Problems and Issues with Lulu

Lulu's main issues are with quality. I had problems with alignment of the text inside (slanting), missing chapters at the end, and more. Other people have reported far worse problems, like having their book sell with someone else's text inside. You really have to check your proof VERY carefully to make sure they did what they were supposed to do.

However, that aside, the main issue with Lulu is getting them into Amazon. Here is a message I sent to the Lulu distribution team, which explains the issue.

My name is Lisa Shea, and I am the owner of BellaOnline.com. We get over 20 million pageviews a month and a large percentage of those are from women who want to learn more about how to publish their own books. Because of that I have spent the last few months working on a project comparing all of the self publishers I could find, to create charts of their features and benefits.

I am a great fan of Lulu and really was hoping for Lulu to come out as the top choice. Your online system is great and your customer service is great. You offer wonderful size options. The only area that you really have an issue is with Amazon placement. For example, CreateSpace offers free entries in Amazon. When you create your free book in the CreateSpace system, instantly your book is also shown in Amazon and is fully purchasable there. As you know, Amazon’s reach is HUGE and this can spell the difference between zero sales and thousands of sales (or at least hundreds). Tests are showing that very few people "browse" Lulu or other publishing sites to buy books, while many people browse Amazon to find books on topics they are interested in.

Yes, Lulu costs slightly more than some other publishers on a per-book basis, but I consider that fair enough given your instant customer support and great online system. So the only real impediment to me recommending Lulu wholeheartedly as my publisher of choice is the Amazon issue. It doesn’t make sense to me that you charge $50 **per book** for a service that is free elsewhere.

I tried to find workarounds so that I could still promote you as the best option to go with. I hand-created an entry in the Amazon system and then hand-mailed in Lulu books to fill the inventory. That worked easily and wonderfully - but now I’m paying double shipping. I’m having to pay the whole cost myself of the book, then pay for shipping to get the book to my house, then pay the shipping to get the book from my house to Amazon’s warehouse. That seems a bad arrangement cost-wise and time-wise.

So I have two questions.

First, why do you charge $50 per book for a service that others offer for free? Can it really cost you $50 for each book just to have Amazon take the feed and put your information into their system? Especially when for example CreateSpace does that for free, while charging less per book?

Second, why not offer the ability for a writer to have your books ship directly from your printer to Amazon’s warehouse? If nothing else, that would allow the process to fill inventory quickly and effectively, and reduce the unnecessary shipping costs in the manual process. This still leaves the problem of Amazon’s manual entry causing the list price of the book to be sky-high, but I am trying my best here to create a system where Lulu is at least sort of cost effective compared with CreateSpace. I have had awful experiences with CreateSpace’s customer support and online systems. I really don’t want to start sending traffic to CreateSpace as BellaOnline’s chosen self publisher recommendation. However, the Amazon placement is a critical need for most of our writers, and to tell them they have to pay $50 out of pocket for every book just is not going to go over well with them. They are asking for a free solution. Many of our visitors are on tight budgets and are looking at this as a way to help them escape poverty - not to get dragged further into it.

Badge of Honor Take a look at the Badge of Honor sales page in Lulu, to get a sense of what the final product looks like. Badge of Honor at Lulu.com

Publishing On Demand Step By Step - Lulu
Lulu Self Publishing - Setting Up the Book
Formatting your Book for Self Publishing
Creating a Lulu Covers

Quality of Lulu Books
Print Copy Sample from Lulu #1
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Promoting your Lulu Book
Problems and Issues with Lulu

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