Writer Rob Loughran sent me a long account of his experience self-publishing with Lulu Press, so I thought I would break it down for you and share it with you in three segments over this week.

Cleanly shaven, dressed in a tuxedo and ready for work I opened the day's mail. Today's postal booty contained bills, a Victoria Secrets catalog, and an SASE with a rejection slip telling me, "Sorry, but there is simply no market for joke books."

I stabbed the rejection on the letter stake in my office (convenient and cathartic) and drove to my night job. The first couple I served at the bar was talking about taxes so I smiled and hit them with a couple of trinkets from my recently rejected joke book, A Man Walks Into a Bar.... :

A man walks into a bar with an alligator on a leash. He says to the bartender, "Do you serve IRS agents here?"

"Of course."

"Great. I'll have a Bud and get a coupla IRS agents for my gator."

and

How are dealing with the IRS and wearing a condom similar?

With both you are screwed with no sensitivity whatsoever.

"We love jokes," says the couple, "but we can never remember jokes." I've worked 30+ years in the restaurant biz, joking and bullshitting my way through shift-after-shift and whenever I tell two or more consecutive jokes I ALWAYS get the above response: We can never remember jokes....

We've all heard: The map is not the territory but on this night it really hit home. Here I am, working five nights a week in a restaurant, serving upscale clientele with disposable income that, I know from experience, not marketing surveys, enjoy jokes of every type-from silly to sick-confess to not being able to remember jokes, and yet the publishing powers that be insist that there is no market for joke books.

Hmmm.

THE WORLD'S TALLEST MIDGET

There is a lingering perception that self-published books are like the world's tallest midget. Even though they are printed and sold successfully (see sidebar), self-published books are perceived as inherently inferior: as the world's tallest midget is, still, just a really, really, really short person. If they were "real" books, wouldn't they have been published by a "real" publisher?

Good question.

The publishing industry itself has, for years, consciously perpetuated this notion of inferiority by dubbing the self-publishing industry: Vanity Press.

The book (A Man Walks Into a Bar...) I was attempting to sell is a comprehensive, encyclopedic volume of jokes. In the restaurant biz you are constantly hearing new jokes. Twenty years ago I started writing them down on bar napkins and beer mats which resulted in, as it reads on the book's eventual back cover: "The definitive single-volume collection of modern American adult humor."

It had become obvious (after years of submitting book proposals) that no agent would agent the book and no publisher would publish it. So I began research into what types of self-publishing were available, and, how much it would cost.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MESSY SOCK DRAWERS

If you have $10,000 dollars stashed in your messy sock drawer you can go on-line, find a Vanity Press publisher, pay them and mail away your manuscript. They will proof the manuscript, format it into book form, and produce a handsome volume all ready for you to market. (more on that later)

But in my messy sock drawer I have enough spare change to (maybe) spring for lunch at the local taqueria, a foul tip baseball hit by Willie McCovey that I caught at Candlestick in 1967 and, well, socks.

I researched which publisher offered what. There are a plethora of legitimate and affordable self-publishers, but man, I was broke. I'm working fulltime as a waiter and my two published novels were selling like George Bush campaign memorabilia in a Baghdad mosque. I happened upon Café Press, who publish you for free, but you have to upload the manuscript in PDF format. I understand this is easy on a Mac but my computer doesn't have this capability so I kept surfing and scrolling various websites.

Then I found Lulu Press.

They will publish your book for free. As a point of copyright law, when you work with Lulu, YOU are the publisher and retain all rights. They offer, again at a price, editing and formatting services. But they also have an informative FAQ page that refers you to Internet sites offering self-publishing techniques and advice.

Rob Loughran's novel High Steaks won the 2002 New Mystery Award. His book Tomorrow&Tomorrow&Tomorrow: A Year-Long Program for Publishing Success is available at Lulu.com . His latest novel Norman Babbit, Scientist is available from Publish America. This year he has also published Babbit, Scientist (Publish America), A Man Walks Into a Bar.....A Compendium of Filthy, Uncouth, Lewd, Lusty, and Lascivious Jokes (Lulu Press) and the sci-fi comic novel Teenaged Pussies From Outer Space ( Lulu Press ).