"It's a Lulu"-1940's slang

Several of the publishing blogs I follow are agog with an announcement from Harlequin. In case you don't know, Harlequin's claim to fame is the romance novel.

Harlequin has decided to publish pretty much anything anyone sends them, for a fee of course. They mean if the 'legitimate' publishing side of the business turns down a manuscript, the author is encouraged to send it to another of their business enterprises which will print it for $600.

In the olden days, that kind of publisher was called a vanity press. But through the marvels of marketing, it's now called self-publishing. Doesn't that sound like good old American get up and go?

We have a wonderful example of how this might work from the music industry. There were so many frustrated rock stars waiting to be discovered, that they simply eliminated those pesky middle men who were wrongly filtering out their talent. They cut their own cd's and put them on the internet. Now anyone in the world can sample their genius before they plunk down any money. Yep, capitalism at its finest.

The problem for consumers (that would be the people with the money) is there are about six bazillion rock star cd's to sort through. I guess that's no problem if you're a student with not much to do. I can't see anyone with a job bothering with it.

It sounds like Harlequin has decided they can't make money selling books. They can only make money selling bindings. Maybe it's just me, but $600 bucks for a binder sounds pretty expensive.

Lulu will do it for about $100.