Color, Cost and Lulu

In my post about Hanna Andersson's blook, A Creative Year, I noted that Andersson was a fan of Lulu, which she had used to self-publish her blook. I wanted to take a closer look at that because Andersson's book makes extensive use of color photographs.

The book is 242 pages, 6" x 9", perfect binding, full-color interior ink, and priced at $44.58. I wasn't the only one who choked on the price for a paperback. I found this at Kelly Kilmer's blog:

"At first I balked about spending $45 for a creativity and then it hit me 'Dummy! This is a self published book. You love Hanna's blog. You need this book.'

In Andersson's FAQ she writes:

"Was it expensive to make?

"To upload a book cover that you’ve designed and the content of a book (a manuscript) costs nothing at lulu.com. To make it available for others to buy costs nothing. I have bought one copy of my own book so far, and I paid just as much as everyone else gets to pay. The price is at lulu for everyone to view and consider! I make about 2 dollars from each book sold I think."

Yours truly is really curious, after all I helped produce Anniemac's garden blook, about what format Andersson chose. We opted for a photo book at Lulu -- no text -- although we could have added captions. If you'd like to see what Andersson's book looks like, Kilmer graciously provided photographs!

One of the commenters asked, "What program did you use for your layout and is that the file that was used to upload the manuscript with?" Andersson replied:

"To answer your question I used Microsoft Word to edit the text that I copied from my blog. The images moved around a lot, but in the end it looks like I want it too. I downloaded a word document from lulu.com where the borders/margins were correct to the book format I wanted and when you upload the document lulu-site converts it to a pdf, but you can also do that before you upload it so really you can use any program (for layout I recommend Quark Express or Illustrator or InDesign if you know them) and send the file as a pdf to lulu. I hope that helps?

"Good luck, can’t wait to read your books everyone!"

Should we understand from that that she used a standard template and that Lulu was smart enough to spot the images and make them color? Has anybody else tried this? Are all interior-color books so expensive? The God Interviews by Natalie d'Arbeloff is 112 pages, 6.14" x 9.21", perfect binding, full-color interior ink, priced at $25.01.