Monday, April 21, 2008

Publishing a calendar

I heard that Lulu.com publishes calendars of very good quality, so I thought maybe I could use them for that Domai calendar people keep asking me about. But it turns out, like one might expect, that unless it's very artistic (as in veiled) nudity, then it comes under "pornography", and can't be sold on their site. A chat supporter told me it would have to be on a page only accessible by myself, which sounds like I can't sell it by them. (I'm not sure what such a page would be good for.)

I looked at a competitor, Blurb.com, and their FAQ sez:
Can I send you content that has nudity?
- If you want the formal answer to your question, please go to the Policies and Legal section of Blurb's Web site and review the End User License Agreement, section 4.
Blurb doesn't review, monitor, or edit content as it comes through, but our printer partners have the right to flag content and/or refuse to print anything that they deem to be pornographic or offensive. There are no hard and fast guidelines regarding this, but the closer it is to the "fine art" side of things, the safer it will generally be.

That's it in a nutshell, I'm afraid. There simply ain't no hard and fast guidelines in these areas. Anything is OK, until somebody makes a stink.

Basically I'd like to publish a Domai calendar, but I don't want to have to deal with printing, distribution and taking orders. If anybody has an idea, I'm all ears.

2 comments:

Alex said...

I guess your book publisher is in a completely different arena, otherwise, it may be a more expensive route but still a possibility.

From what I see of the Domai nudes, there are plenty of samples where beaver and lips are not present Veiled is a nebulous term in itself, what needs to be covered?

A web published PDF then leaves the problem of control of print quality and how many punters end up getting their calendars not printed at Kinkos.

What about the Sun newspaper? Don't they have "Page 3" calendars, who is their printer?

Anonymous said...

"If anybody has an idea, I'm all ears."

Strike a deal with Private Media Group and have them distribute millions of copies through their chain of stores and other channels.

10% to me for the idea. :-)