Why? Because more of them are finding the remarkable works of Lulu authors.

Back in April we expanded the Lulu Marketplace with more than 700,000 traditionally published titles (including works from John Grisham) to bring a bigger audience to Lulu.com. As I explained then, the goal of this and other initiatives we have underway is to help our authors sell more while introducing buyers to a bigger and better world of content.

Some early numbers since we expanded the selection of books available on Lulu.com show the strategy is working:

• Sales of titles by Lulu authors have increased 14% in the days since we added the additional selection compared with the prior period.

• That’s due, in part, to that fact that readers are spending more time browsing our site. We’ve seen a 25% increase in page views of Lulu content since we added the traditionally published titles.

• About 50% of these buyers of traditionally published books are completely new to Lulu.

• This new and expanding audience benefits Lulu authors, because 60% of the customers who bought a traditionally published title also bought a book penned by a Lulu author. 

It might seem surprising that adding more books to the Lulu Marketplace would result in more sales of Lulu-published books, but it is a well-documented phenomenon. It is explained in part by Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory. The Internet is giving consumers more content choices than ever before, and authors like you can bring your works to your audience more easily than ever before. These converging trends mean that consumers can find books that fit their interests ever more precisely. The result is more total book sales, a growing market that benefits both John Grisham and you.

The statistics above are exciting for me and will be for you, too. We’ve long understood the value of the works that our authors produce — titles on topics as diverse as particle physics and vegan cooking. Now, the rest of the world is discovering the talent and insight of Lulu’s authors and publishers.

In the coming months, we’ll have many other initiatives to bring more buyers to Lulu, and to take your books to more buyers beyond Lulu.com, all with the goal of helping you sell more. Our recently launched FREE Summer Shipping campaign is one example. Another is the ability to set and manage your very own discounting strategies, coming this summer.

John Grisham sells tens of millions of copies of every book he writes. Seems only fair that he and his publisher, Random House, should be willing to share that success with all of the aspiring writers and next-generation publishers who are using Lulu to bring their knowledge, expertise and remarkable stories to the world.

On behalf of all of our authors: Thanks, John.

Cheers,    Bob.

To celebrate our newly expanded open marketplace, we’re giving away a book a day to one lucky follower! From April 16 -21, follow Lulu on Twitter and tweet us your favorite Lulu find (make sure to use #LuluFind in your tweet). You could be the lucky daily winner of a $20 coupon for your favorite Lulu find!

Your knowledge and ideas are the building blocks for the next generation, the foundation that ensures we continue to progress as a society. You need ever-better ways to share your knowledge and reach more people — and you deserve ever-better incentives to do so.

Lulu is working to open publishing to everyone, to create best-in-class tools so you can make just about anything and reach anyone. Whether you are an individual, publisher, educator, or enterprise — and whether you write technical manuals or romance novels — our goal is simple: to give you the most opportunities to share and profit from your remarkable ideas, knowledge and stories.

We are launching a significant initiative in the effort.

Beginning today, you will find more than 700,000 new titles in the Lulu Marketplace, titles as diverse as Harlan Coben’s Caught from the list of New York Times bestsellers to Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. This follows the addition of more than 200,000 traditionally published eBooks that we added in November. In the coming weeks, we’ll add more content through additional partnerships as we make Lulu.com the world’s premier destination for published knowledge, ideas and expression. In effect, we are creating the world’s biggest bookstore.

At the same time, we are creating new ways to discover the books, information, and knowledge you need from this massive bookstore.  We will be enabling millions of Web sites to earn more by offering their own bookstores to their communities.

Our goal is to give you the tools you need to reach your market.   Whether your target audience buys your books, or knowledge or services is, of course, up to the quality and usefulness of your work, as it is in any other free market.  But by expanding the Lulu Marketplace, and taking our marketplace to your readers, the goal is nothing less than to enable more buyers to discover your work.

Buyers should be rewarded.  The really motivating part of building Lulu over the last few years has been the remarkable works that are uniquely available on our virtual shelves — non-fiction books about science, commerce, art and history and novels that show the rich imaginations of creators from around the world.

To help buyers sort through their many options — and help you get noticed —the search engine on our site has been significantly upgraded and “Find” is now the most prominent element at the top of our revamped homepage. We continue to enhance our search function and will continue leveraging our weRead social discovery platform to foster even better connections between creators and buyers.

It’s an exciting time in this industry, this era of open publishing that is giving voice to a new breed of creator and empowering consumers with a new world of ideas. We know you have choice, and we appreciate that you’re with Lulu.  We know we have to offer you better tools and more innovative approaches to ensure you reach ever-larger markets, in order to have ever-greater opportunities to be rewarded.

This is a fun adventure as we, you and Lulu, re-invent publishing for the Internet age, and remember: we are not the publisher — you are. Thanks for your support and don’t hesitate to let me know what you think of what we are attempting to achieve.

Cheers, Bob.

You’ll now find their works — and about 200,000 other eBook titles from traditionally published authors — in the Lulu Marketplace. We’ve added them through agreements with Ingram and other distributors to make their public catalogs available on our site.

It’s a significant shift for Lulu, but one rooted in a strategy to maximize author success that has guided us from the beginning. To sell more books, you need more exposure. We’ve long provided distribution choices to help you reach customers in myriad stores, including Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. We’re continuing to expand those options, and we’ll have more to share soon.

But that’s not enough. The time has come for a better marketplace. Like many of you, we’re discouraged by some trends in the industry and what they might mean for the future of books. Here at Lulu we champion books, and the people who create them, because of what they represent. Books are conversations between generations that convey our best thinking and help move us forward. They deserve appreciation. And authors deserve success.

The open marketplace we’re building will have the broadest selection. It will be a one-stop shop with content from all authors, in all styles and in all formats, paper and electronic. The goal is to give readers access to the best knowledge, ideas and entertainment and to give authors access to the best audience for their works. We believe the increased choice offered by increased selection will attract more readers. And as we attract more readers, we will have more opportunity to get Lulu authors in front of people most likely to buy. In fact, we’ve invested in recommendation technology to help with that by steering readers based on their browsing patterns.

Adding 200,000 eBooks is just the first step in a journey that will unfold over the coming months, one intended to bring more success to Lulu authors every day. As always, I welcome your suggestions and feedback as we move forward.

Why publish an eBook? The simple answer is it makes sense for both authors (universal distribution, more sales, and higher royalties) and readers (cheaper than print, instant delivery, and mobile access). How can Lulu help? By providing features to support a wide range of scenarios: give eBooks away for free as a marketing tool, automatically link eBook and print editions to enhance discovery and provide more options to readers, and offer optional copy-protection (DRM) to prevent piracy and unlicensed distribution.

Beginning today, Lulu supports all of these options, and more. With multi-device support, readers can access your eBook on a Mac, PC, iPhone (Stanza), Sony Reader, and many others. You can now upload files in the popular EPUB format, which is quickly becoming the industry standard (see recent announcements by Barnes & Noble and Sony). Concerned about losing sales when you make unprotected digital content available in the marketplace? You can now apply DRM to your eBook, and sell a licensed version which can’t be freely copied and distributed.

To support enabling these features for more than a million Lulu authors, Lulu has adopted a new pricing structure for eBooks and print downloads.  As always, it’s still free to publish, and if you choose, you can continue to give away your digital content for free. For authors who want to sell eBooks and downloads, we’ve added a fixed $1.49 base price to cover our credit card processing and hosting expenses. Applying DRM (optional, eBooks only) adds $.99 to the base price to offset the fee charged by our DRM provider.  To reiterate, authors never pay to publish, these fees are reflected in the list price and are only charged to the purchaser at purchase time.

All of us at Lulu are excited about our new eBooks, and welcome your feedback. Stay tuned–we’re actively exploring many more features, including providing easy access to retail distribution channels with the goal of enabling Lulu authors to sell eBooks in every online marketplace.  Meanwhile, we encourage you to get started and publish an eBook today.