Lulu Blog

Last week we asked you, “What Features Do You Need To Make Your eBook a Success”, and you gave us lots of excellent feedback. This week we want to dig into eBooks even more, and focus on how you want to use eBooks. Is your primary goal to gain exposure and attract new customers for your print editions (offer free or near-free ebooks as a marketing tool)?  Or, do you plan to create a lucrative new revenue stream by selling your ebook at a competitive price? Do you plan to market them as a green alternative?

Please tell us how you plan to use eBooks so that as we look at options we can try to deliver the experience you are looking for.

This month marks the beginning of calendar season, and so this week we want to know – what we can do to improve our calendar experience? One of the ideas we’re brainstorming is allowing buyers to add custom events, but what do you want to see us do?

We also want to remind you that if you already have a calendar it’s easy to update it to 2010. Simply log into your account, click revise, select the Properties tab, and change the start date to whenever you like. If you haven’t created a calendar before, then try it out and give us your feedback!

First, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has been participating in our Lulu Lens discussions. You’ve all given us incredibly valuable feedback, and I have been recording all of it and sharing it with our Product Development team. They are looking at which ones we can implement and I will be keeping you all up-to-date on our progress. So thank you for contributing, and keep it up!

This week we want to focus a little more on our distribution. We are looking at ways we can improve the process overall, and so any insight you can give us would be very valuable. Specifically, we want to know what aspects of our existing process have been confusing or frustrating for you? Hopefully, we can use your feedback to streamline the process and help you get your book into the distribution channels that are most beneficial to you.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing how to get your book into broader distribution, and once it’s there what can be done to help it stand out. Now, we want your feedback on how Lulu can help bring readers to you?

Currently, approximately 90% of our traffic on Lulu is self-published authors. This means we have a lot of people interested in publishing, but very few people browsing for books. Most of the time, people purchase books via direct links to the author’s book. We want to try to come up with ways to help readers find the Lulu books they would be interested in, but may not even know about yet. We certainly have some ideas on how to accomplish this with more focus on selling on our homepage, helping quality content bubble to the top, and recommendations, but we want to hear from you. What can Lulu do to help readers find the Lulu books they want?

One of the most important aspects of selling your content online is making sure your audience can easily find your work. At Lulu, we strive to make sure that if you choose to distribute your content that it can be found – not just on Lulu, but on other online retailers as well. We offer ISBNs, which come with listings on Bowker’s Books in Print, Amazon, and other online retail sites. Recently, we launched a program to get books without an ISBN onto Amazon Marketplace via a pilot program. Now, we are are looking at more avenues to help you get your work into the hands of your audience, and we want your feedback: Where would you like to distribute your products?

Feel free to suggest anything from the Barnes & Noble website to their brick & mortar stores to some kind of premium listing on Lulu, or anything you want. We may not be able to get your content into every channel you suggest, but we will be listening to you and taking your feedback into account.