Zepfanman.com - Latest Comments

Re: A review of Lulu’s book-publishing service

Dae323 — Mon, 07 May 2012 12:54:07 -0000

the biggest problem with LULU is their customer service - essentially nonexistent - and their email service - completely borken (to the tune of HUNDREDS of the same automated emails flooding your inbox the second you attempt to contact them ABOUT ANYTHING).

Re: A review of Lulu’s book-publishing service

Jeanette Ertel — Fri, 04 May 2012 22:13:08 -0000

Mr. Zepfanman, it is great to find your site and I am grateful you are willing to share your understanding of the Lulu publishing method. I am a retired (86) book editor but am at a loss with electronic publishing. I am sure it is simpler to do than I seem to believe. I have a collection of forty poems that I have put into a format that I chose from the Lulu options of sizes. Size: 5.83 x 8.26. This in itself is a wonder to me. Would that size be the book size in inches or the space allotted for the text?

Re: A review of Lulu’s book-publishing service

zepfanman — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:52:31 -0000

Yes, they have FTP for files larger than 300MB. Their support page is pretty good if you have other questions like this.
http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Lul...

Re: A review of Lulu’s book-publishing service

Haugen History — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:34:06 -0000

Thanks for your quick reply! That sounds great. I will look below. One more question, though. When I incorporate the scans of my grandfather's diary pages, we are talking about 100 trade size pages. Will that be too large to upload? I may need to see if they have a FTP site. Anyway, thanks again for your help.

Re: A review of Lulu’s book-publishing service

zepfanman — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:04:45 -0000

You upload the entire document in one piece. As long as your scans are pretty good, they should turn out fine in black & white grayscale for the Lulu book. See my response below to a similar question from CindiSell: http://zepfanman.com/2010/12/r...

Re: A review of Lulu’s book-publishing service

Haugen History — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 16:48:31 -0000

Hi, thanks for an interesting review! I am trying to publish my grandfather's diary written in 1915. I have scans of his diary and then transcribed text. I wanted to have both in the book. How does Lulu handle pictures/scans? Do I have the text in the word doc and then have the jpegs of the scans placed in the same word document as the transcribed text and upload it all as one document? I envision the transcription of the diary at the front of the book and the other half of the book as pictures of each handwritten page of his diary. Thanks for any help! Astrid.

Re: Food, sights, and culture in Rome, Venice, and Athens

zepfanman — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 14:03:54 -0000

Organization is all thanks to Kurt, for sure. Glad you enjoyed!

Re: Food, sights, and culture in Rome, Venice, and Athens

Nick — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:25:00 -0000

Always enjoy your travel logs Jaige. Kudos for being well organized to put this together. Glad you enjoyed your trip!

Re: Italy & Greece vacation

Rita Thompson — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:42:17 -0000

no...I've been to Italy, but not Venice. I hope you have a great time!!!!

Re: Italy & Greece vacation

zepfanman — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:40:24 -0000

Yep! Ever been?

Re: Italy & Greece vacation

Rita Thompson — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:34:02 -0000

be careful! Greece?!

Re: Italy & Greece vacation

zepfanman — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:14:46 -0000

I think you're fully qualified to take care of XanEdu's computer problems. I'll expect to return to the building burned to the ground. Then we'll all join the circus - oh, wait...

Re: Italy & Greece vacation

Michael Holladay — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:08:03 -0000

Bye JJ! Not sure what we’re going to do at work without you. Maybe I will step up and try to fix everyone’s cat viruses. But that means I will probably create a bunny virus on top of it that you will have to face when you get back. Have fun!! : )

Re: Science Saved My Soul transcript

zepfanman — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:43:30 -0000

I agree!

Re: Science Saved My Soul transcript

Teresa Slaven-Blair — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 04:41:33 -0000

I have only one quip with that. At the end there was only 1 female who's picture appeared, and it was obscured. Granted through history there have been few women who have been allowed to contribute, but the more recent faces that appeared could have been female. Other than that, it is a beautiful clip and completely awe-inspiring.

Re: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s testimony for space exploration (Senate hearing videos and documents)

Michael Holladay — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:39:17 -0000

It's sad to see NASA in decline because of corrupt bank bailouts and expensive unethical wars that hurt us. I like how the central focus of this is that scientific programs mean innovation, something the US severely lacks.

Re: I did the hundred

X11 — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:23:20 -0000

For knee strength, I recommend inline skating. It will take a long time to learn, and you will fall a lot, but with pads it will be easy. You'll learn to fall right and maintain your balance better. In the end, the skating motion strengthens muscles which support the ACL. Your whole legs will get ripped if you do it enough. Find a bike path. Have someone expert train you so you learn faster. Wear pads, and be ready to fall down. It's no problem with the pads.

Re: Science Saved My Soul transcript

JK — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:07:43 -0000

Thank you very much for taking the time to sort this out...

Re: A few album ratings – Part 3

zepfanman — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:39:47 -0000

Everything about the new Dragon Tattoo film was just repetition for me. On its own, the soundtrack is okay, but it's basically Ghosts/Social Network continued - nothing new. The movie itself:
http://www.theshiznit.co.uk/fe...

I need a new way to display the ratings as it's too hard to count these stars. Notice that nothing I've listened to lately gets a 10. No DSotM-like classics being produced these days - although Robyn's *Body Talk* is close to perfect.

Re: A few album ratings – Part 3

Brett — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:24:52 -0000

I second Florence & The Machine (they were great opening for U2), and Trent & Atticus of course. I also second the ambivalence towards Fleet Foxes.

Re: Science Saved My Soul transcript

zepfanman — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:14:34 -0000

Try dotSUB
http://dotsub.com/view/search/...

Re: Science Saved My Soul transcript

Boxofslavery — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:48:06 -0000

I can't thank you enough for transcribing this! I'm performing an analysis on his style in my writing class at St Edward's University (oh, the irony) and the teacher gave permission to use his work, but only if I could find ten pages worth. This cut my initial legwork in half! Does anyone know where one can find other "fanscripts"? I've also sent philhellenes two personal messages but have not received a response, although not much time has passed. (I am kind of on a time budget...)
Again, thank you for taking the time to do this.

Re: A review of Lulu’s book-publishing service

zepfanman — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:11:03 -0000

Yes, it's no fun trying to wade through all the literature and different websites while you're trying to decide what service and options to use. I just updated the link to the pricing page in the blog entry above: http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Pro...

Basically, instead of $.02 per page, it shoots way up to $.20 for color (for every page in the book, not just the pages with color on them). As you'd expect, we opted not to do color.

Re: A review of Lulu’s book-publishing service

CindiSell — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:14:51 -0000

My husband and I are doing personal histories. I have a novel. I have a short biography of my first husband.
I have a children's book. (Now that we are retired you can see what we do with our time).

The novel is ready to go except for the cover. The others are in the pipeline.

Thank you so very much for the info. It is specific, and that is what we needed. Were any of the pictures in color?

We have had a difficult time deciding on a company. It's all very confusing. Think I will do the short biography first. It is just for the cousins, children, and grandchildren. Lots of pictures.

Re: A review of Lulu’s book-publishing service

zepfanman — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 19:11:00 -0000

All very good questions. I had 30 pictures at the end of the book, one every other page so the ink does not rub into the other pictures. I did not have any charts, but one thing I realized once I was all finished is that I could have converted to PDF BEFORE I uploaded the final document to Lulu. I initially thought they had some special processing to do, although the reason I uploaded in a word DOC was their warning that some fonts don't work properly if you upload in PDF - not sure how significant the warning was, but I didn't want to take a chance. I did not have any font problems uploading the DOC, but when Lulu converted it to print, there were a couple of page breaks that incorrectly spaced out the pages. If I had uploaded the whole thing as PDF, I would not have had that problem. Not sure how well I explained that, but it's really the only regret I had. Everything else looked great. Oh, also on that note, I'm sure charts would look fine as lulu simply takes whatever you have in the final document you upload and prints it - it costs the same whether the content is a chart, photo, or just plain text.

252pp, $13.08 plus shipping; otherwise, no extra processing costs or anything like that. They do frequent deals and they also happened to have a free shipping deal when we ordered a reduced-price bulk shipment of 24 copies for $206.16.

For comparison, the initial draft that I printed had 163 pages, $7.76 per copy, plus shipping.

Hope that helps. Are you creating your own book?