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.

One of the solutions to the issue of finding your audience is weRead. That’s the book discovery tool Lulu acquired last year that makes use of social networks to help authors find new readers and readers find new authors. More than 3 million people already use the site to rate and review the books they read, and the number keeps growing. Just this week, Yahoo! made weRead the only book application accessible from its revamped home page. That means more than 100 million more users could discover weRead. It’s a powerful tool, one that we’ll be doing even more with over the coming months, and can help you find new readers and develop stronger connections to them.

One of the features that you can already use to help build your personal brand as an author is weRead’s author profile. I want to walk you through the some of the steps of setting up a profile of your own, but first I want to highlight some of the benefits of having one. With a weRead author profile you:

As you can see, you then have the option to claim the profile associated with your book(s). Once you’ve claimed your profile you can add a profile picture, biography, choose what information gets shown, add details to your profile, and view your stats. Below is a screenshot of my profile:

To me, the most exciting part of the author profile is the stats section and how easily you can connect with your fans. As you can see from my page, I have no readers, no fans and no discussions. However, if you’re a fan of my work, if I have a profile, then you can easily become a fan, or start a discussion about one of my books. For authors, this is invaluable.

The ability to easily participate in discussion with their readers, get feedback on their work, and reach out to fans when they release a new project (and to do so across multiple platforms), is priceless. This kind of connection is why social media is such an important part of self-publishing, and publishing in general. Most of us have to do our own marketing and publicity, and tools like weRead’s author profiles allow us to easily connect directly with our fans.

Now, in addition to publishing your books on Lulu, weRead will enable you to connect with well over two million readers across a variety of social networks. You can even create your own author page, and  interact with your fans!

Another feature of weRead is that it has the complete catalog of all books in print. Readers will be able to rate your mystery and adventure book against “The Da Vinci Code”, and your period romantic comedy can be easily compared with “Pride and Prejudice”.

weRead’s discovery and recommendation engine allows users to find the types of books they will be interested in quickly and easily.  Who doesn’t want more people finding, reading, and sharing your book?

weRead works on many of your favorite networks including:
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Orkut
• Hi5
• Bebo
… even your own blog or website!

To get started, you can either:
•    Go to http://www.weread.com and register for an account, or
•    If you already belong to a social network listed above, simply follow the link to install the application on your profile

To help you get more familiar with weRead, and what you can do with it’s features, we will be doing a series of posts focusing on how you can use weRead to promote your work and interact with the largest possible audience of consumers. Some of the topics we’ll be covering include tips for setting up an author page on weRead, and using weRead to market your work.

I hope you’re as excited as we at Lulu are about our new partnership, and be sure to keep an eye out for more Lulu and weRead tips & tricks.