Man, I haven't posted on these forums for awhile. I just never know what to say a lot of the time. But I have a question this time. Anyone use Lulu publishing and what are your experiences with them good or bad. I have ordered two copies of my book from them for reviewing mistakes and they just can't seem to keep the blacks in my book consistent. I even went back after the first book I looked at from them and darken all my pages so this wouldn't be a problem. The second book of mine, with corrections, comes in so I can make sure it looks okay and every other page is half the black tone of the previous page. I have contacted them and they are looking into the problem. But has this happened to anyone else with Lulu publishing. Okay...done talking:)

I've never dealt with them as of yet, but I have considered them in the past. I am just afraid of the quality of the final product. I've heard horror stories with digital print on demand stuff.

From what has been said in several other forums, Lulu is a quality printer. They do great work. The downside is that they are the most expensive of the POD printers.

Ka-Blam also does quality work (this one I know from experience), but tends to be a lot less expensive than Lulu.

Both printers do top notch work fairly quickly.

Comixpress has a more shaky rep. Their work is good, their price is cheaper than the other 2, but they often take forever to print your work, & their customer service is pretty rocky as well.

That's the current summary of things.

Thanks for the information cs3ink. This is the first time using print on demad printers for me. I will check out Ka Blam printers:)

I haven't used any of the print on demand services, but I just received my books from SIPS Comics and they were top notch, quality-wise, and cheaper than any of the POD services. The books are 36 pages black and white with nice, thick covers and slick high-quality paper and only cost $1.48 each. I recommend them to anybody who is looking to get their books printed.

Lulu is a lot more expensive than Ka-blam. Although minor, I've had couple problems with Ka-blam (not being able to reorder, guaranteed delivery date wasnt delivered or shipped on guarenteed date), but their printing is excellent. I havent had any problems with lulu, their system is a lot easier to handle and more flexible, you have absolute control over your book, anytime. Ka-blam pretty much takes your stuff and prints it. You need to get every thing set up before you get it to them. Meaning you have to make sure you dont have any mistakes before sending it to print. on lulu, you can add, subtract pages, change stuff freely, on Kablam I think they charge you if you want to reorder a book with changes.

They're both real good. I prefer lulu's store system over Ka-blams indyplanet store, again, because you have total management over your products.
Not putting Ka-blam down, they're working hard to improve they're system, they do good work for a small printing service :D

I've printed my work through Lulu and Comixpress.

Lulu is good if you don't want to deal too much with customer service. You can make the book, upload it, print it, and sell it online with out having to deal with the heads.

The downside to lulu is it's too expensive if you are the kind of person that wants to buy the books and sell them at conventions. It's really expensive if the pages are in color. It's almost impossible to make a good profit.
Also the book size choices are limited, you can't make a custom book size. One more thing, if you have some pages of your comic in color and some without, you can't custom make your book to have both B+W pages and color pages. You have to print it all in color. Expensive!

Comixpress is nice and cheap. The quality of printing is excellent. You can also print books with a combination of color and B+W. There is also an option of adding a Comixpress ad to part of your book to reduce the cost.

The downside to Comixpress is the online store and customer service. The online store has a waiting list... a long waiting list to get in. I know people that had their comic printed through them years ago and their work still isn't in the online store.
Cs3ink is totally right about the bad customer service. I've ordered 50 books printed through them in December, told them I needed them by March and whoa... they waited until March 23 to print my books. Talk about nerve racking. During the wait, I emailed them a few times asking what's going on. I didn't get one reply. Not one.

I talked to others about Comixpress, the big problem with them is that they are infamous for not replying to any complaints and question emails.
So if you order through Comixpress set up an exact X/X/X date a good time before you actually need them and order in bulk, so you deal with the customer service as little as possible.

I just heard about this POD printer. It's called SIPS, Island Print Services.

The eddress is http://www.wedocomics.com/.

I don't know that much about it, but the word I've picked up is that they're both dependable & affordable. I haven't had the time to do my own research, but the word is good enough that I thought I should pass the info along.

Anyone know any more about these guys, please feel free to share.

SIPS...

I've never used SIPS for personal projects, but I did manage a few comic book projects for a friend of mine who used SIPS and my friend was always very happy with the result. I talked to Jeff at SIPS a few times on the phone to iron out a problem here or there and we always made it worked. The last time I dealt with Jeff or SIPS was probably 8 months ago, so I'm not sure if anything has changed.

Now, another person I know had a real bad experience with SIPS, not getting any books at all! This person got a reduced rate if they came back for another turn. This person decided to print two books this time. They got tracking numbers and updates on these projects. And when the box arrived at this person's house, only one of the books was there.

That's what I know about SIPS.

And for all of you who will be selling your comic in the United States and are having it printed outside of the US, you need to include a line in your legal info about it. Usually, PRINTED IN CANADA is good enough. SIPS is in Canada for those that don't know.

I mentioned SIPS earlier in the thread.

I had my books printed with them and was very happy with the quality and customer service. They made a mistake in the binding of the books, but immediately sent out a new print run of books that were bound properly at no extra charge. I'll be using them again for my next book.

Also, there's not going to be a printer that has a unanimously good record. Especially since people tend to be more likely to be vocal if they had a bad experience.

I'm glad someone made a thread about this; I've been tossing around the idea of getting my comic published (several months from now, probably), and wasn't sure if there was a better service than Lulu.
Ka-Blam sounds promising, but here's a problem I have with it (from what I've seen on the site): unlike Lulu and Comixpress, you actually have to buy the books yourself and then ship them out to whoever is going to buy them. Personally, I'd think it'd be too much of a hassle both on my and the customers' part to have to wait for the books to get shipped to me, and then for me to have to turn around and ship them back out, y'know? It'd be so much easier to have the book available on the site's online store so people can order what they want straight from the publishers.

Korosu, can you type, indyplanet.com? Yes, that's Ka-Blam's online store.

And the plan wouldn't be for them to ship you comics and then you would ship to your customers, you would order 10-20 books ahead of time and then send them out when the orders came in. That way you could personalize every package if you wanted to.

Okay...I obviously misunderstood it. And I don't know why I didn't see the big section about IndyPlanet; it's right on the main page. Again, I'm just judging it based on what I could see from the few minutes I was on the site, but obviously I should've taken a closer look at it, so sorry.

:) No worries, just happy to help.

Lulu is great for B&W books more than 100 pages. Not great for color books.

Lulu is great if you know what you're doing. It's all about knowing what kind of paper you want to use. That's why ink issues might appear. It's also got a lot to do with the scan size and DPI settings. I made one short book that looked fuzzy, found out my DPI settings and scan sizes were off. So I redid it and they were really good about sending a fixed copy out with all the corrections. It looked better, but half the book seemed to be a bit fuzzier than the other. I rechecked my settings and found out I was the one screwing up.

However, the bright side that I found was that you don't need to order in bulk and then find a distributer. It works kinda' like cafepress. Sure you make less that way, but people like me don't really sell that many copies to warrant a bulk order. Plus they give you a ton of options on how to bind your book, your book size, paper, etc. Yeah it's expensive, but you're really paying for the services they give you. I intend to use them again unless I can find a better service that offers the same.

tl;dr

Pros: Great service, fantastic options, get what you pay for
Cons: Not always the best quality, expensive for some, need to know what you're doing.