It begins…

The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them.

It also includes a nice success story about Jim Bendat’s self-published book about presidential inaugurations.

“I wanted the satisfaction of holding the book in my hands,” Mr. Bendat said.

“O.K., it’s not a best seller,” Mr. Bendat said, “but I’m happy for what’s happening.”

Don’t miss this quote from Lulu’s own Bob Young…

Indeed, said Robert Young, chief executive of Lulu Enterprises, based in Raleigh, N.C., a majority of the company’s titles are of little interest to anybody other than the authors and their families. “We have easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind,” Mr. Young said.

Overall, I found it to be a very nice and enlightening article and definitely worth the read for anyone who has already self-published or might be considering it.

Read the full article here.

Posters in one of the forums are worried that help through email won’t be much better and may be more time consuming as authors sit and wait for replies.  I always thought the option for live chat help was at least ahead of other POD publishers out there who don’t offer it.

Lulu also recently laid off 24 employees, including their president Bryce Boothby Jr who was just brought on board last year.  Apparently Bob Young, Lulu founder, is taking a more active role in the company during these hard economic times.

Let’s hope for now that Author Solutions doesn’t come snooping around.  They already own iUniverse and Authorhouse, and just recently bought Xlibris.  I found this line from a Wall Street Journal article about the buy out to be humorous, particularly the part about “placing books in stores”…

Print-on-demand publishers take manuscripts from authors, edit them, market them and place them in stores and for sale online, in exchange for payment.

What are POD publishers?  Book prostitutes? Even Wall Street has no idea!

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.

But Lulu has always been a very different star shining down on the great big world of POD by not charging its users any up front fee for producing a product. Lulu basically takes the manufacturing cost and gives the author the opportunity to make money by marking up the product at their leisure. For instance, at present, Lulu’s cost calculator shows the production cost of a 6×9 perfect bound 150 page black and white print trade paperback as being $7.53. If I was the author of such book, I’d probably mark it up at least 5 dollars. That makes the retail price of this book $12.53. That’s not too bad for a trade paperback.  Having no control over pricing when I published with Xlibris in 2003, the retail price of my 176 page book was $19.99 for a paperback.  My cut of a sale was 10%.  End of story.

However, Lulu could easily tack on another 3 or 4 bucks onto this business model, ultimately increasing their cost to counter the fees Amazon will probably bestow upon them. Heck, if Amazon’s fees are going to be as high as most blogs are saying they are, Lulu could double their manufacturing costs to cover their expense. But this would quickly throw them into the expensive pricing realm that authors all too often experience with other POD publishers. Would it even make a difference by now?  Who knows? Only time will tell. But consider this….will this increase only affect authors who purchase an ISBN to get their book listed on Amazon, B&N.com, etc?  If so, that would probably require Lulu to build an additional set of services (and pricing) only for those who plan to get their book listed on Amazon.  For the author who plans to just use Lulu for set-up, binding and printing, but not purchase an ISBN, should an increased pricing structure apply?  Chances are it will across the board just so Lulu doesn’t have to come up with a separate business model for ISBN purchasers.

At this point, I highly agree with Angela Hoy’s advice she gives to BookLocker authors.  I quote:

1. Remove all Amazon.com links from your marketing materials – website, ezine, blog, email signature, press releases, articles — everything.

2. Change those links to your book’s page on BarnesandNoble.com. To obtain that link, search for your book’s title at http://www.bn.com. All Booklocker.com print books are on their website.

3. Don’t forget to contact Amazon to tell them what you’re doing in response to their horrible actions!

Angela has done a magnificent job at Writer’s Weekly of covering this issue. Catch up with her blog here.

As Angela states, the success of a POD book is really left up to the author.  It’s all about self promotion and marketing.  Your readers will more than likely buy the book from wherever you tell them to.  You DON’T have to send them to Amazon.  Almost all POD publishers, Lulu included, support their own online bookstore.  Lulu even prints a link to your book on their marketing materials.  They have free BUY links available to you as well which you build onto your websites and blogs. And if your book has an ISBN, then B&N lists your book as well.

Book Reviews: Check back this weekend for this month’s first review:  OH Brother by Paul Ciccone, Jr.

Amazon claims it can print and bind a book on site in its facility in about 2 hours (yeah, I’m sure that’s quality), allowing it to be married with multiple purchases made at the same time by a single customer and they can all ship together at once.  This will help to save shipping costs and fuel.  I wonder if this savings will be passed on to the customer?  It’s true.  Amazon does already offer free shipping on orders over $25.00, but that doesn’t mean they ship your items the same day.  It also doesn’t mean they use a preferred method like UPS or Fedex.  I seem to recall a multi-item purchase I made once that took 7 days before they shipped it, and they shipped it in two boxes days apart from one another using the postal service although all the items shipped from their Kentucky warehouse.  14 days later I got one box, and the other arrived a few days afterward.  I would have received the items in 3 days had I just paid the shipping.  Amazon might have saved here, but I certainly didn’t.

I wonder if this means they actually have Booksurge printing facilities in every single warehouse?  How much money will they spend on programming to make sure your POD book purchase actually prints in the same warehouse where your other items are in stock to ship?  Will they pass on that fuel and shipping cost savings to the POD publishers, or charge them an ungodly fee for file uploads, storage, and PRINTING!?  If the publishers get hit, you can bet that will then increase the fees bestowed upon the author, and probably the pricing of the actual books as well.

True, Amazon claims you can continue to print your books as you like and just ship them about 5 to keep on hand to fulfill orders.  Hmm..an excellent way to slap POD publishers with a storage fee, inventory upkeep fee, receiving fee, etc.  So, Amazon saves on shipping and fuel, and makes money by charging POD publishers like crazy for their service!  It will be interesting to see if Booksurge soon becomes the preferred method chosen by POD authors and/or who will be the first POD publisher to go belly up (if any).

For now, Amazon is no longer my preferred method for shopping!

Based on their press release, it sounds like PublishAmerica is backing down. They plan to work closer with other distributors and with B&N to combat the issue. Remember a few weeks ago when Starbucks closed for three hours to retrain employees, and all the other indie coffee shops jumped at the chance to gain that business? Let’s hope that B&N comes up with a plan and is ready to step up to the plate!

Although not much has been released as of yet, I’m sure other POD Publishers will be approached by Amazon soon. Who knows what this means for Lulu, but keep your eye on this Lulu forum to find out. Based on a quote, it seems that Bob Young has already been approached. Here’s the quote from the forum…

Publishers will “have to abide by Amazon’s pricing,” said Bob Young, CEO of Lulu Inc, a print-on-demand publisher based in Raleigh, N.C. Mr. Young said he believed BookSurge’s prices to be “slightly higher” than other printers. An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on that issue. “A significant number of our authors do request for their books to be available on Amazon,” said Mr. Young, who hasn’t yet decided whether he will agree to Amazon’s terms.

For someone like me, who uses Amazon almost everyday as a informational book source for work, and is also a POD author with a book on Amazon, this news really saddens me. It reminds me of a move another billion dollar company made a few years ago. It was all the rage on the internet and made lots of money while making lots of shoppers happy. Then, it started raising it’s pricing and making lots of rules, tightening the grasp it already had on the www market share. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It’s called Ebay.

It’s sad that a POD author’s most valuable online marketing tool, someone we probably thought was a friend to our industry, would choose to do this. So what do we do now? Check out Angela Hoy’s article on the subject if you’d like Amazon’s contact information to send a letter and voice your own concern to them. Good luck though! Amazon’s quite known for not really listening to its consumers. Who knows? Maybe Amazon will become a fad and another site will take over as the ever-growing internet continues to change. I’ve already tried to use B&N and Abebooks a bit more these days for purchases. And I suggest you do the same!

And hey, while you are looking for an outlet to support, try your local bookstore. You know… That building on the corner with bookshelves filled with books. There’s a person standing in it to help. You take the book off the shelf and walk up to a cash register. You reach in your wallet or purse for cash, a credit card, or a check book. That’s right! You have to GO to the bookstore. The postman doesn’t bring the book to you. While you are there, if you are a POD author, take a copy of your book with you and put it in the hands of the manager or community relations manager. Don’t be pushy! As a matter of fact, thank them for being there. Tell them your book is a thank you gift even and that you’d appreciate their support in return. I’ve always thought Amazon might end up bringing about the demise of the brick-and-mortar bookstore, but let’s NOT let it monopolize the POD industry too.