Just How Easy Print Book Publishing Can Be!
Ok I think I went a little over the top with the capitalisation of the blog post title.
Anyway, you probably already know my school runs an online bookstore, selling real print books authored by our students! See: : http://stores.lulu.com/realaudienceproject
This is an example of how we do it. This example suits Primary projects. I'll cover Secondary in a tick.
1. The students were engaged in imaginative descriptive writing with their teacher, Mrs Julia Harbor. They cared about what they wrote, especially because they saw our bookstore and realised their work was going to be sold and seen.
In this case they wrote about 'My Hiding Place.'
2. After editing and refining, they type up their description onto an A4 page, print it out, and get it proofread.
3. Now they add illustrations. This is what we end up with:
4. I scan the pages at 600dpi on a colour scanner. The scanner spits out a 130 mb PDF file at me.
(in case you don't know what a scanner looks like!)
5. I upload the PDF to our account at www.lulu.com
6. I rescan another A4 page to act as the front cover, and another as the back cover. I scan them as JPEG image files, upload to Lulu.
7. I type in a title, description, and set a price.
8. DONE! It's on the market!
Check out the finished product at: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/my-hiding-place/13854240
By the way, Secondary is even easier. Let's assume your students have written a study guide, a novel, a student-written textbook, a set of poems, or whatever. Let's assume it is basically all text. Throw it into a Word document, upload the Word document to www.lulu.com, add a description, set a price, and bang! It's on the market!
We're going to set up a display where all past titles are available for purchase by visitors to our school. We'll order a few copies of every book in order to get stock running.
Out of curiosity, I've just checked, and we've sold 80 books so far.
Please let me know if you've tried this idea too at your school.