Lulu Sucks! epub Formating, TOC, & NCX for Dummies. Publish your book in the Apple iBookstore for only $100 or $2.99

By Don Richardson

"Your eBook has been rejected for missing, incomplete, unreadable, or inaccurate Table of Contents. The NCX must be accurate." Sounds familiar?

Simple Answers that No One Wants to Tell You.

Why pay thousands of dollars to Lulu or others for epub conversion?
Why use Lulu or other Apple aggregators, and receive only 80-% of royalties?
I charge $100 for epub formatting and $100 for Apple iBooksto

• Language: English
• Publisher: don Richardson
• Release date: Apr 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476286051

Book preview

Chapter One: Simple Solutions to Common Problems

Apple’s distribution system for the iPad is a free app called iBooks. This app allows you to buy and download books from the iBookstore.

Apple doesn’t have too many restrictions on the books that can be uploaded to the iBookstore, but individual writers are not able to directly upload titles.

Apple has appointed a number of iBookstore aggregators that are approved to submit books to the iBookstore for you.

ePub is the format Apple accepts for ebooks. Lulu has a service ($729-$4,949) that will run a special ePub checker and then convert your book into the proper format to pass Apple’s strict guidelines. You can also submit the ePub file yourself using any number of ePub services as well as Apple’s own Pages program.

The problem with Lulu.com is the customer service. If you read the various discussions online, then you will see that they have a notorious reputation for giving canned responses to your difficulties. Apparently the company built this system that is inflexible and very user unfriendly, and the customer service people are powerless to help. Here is an example:

I found this site to be extremely disappointing. After I spend days and days putting together a cookbook that I wanted to give as a Christmas present, a bug prevented my book from being published. I notified LuLu over and over again with e-mails and it took about one e-mail a day for a month for them to get back to me. Now 5 months later they have finally addressed the problem and I can publish my book. The idea of Lulu is one that I like but their service lacks professionalism. They have very poor customer service.

Lulu has created their own filter which flags a lot of things not required in the ePub standard, and not demanded by Apple (although they blame Apple for it).

Chapter Two :