Lulu’s Faux Pas & WritersWeekly Article

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Angela Hoy over on Booklocker.com has posted in this week’s edition on Writersweekly about the growing concerns some authors are experiencing with Lulu’s quality of service and shipping charges. While Angela does not go into a great amount of detail in her article, she does carry links from Lulu’s own forum from many disgruntled authors. Her article title very much sets the tone – ‘Has Lulu Gotten Too Big For Its Britches?’. She also reports an increase in the amount of authors requesting to move books over from Lulu to Booklocker, that maybe a little gamesmanship on her part in the ruff and tumble of POD publishing, and I also have experience of this turnabout, but I suspect far more authors are moving their books over to Createspace.

We have touched a number of times on this issue and even got some direct responses from Nick Popio of Lulu, here and here and here and, eh, once again, here. It is a personal concern to me as well as many authors. I have posted numerous positive articles over the past two years about my own books with our series ‘Adventures With Lulu’. Only recently I purchased several copies of my own books for a book club promotion and to my horror discovered they were cheaper to get from Amazon.co.uk than directly from Lulu.
I thoroughly enjoyed my experiences with Lulu, but with the recent changes, staff layoffs and technical ‘faux pas’ – that is shooting yourself in the foot in English – hand on heart, I’d have to draw a serious reservation under Lulu if I were to bring out another self-published book. This from an author solutions company I would have considered ‘Grade A’ material up till a few months ago. I will finish with a few more of Angela Hoy’s thoughts;
“Lulu used to have a pretty good reputation. Heck, I even used to refer authors to them. No more! Since they’ve grown so large, started using different printers, and laid off a chunk of their staff last year, things appear to be not-so-rosy at Lulu these days. Have they grown so big that they can’t keep up with their authors’ needs anymore?”

Angela Hoy, July 8th, 2009 – ‘Has Lulu Gotten Too Big For Its Britches?’

Your own comments and experiences are welcome here.
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