Bad books are welcome here

LONDON - Rejection is always difficult to take. Most budding authors know the feeling only too well. Nick Alexander, 41, is one of them. He spent years being rejected by all the main publishing houses when he was touting his novel, “50 Reasons to Say Goodbye.”

Now, however, the British author has sold more than 1,000 copies of his “chick-lit-style fiction for the gay community” without agonizing over whether the telephone would ring or an acceptance letter would arrive in the mail. He did not have to spend anything on trying to publish the novel himself and is working on his second book.

Mr. Alexander’s success has come courtesy of a new Web site that pledges to publish anything by anyone — however obscure.

Titles such as “How to Cook a Peacock” and “Ten Crochet Dude Dishcloths” have, against all the odds, been published, and read, via an American Web site, www.Lulu.com, which was introduced in Britain last week.

Lulu enables writers to load their work onto the Web site at no cost, and the books are printed individually in paperback each time an order is placed.

There are no minimum print-run costs, and the authors, who set the sale price of their work, receive up to 80 percent of the profit, a far cry from the 7 percent traditionally offered by publishing houses.

The Web site was created by Bob Young, a Canadian technology entrepreneur who once wrote, by his own admission, “a really bad book” about computer software.

To his amazement, the book went on to sell 15,000 copies, but although it generated more than $500,000 in revenue, he received only about $1,800 from his publishers.

“After my book came out, I was so frustrated with the publishing system and how authors seem to have such limited control over their work that I decided to do something about it,” says Mr. Young, 51.

“With Lulu, anyone has the chance to be published and find an audience, however small, regardless of how many publishing houses have rejected their work.’

Mr. Young named the Web site Lulu after an old-fashioned American phrase, “a real Lulu,” that was popular in the 1930s and depicted something or somebody out of the ordinary.

He hopes Lulu will do for publishing what EBay has done for auctioning. An opportunity, then, for aspiring authors to pitch their junk?

“There is no question that there is an awful lot of [expletive] on the site,” Mr. Young says.

But surely it should be the job of readers and not a handful of publishers to decide what is and isn’t worthwhile? After all, didn’t J. K. Rowling have a string of rejections before somebody took a chance on Harry Potter?

Readers, indeed, are deciding in the thousands, with 30,000 books, priced from $5.36 to $77, sold on Lulu last month alone.

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