Industry Standards for Publishing
The industry requires that your book adhere to certain standards, and it is up to you to ensure your book meets these requirements. If your book is submitted before it meets these requirements, it will be rejected and your book distribution will be delayed while you work to bring your book into compliance.
I. Requirements for all book covers
A. If including the retail price on the cover, it must exactly match the retail price for the book. Lulu does not add the price to the book cover.
B. Keep all important text and images at least 0.375" (.25" bleed area + .125" safety area) from all sides (including the spine) of the cover. This area may be trimmed off or obscured by the cover bend.
C. Keep in mind that B&W 8.5 x 11" books will be printed at 8.25" x 11" through the retail channels, so you may need to increase the distance of any text or images from the edges to take this into account.
D. Spine text must be at least .0625" away from all edges of the spine. Text that is too close to the edge of the spine will be reduced in size to fit. (This may result in very small text on the spine of the book.)
1. Additional requirements for one-piece covers:
a. Use these dimensions prescribed by Lulu.com
b. Cover must have correct 13-digit ISBN/EAN.
c. Bar codes must be provided in black and white.
d. Bar codes should be 1.833" wide by 1" high.
e. There cannot be spine text on books with less than 80 pages.
II. Requirements for book interiors
A. If providing a PDF it must be distilled using Adobe; if uploading a word processing document, Lulu will distill it using Adobe.)
B. Embed all fonts (and all font family members used) when distilling the PDF.
C. Book must have a Title page.
D. Book must have a Copyright page with your correct 13-digit ISBN/EAN and a copyright notice. The Copyright page must come after the Title page.
E. Final page of each book must be completely blank.
F. Margins must be at least .5" on all sides. The left margin must be equal to the right margin, and the top margin must be equal to the bottom margin.
G. A gutter may be added to the document in addition to the margins. This is extra space on the spine side of your book
H. Page numbering must be correct. No page numbers may be skipped. A page can go without a number, but it must be counted and consistent.
I. All files should be submitted at high-resolution (between 300 dpi and 600dpi).
J. If any page in the book will have color or images that extend to the edge of a page (full bleed), format the document according to the full bleed specifications.
K. If the page count is not divisible by 4, the printer adds enough blank pages to the back of the book to make it so.
III. Requirements for the Publishing Wizard
A. Book Description, Author and Title must use a Latin Character set. We cannot accept Russian, Chinese, Japanese and other non-Latin characters.