As luck would have it, I found that you can use the same PDF for both services. Being me, I did it all in LaTeX, which beats M$ Word in the typesetting department any day, provided you’re willing to write your SF murder mystery in a Turing-complete programming language.

The only legit case I know of is if someone like Lightning Source or lulu needs a non-exclusive license to print copies to fill orders from third parties. No one should ever get an exclusive license or anything that affects your copyright for this or future books.

When you are self-publishing, you have to either do the things a publisher does yourself, or pay someone else to do it.

A long time ago, I worked for a company that wanted to produce printed manuals for the software that we produced. There was no way a real publisher was going to do it, there was simply no market. So we hired a publishing services company (I don’t remember which one, and this was 15 years ago) to help produce the book. I had to write the dang thing, but they did the layout, typography, etc, helped us find a printer, advised us on paper and binding, and basically got us through a process we knew nothing about.

And afterwards, we owned it.

If you’re familiar with Yog’s Law, you might have also read Slushkiller. Vanity presses are preying on the first 10 grades. Self publishing is for grades 11+, that is, “Someone could publish this book, but we don’t see why it should be us.”

I don’t write fiction because I suck at it, so don’t think you know anything about typesetting and typography unless you’ve successfully done it with the right tools and study.

When it comes to the issue of novices (and some experienced authors) having less than adequate business training, let me just say…Amen.

One of the first things I advise clients to do is become familiar with the industry – very, very, very familiar.

One of the other things I advise is that they find a good lawyer. (You’ll note I don’t advise “my clients” to that end – probably because I try not to give advice that’s no longer necessary or relevant. I tend to think they already have one.)

It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of business savvy when making decisions about writing, particularly when it’s intended as a career. Self-publishing isn’t “traditional publishing,” and it’s not for everyone, but I know plenty of people who’ve used it to good advantage. The real issue is one of disclosure, information and understanding – without which, quite frankly, people make bad decisions in many areas – publishing perhaps the least of them.

And just to add two more cents’ worth: I have several clients who use Lulu regularly, for various purposes (read: I’m the lawyer, don’t ask me for details) and although I have only very limited contacts with the company, my experience with their business department has been much better than I expected. They seemed particularly interested in ensuring they met the needs of small publishers and independent publishers. I can’t otherwise recommend or criticize their service, but I can say they did have a better grasp of the issues and a more helpful support team than I expected.

We set our Lulu account up to be zero royalties, so total cost to our project was zero, and the cost per-book was as low as possible. I forget the exact sales figures, but we did sell a fair number of copies.

The coolest part was working with the translation teams to do internationalized non-English editions; I’d done the original cover art and found myself learning to work with Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic and other non-Western scripts for the first time… and I’m esentially a unilingual English speaker! (we eventually hacked out a script to do most of the translation, by pulling certain phrases from the already translated content and copying them into the SVG graphics used for the cover.)

Lulu worked well for us, but we did have, between us, a large amount of computer knowhow, reasonable design chops, and some layout and publishing experience. The content is several years out of date now, but it was a great project.