Is it the number of books you sell? The reaction on your mom’s face when she sees her recipes in a printed cookbook? Holding the first copy in your hand? Tell us your stories, and help us understand how you define success for yourself.

Do you have a preferred payment method other than a credit card or Paypal? If so, what is it?

Recently in the forums, mark_sheldon1221 made a post about Pre-Publication Marketing that generated some interesting discussion. Mark asked:

“Since I’m not going to be publishing the first book for another nine months, is there any way to set up some sort of marketing here on Lulu that I can refer users to between now and publication?”

Several of our forum mainstays like Keith Dixon and veinglory have chimed in with suggestions for Mark. What are your thoughts? Should you market your book before it’s released? What are the pros and cons?

We’re looking at revising the “My Order History” section of My Lulu and we would like your feedback on what additional information you would like about your orders. Please let us know what you’d like to see. The more feedback you can give us the better changes we can implement.

The most popular idea in the Lulu community right now is Belinda D’Alessandro’s suggestion that we ”allow Lulu creators to generate their own coupons, discount codes and gift certificates to offer their customers.” I have taken this idea to our product managers, who are eager to explore it further. We’d like to hear more — and from more of you — about the specific features and functionality you would like to see.

Please follow the link and comment on the idea, and if you like the idea be sure to click the “I like this idea” thumbs up next to it. If you have other ideas for how Lulu can improve, post it to the Ideas & Feedback section. I will be regularly highlighting ideas and making sure our product managers know which ideas are important to the community. I can’t promise that they’ll get done, but I can promise that I will do everything I can to get them promoted.

Obviously, one of the most important aspects of our site is our publishing process. Our wizard helps authors create a book from their digital files, and we want the system to be as easy to navigate as possible. With that in mind, we want your feedback on what we can do to improve the publishing process.

Can we improve the process for adding ISBNs to your book? Is the language used to explain the steps straight-forward enough? Let us know what you think!

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!

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?

At Lulu, we believe it’s important to provide as much information as possible in our Help section and to present the information in an easy-to-use way. To accomplish this we have video tutorials, community forums, and an extensive knowledgebase where creators can help each other. However, we also recognize that we can always do better. Part of this is reflected in our continued commitment to improve our customer service, but we also want to make our Help easy to navigate and as useful as possible.

We are already working on initiatives that allow us to easily pull useful threads that our community creates into Help and improve navigation, but we want to hear from you. How can we make Help more helpful?

One of the things that is most important to us at Lulu is giving our users a place to sell their content and highlight themselves. The author storefront is a place where you can easily display your creations, provide your readers with more information about you, and more! We want to make these storefronts as useful as possible to you, and so we are asking for your input on them. What can we do to improve our storefronts?

We’ve already gotten some feedback from you on what you want, and we are looking at how we can allow you to easily contact your readers so you can update them when you have new releases or need to give them information, and allowing you to generate your own coupons. Those features are still a ways off, but they are high on our priority list. What other features would you like to see? Modular sections of your storefront you can take with you to your personal website or blog? A search feature so it’s easy for your readers to find content if you have more than a few books? Let us know what would help you!