Fund-Raising with Lulu
There are two big fund-raising favorites down in my neck of the woods – cookbooks and calendars. Lulu, the self-publishing platform, realized that and made it easy for anyone to create, publish and sell either product. Why am I bringing this up now? If you’re considering a 2010 calendar to have ready for sale in December, now’s the time to get started.
Lulu calendar options.
All you need to create an awesome calendar with Lulu are great photos. For historical societies, this could mean a search in the archives for interesting historical images. Lulu Studio takes you step-by-step through the calendar building process from choosing a title to selecting and organizing photos and even adding your own events. We include birthdays and anniversaries on our family calendars, but associations might add meeting dates and other scheduled events.
Once you’ve finished the creation process, you can add the calendar to your Lulu storefront so anyone can purchase from there. You’ll probably want to order a quantity of calendars to sell yourself. Not only do you pay the “costs” price, but depending on the quantity you order, you will receive a bulk discount. Your cost to print a 12-month standard calendar is less than $12 each with quantity discounts beginning at 26 copies.
Sample calendars at Lulu.
Cookbooks will require more effort – collecting and reviewing recipes being the toughest task. With Lulu, you can use the Studio platform to walk you through the entire process or you can create a custom cookbook on your desktop and upload the resulting file for publishing. Costs will depend on variables such as size, binding, number of pages and whether you’re publishing in color.
It costs nothing to set up an account and experiment with Lulu’s Studio system. Create a sample calendar and buy a copy so you can see first-hand what the finished product will look like. One of the (many) beauties of Lulu is that there are no upfront costs – and there’s no minimum order requirements either. This is just another way that you can benefit from today’s publishing technology.
