Lulu Trying to Fox The Geese with Author Profiles

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Have a look at the three book covers displayed and tell me which one was self-published.
It wasn’t hard, was it?
Yes, Bachelor 101 – Cooking, Cleaning, Closing was the self-published title. But what is interesting is that the author, Jamie Reidy, published his cook book, after Hard Sell, a book that has went on to be a commercial bestseller and an acclaimed film. I welcome this kind of transition by a commercially published author and it is something we are seeing more often in the past year.
Now, first to the Lulu blog posting today about its author, Jamie Reidy.

“The industry is scared to take a chance right now” says Reidy. “Luckily, tech like Lulu lets me sell my work anyway and I can get on with my writing.”


Reidy is particularly fond of Lulu’s formatting services and the freedom of not having to go back and forth between editors, which can become very expensive and time consuming.


“With Lulu, $400 for formatting was a deal – I know I got my money’s worth,” Reidy says.

And this from Natural News about how Reidy came upon a publisher…
  • “Right, yeah, it was totally top secret. And the funny thing was, I got rejected by more than 26 agents, so I got published without an agent, which is even more miraculous. So, when I got the contract, it was March of ’04, and they waited a year before the book came out. It was just incredible trying to keep my mouth shut for a year, because I’m a pretty yappy guy to begin with, and to have to keep that secret was quite a challenge.”

  
Reidy is obviously talking about his cookbook which he could not find a commercial publisher for. But, what irks me most about the Lulu posting, is the suggestion that Reidy is a ‘Lulu author’ and that the success of his first book, Hard Sell, is somehow an endeavour of his DIY publishing exploits with Lulu’s services. This is not the case. Hard Sell was acquired by Andrew McMeel Publishing in 2005. It had nothing to do with Lulu, or their Market Place, but the insinuation is that Reilly is a Lulu author, and all his published output is through Lulu. I don’t like this kind of publicity by author solutions services, but after John Edgar Wideman, and the manner Lulu used him to promote their services, rather than the author promoting themselves.
I’ll let readers peruse the kinks, but this is a direction I personally do not want like to see Lulu following. This is more a misleading self-promotion exercise executed by vanity presses.
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One Comment;

  1. Theresa M. said:

    The problem is that people reading the Lulu blogs don’t know that the announcements are not legitimate. It’s just more of Lulu’s blundering, which started when they imported books published by other houses into the Lulu marketplace and then literally obliterated the Lulu user books by assigning them different catalog numbers from their project ids. Now, you cannot find a real Lulu published book unless the author tells you where it is and the url to the link. They have also managed to silence their detractors by blocking them from participating in the Lulu “community” forum, which is really geared to log the complaints and hide them under a series of cookie interference codes. This is in essence a legal violation of their own membership agreement. Other Lulu authors I have spoken to by email say that they had long ago learned to ignore Lulu altogether and move to CreateSpace, just as I had. The “author profiles” are as much a source of irritation to us betrayed authors as they are to the newbies who have no one to turn to for the real info.

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