Happy Halloween from the blog team at Lulu!
Carol, Nick & AJ
Monthly Archives: October 2009
Have a spooktacular Halloween!
Extra Hour. Extra Savings. Save 20% On Anything Site-wide With Code FALLBACK
20% off anything on the site
Valid: 10/30/09 – 11/2/09
Coupon code: FALLBACK
Promotional codes cannot be applied to any previous order. No exchanges or substitutions allowed. Only one valid coupon code may be used per account. Offer expires on 11/02/09 at 11:59 PM GMT. Orders must be in U.S. Dollars. Lulu.com reserves the right to change or revoke this offer at any time. Void where prohibited.
Lulu Publishing Services 101
How do you know if Lulu Services are right for you? Why not join us for a free online webinar to find out.
On November 5th at 3:30pm EST we will be hosting Lulu Publishing Services 101 to discover how a little professional help on your book goes a long way. We will be discussing the reasons why or why not you might benefit from services such as editing, formatting and cover design.
Join us for a half hour right here and we’ll cover the most common pre-publishing topics. Mark your calendar—seating is limited and we’ll be accepting attendees 30 minutes before the call. No need to register in advance. If you cannot make it at this time we will post the seminar for replay in the near future.
Get a jump on publishing using this coupon and save 20% off when you purchase at least $350 worth of services.
Promotional codes cannot be applied to any previous order. No exchanges or substitutions allowed. Only one valid coupon code may be used per account. Offer expires on 10/31/09 at 11:59 PM EST. Orders must be in U.S. Dollars. Lulu.com reserves the right to change or revoke this offer at any time. Void where prohibited.
Lulu Lens – What statistics about your book or account would be helpful for you?
As many of you are aware, we’ve temporarily removed the hit counter from our product pages. We recently discovered it had introduced a security vulnerability on our site, and are working hard to fix and bring back this popular tool. We would also like to offer other innovative and effective ways to help you analyze the effectiveness of your marketing, generate more traffic, and sell more books. As such, we want to hear from you. What statistics about your book or account would be helpful for you? What tools would best help you improve marketing impact?
Let us know what you’d be interested in seeing, and we’ll see what we can do!
Trick or Treat Sale
Weekend sales are also running this weekend in the UK and France. Check out the French and UK homepages for more information!
Mind Your Manners: Self-promotion through Social Networking
Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are great marketing tools because they provide the ability to reach an almost limitless amount of people. Someone with a new product or message to share can vastly grow his or her audience through these sites. While some people handle self-promotion through this method very well, many people new to this type of networking make mistakes without even realizing it. Self-marketing/promotion can seem foreign for some, but when you are trying to make a name for yourself there are rules to be followed.
Take your time and be thoughtful.
The majority of work that goes into a product is (arguably) spent after it is finished and available to the public. When you pour so much time and energy into making something, you are proud of your work. You wouldn’t want to belittle your accomplishment with rushed, sloppy, self-promotion. Take the time to do some research and figure out what’s going to work best for you.
Continue Reading »
Help Lulu Reorganize Our Help Pages
Lulu is getting ready to reorganize our help pages, and we would appreciate your help. To make sure that the new organization works for our users we have created an online card-sorting exercise. Please take a few minutes to tell us how you would organize help topics, and give our development team some valuable feedback.
Lulu Lens – What Can We Do To Improve the Checkout Process?
For obvious reasons, we want the checkout process on Lulu to be as easy-to-use as possible, and we want to improve the experience for you and your readers. For example, one of the common questions we hear is that readers would like to be able to purchase books from us without signing up for an account. The problem is that if we don’t have contact information for you, then we cannot let you when an order has shipped or send you a record of the transaction. Reporting any issues with your order becomes harder as well.
That said, there may be ideas for how to make the process easier or even solutions for these issues that we haven’t thought of yet. Which is why we want to know what you think. What can we do to improve the checkout process?
Update: Weekly Author Q&A
I am so happy with the response we’ve had to the Weekly Author Q&A! To date, we’ve featured 13 authors and just started our 14th Q&A today with Dr. Bill Misner, author of “What Should I Eat? A Food-Endowed Prescription For Well Being.”
The wonderful thing about these Q&As is that you get to ask Lulu authors anything! You can ask them about their writing styles, marketing techniques, cover design, anything! Lulu authors are so diverse that there is never a boring moment. The discussions are rewarding because you talk about the things that are important to you.
If that sounds fun, maybe YOU would like to be one of the featured authors too! If you are interested in your very own Weekly Author Q&A, email me at chousel@lulu.com and let me know. Be sure to include a brief introduction, highlighting any accomplishments, accolades, or even personality quirks! Send me links to your websites, too!
I look forward to hearing from you and getting to know all of you better!
What does success mean to you?
For some, success can mean selling a copy of your book to someone you’ve never met, or maybe success means seeing your grandmother’s recipes in print or being able to quit your day job and do what you love. We at Lulu know that success means something different to each of us, and we want to know what success means to you!
Tell us!
Create a video clip up to 30 seconds in length and tell us what success means to you. We’ll cut all the submissions together and create a video showcasing our wonderful Lulus! You get a chance to tell the world what success means to you!
Here’s what you need to do:
- Create a 30 second (or less) video clip (.mov file)
- Tell us what success means to you
- Save the files as your full name (ex. CarolHousel.mov / CarolHousel.jpg)
- Upload the video file
- Upload a photo of yourself
If you have questions or comments, feel free to post them below in the comments section. We look forward to seeing your smiling faces and hearing what success means to you!
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