All Lulu authors should have received an email today making them aware that Lulu is making changes to their pricing. With UPS fuel surcharges increasing shipping rates, Lulu is not the only company in the book industry getting hit hard by recent economic factors. Here are two emails that I received today, with the differences highlighted in red.
The first…
Dear Valued Lulu User,
As Lulu grows and adds the availability of social networking applications, such as weRead’s search and discovery features, easier-than-ever publishing tools and licensed content to our offerings, we remain committed to the idea of democratizing publishing.
No one is immune to our current economy. With the rise in cost of raw materials, freight and shipping, we have had to make some pricing adjustments. Others in the self-publishing business have as well. The difference is, at the same time, we are now offering you more value options. What hasn’t changed is that the publishing process with Lulu remains absolutely free; meaning you can publish your book and make it available to your readers at no cost to you. Additionally, we are always looking for ways to make publishing more profitable for you.
This is also about what happens when your customers buy one of your books. The pricing rules at Lulu are adjusting significantly. As a Lulu user with a retail distribution package, your retail price and Lulu marketplace price will not change. Also, your retail royalty will remain the same. The only change that affects you is that your Lulu marketplace royalty will be adjusted depending on the binding and interior color choice of your book. Please refer to this chart to see how prices will change effective October 28,2008.
The second:
Dear Valued Lulu User,
As Lulu grows and adds the availability of social networking applications, such as weRead’s search and discovery features, easier-than-ever publishing tools and licensed content to our offerings, we remain committed to the idea of democratizing publishing.
No one is immune to our current economy. With the rise in cost of raw materials, freight and shipping, we have had to make some pricing adjustments. Others in the self-publishing business have as well. The difference is, at the same time, we are now offering you more value options. What hasn’t changed is that the publishing process with Lulu remains absolutely free; meaning you can publish your book and make it available to your readers at no cost to you. Additionally, we are always looking for ways to make publishing more profitable for you.
This is also about what happens when your customers buy one of your books. The pricing rules at Lulu are adjusting significantly. As a Lulu user with content available through the Lulu Global Marketplace, your Lulu marketplace royalty will remain the same. The only change that will affect you is that your Lulu marketplace purchase price will adjust depending on the binding and interior color choice of your book. You are able to modify your book’s purchase price in accordance with our new pricing structure to maintain your current creator revenues, if you so choose. Please refer to this chart to see how prices will change effective October 28, 2008.
_______________________________________________________________________
Confused? Yeah, I was too at first. But think about it…depending on what publishing package you purchased (if any) will determine how your pricing changes and where you are affected. Those with ISBNs will remain at the same price due to the fact many of us put the price on our book or embedded it in our ISBN bar code. We’d have to republish our books, and since they are registered with Bowker’s, that would mean hefty fees to make those changes. But the message from Bob Young sounds like we will be able to change our price if we want to.
New comers to Lulu won’t know the difference. Yeah, the base prices will be a bit higher which may force most of us returning to Lulu to set our retail price higher to make a profit if that is our intention. Higher priced books are pretty much a given in the POD community already, so it’s no shock to find Lulu having to join the norm. The good news is that volume discounts will be improving.
Check out the letter from Bob Young for more information…
This is also about what happens when your customers buy one of your books. The pricing rules at Lulu are changing significantly. Remarkably, many of our prices are falling.
What we have really done is applied a simple logic to our pricing: smaller books cost less and larger books cost a bit more. That same logic told us that we needed to offer our customers an even less-expensive alternative to our standard paper options, which is why we are offering a new economic publisher-grade paper choice…
Quite simply, the cost of conducting our business has gone up, inflation has affected many of our existing offerings, but new technology can often be used to offset these prices and that is the case here. Which is why we have expended enormous effort—searched high and low—to find ways for you to receive greater value when you publish. In the pricing grid you will see our new 50# white paper choice. It is available in two sizes: 5.5″ x 8.5″ (a new Digest size for Lulu authors) and 8.5″ x 11″.
A few other things:
- If you have purchased a distribution package for your book you will have the opportunity to adjust the book’s pricing in accordance with our new pricing structure. We will be sending specific information to these customers in the days ahead.
- Shipping charges will now be visible at check-out rather than in your shopping cart.
- We now have current exchange rates on our site, making it easier for those who are buying and selling in currencies other than the U.S. dollar.
- Our new quantity (bulk) pricing means we can offer you more efficient volume discounts on any book.
Many of these changes will make your publishing experience clearer and even easier—which is important to us. Again, this new structure will go into effect, October 28, 2008.
Our goal remains that you, our customers, are able to simply publish your work for free, control your content and at the end of the day, profit from that work.
You can read Bob’s full letter or email questions here.
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