Just for fun I ordered a few printed and bound copies of Jeremy Comes Home. I used a self-publishing company called Lulu.com. You send Lulu a PDF or other file of your book, and they’ll print and bind as many copies as you want. If you want, they’ll even make it available for sale. This year Lulu made an offer to NaNoWriMo winners: Send us your book by January 16 and we’ll print one copy for you for free.I missed the deadline, but ordered two paperback copies anyway, one for me and one for my sweetie. The price was just over $8 per copy, plus shipping.

You can either design your own cover art or choose from Lulu’s gallery of about 150 stock backgrounds. I found a stock cover I liked well enough. It’s hard to gauge the age and gender of the person in the picture, so let’s say it’s a 12-year-old boy.

The books arrived on Thursday. They’re nicely bound, and the cover looks great. I hadn’t read any of Jeremy since I finished it on November 30. Thumbing through the book has been a nice surprise. There’s a lot in it that I like, and reading it makes me want to start the rewrite.

I’m not making Jeremy available for sale on Lulu. I’m hoping to find a publisher for it, and publishers tend not to like previously published material.