & Peter Warlock in Cornwall
PAUL NEWMAN
Involving murder, mayhem, espionage, sexual scandal and the Beast 666, this bizarre and tragic investigation into the death of Ka Cox at a lonely, haunted cottage in Zennor is one of the strangest stories to have ever come out of Cornwall. Involving a large and larger-than-life cast of characters, including the 'handsomest young man in England', Rupert Brooke, the climber George Mallory, the mad, babbling psychotherapist, Meredith Starr, and the rip-roaring composer, Peter Warlock, the narrative unwinds a tangled tale that enlists the embattled remnants of the Bloomsbury Group, the decadent acolytes of Fitzrovia, a young woman's involvement with a notorious magician, occult orgies in the grounds of a great house climaxing in a flourish of grand guignol when Bob Fabian, ace sleuth of Scotland Yard, joins the ensemble as he seeks to find the perpetrator of the horrible and still-unsolved 'witchcraft murder' of Lower Quinton.
With so much to offer, one might have thought such a title would be snapped up. Nothing of the sort. It would have been far easier if my book had been a cake-making manual or merely a list of shops in North London prepared to offer cheap photocopying services. The publisher's reader complained that he had never heard of the main characters. The title held no resonance. "Where is the hell is Tregerthen?" he sensibly enquired. "Where the hell is Xanadu?" I asked equally sensibly. He had read and enjoyed ‘Kubla Khan’ yet did not worry about the location of the poem, so why not allow me the same privilege? Besides, the public could always find the tiny hamlet on the map or through a computer search engine.
But I could see the publisher's point. The disadvantage of 'The Tregerthen Horror' lay in its sheer unfamiliarity. If the subject of my book had been King Arthur, the English Civil or Famous Football Players, the publisher might have been able to pigeonhole it and guess its potential readership. But when you write a book primarily constructed from original research, you inevitably face the problem of it being ‘an original’, a first, thus no framework of comparison has been pre-established. My subject did not exist, in fact, until I gave a name to a particular incident that took place at Tregerthen. In other words, the book's major virtue was also its major disadvantage. Hence the publisher will nearly always follow this dictum: if in doubt, turn it down.
After the first rejection, I submitted it to a few more conventional publishers who also rejected it for the same reason. Fair enough. It was their privilege. But oh how much of my time they wasted, keeping me waiting, making this reader and that comb through it, inviting me to pitching sessions and board meetings. One pack of clowns lingered over it for something like six months; another for about eight months. They’d mumble things about ‘markets’, ‘genre’ and ‘type of reader’ as if they knew anything about it.
So it was with massive relief that I turned to Lulu and instantly became an evangelist, a convert. The firm simply is the most welcoming project in present-day publishing, the most radical advance since Caxton, truly American in the sense that the author, the small man, sits at the front of the wagon train.
Hence, now I have at last launched ‘The Tregerthen Horror’, I get a constant stream of positive feedback from people who have enjoyed it and think it a fine book. Where the publishers were unable to recognize the relevance of its content, I have discovered many new readers who are fascinated by the milieu it evokes and the mystery at the heart of it and exclaim, "That was just the book I was waiting for!" In other words, the cultural ignorance of those who read the manuscript was the problem. This sound censorious and insulting, but it is not meant to be. An endless stream of information is poured out every day, in science, the arts and technology, and in the effort to keep up with it, much valuable knowledge becomes forgotten or buried, and thus many of the titles one sends out to publishers will not be comprehended or assessed fairly, not because the work is badly written or poorly constructed, but simply because of their disinterest or unawareness of the subject matter. Because I knew who I was writing for, the book has had a popular response among the audience for whom it had been originally intended. Although I haven't yet bothered to get an ISBN, I have already received a stream of requests for signed copies. Thus I am overjoyed that such a service as Lulu exists. Furthermore, I am delighted to hear that it plans to establish branches in Europe and the UK.
Email Paul Newman