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Adventures in Self-Publishing, Part 2

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

I've been a professional graphic designer for decades so I figured the process of preparing the book for print would be easy, but unfortunately I ran into some snags. The service I chose to use is Lulu. They are not the largest but are highly regarded and have excellent terms of use. You can print your book through them absolutely for free: you only need to pay if you want distribution of your book via Amazon and other sellers and the cost is low ($99 minimum). They even give you a free webstore to sell your book on their site.

There's a lot to like about Lulu: their process is quite automated, there's a vibrant community, there's lots of information on the process on their website, and they are generous with their terms allowing you to publish your book elsewhere at the same time if you want (some Print-On-Demand companies want exclusivity).

Unfortunately, my impressions of Lulu went downhill when I began researching the details of the publishing process. For one, there is almost too much information on their site. Publishing is complicated and there are hundreds of FAQs split among thousands of pages: I spent many hours reading through their site trying to understand all of the available options and procedures. Information overload was high, but the documentation still has gaps. In places the docs contradict themselves, with one page saying one thing and another saying something else. In other places the text just isn't clear, leaving you with ambiguous answers. The docs are also geared toward amateurs, not professionals, with pages of instructions for creating PDFs out of programs like Microsoft Word and not a one about the settings to use in professional-level software like Adobe InDesign (which actually give you a lot more options for PDF-creation and thus need specifications).

A key flaw in Lulu's website documentation is that the website really is designed for two utterly different groups of people: publishers, who are wanting to produce and sell content, and consumers, who simply want help buying a book from the site. Both sets of instructions are lumped together into a giant FAQ system which is confusing. As a publisher I expect it to be somewhat complicated for me, but I've got to imagine that the site would be really confusing for a simple consumer wanting to buy a book and running into a problem. Lulu really should separate the tech documents and have publisher information in a clearly delineated section (possibly walled off and requiring a login).

The next problem was when I attempted to get additional help. Initially I was pleased to see that Lulu offers free live chat support. But that was before I used it. Frankly, Lulu's support people are some of the rudest and dumbest people I've ever encountered. The "live chat" system is extremely slow with them taking several minutes to respond, which ruins the whole point of an interactive conversation. They might as well use email. (I finally figured out that they are apparently interacting with multiple people at once which explains why it takes them several minutes to answer to an "Hello? Are you there?" query.)

The support techs' main problem is that they do not actually know anything: their every answer is simply to point you to the "correct" page on their website. While that might be good enough for some people, I'd already spent days combing the site for answers that weren't there. When I pointed out the page they indicated doesn't actually answer my question, it's another five minute wait only to be pointed to another page that doesn't help. Much of the time they utterly failed to understand my questions, answering something completely different from what I asked.

Another time they promised an expert would contact me in a few days; they never did and it delayed my project for a week while I waited for them to respond.

Some of Lulu's "solutions" to my problems were also odd. For example, I wanted to find out the price of shipping books to me. Though I can sell books via Lulu's website, one of my plans was to buy small quantities of the books in advance and sell them myself on my own website, that way I can bundle the book with other products. But all of Lulu's shipping info on their website is about book buyers, not book publishers, and doesn't say anything about the shipping costs of ordering books in quantity. When I asked a support rep for a shipping quote I was told, "Find another book on the site that's similar in size and page count to yours and add it to your shopping cart. Then change the quantity to the amount you wish to order. Then you can use the checkout system to get a shipping estimate. Just don't actually complete the purchase or else you'll buy a bunch of someone else's book!"

Hmmm. That's an example of something that works perfectly fine, but is definitely overly complicated. The site has all kinds of web-based calculators for computing the cost of your book based on your specs: why not do the same for a shipping estimate?

This kind of thing epitomizes the problems with Lulu: if your project fits within their standard specifications and you don't want anything unusual, the system works. The moment you start to customize anything or want to anything possibly non-standard, you run into a brick wall.

But worst of all, there's no other kind of support for Lulu: no phone numbers, no email address, not even a manager to escalate your problem with. This is extremely frustrating and troublesome. Even more alarming, this same system is what your potential buyers would run into if they attempted to buy books direct from Lulu. This made me shy away from using Lulu's website for sales. Not only do I have give up a percentage of my profits from each sale to pay for the Lulu store, but with such poor customer service I worry they would alienate my customers. I decided that though it costs me more upfront, I would be much better off to pre-buy books in quantity and sell them myself. That way I'm providing the customer service and any failings are my own fault.

Another issue with Lulu is that publishers don't get any special treatment. Sure, you can buy copies of your book at cost, but that's it. For many people who just want to use Lulu's service to produce a dozen books for family members or a small group, that make sense, but for someone who has a "real" book project and anticipates selling hundreds of copies of a book, a little consideration might be helpful. For example, the site encourages you to buy a proof copy of your book before you begin selling it just to make sure everything's correct.

That's good advice, of course, but with Lulu's sluggish turnaround time on book printing that can seriously delay your project. In my case it took nearly ten working days to receive my proof copy. I could have had paid for priority service to receive it in two days -- but that would have cost an outrageous $100 for one copy of my book!

A publisher's proof copy ought to receive some special treatment: perhaps you pay a little more for the rush printing (say double the normal cost) and whatever shipping costs you are willing to incur, and Lulu could limit this to just the initial copy or two and maybe even require you to commit to purchasing a certain minimum later (in my case I placed a $1,000 order couple weeks later so it was an insult to expect me to pay $100 for a proof copy).

Granted, Lulu doesn't charge anything to publish a book, so it makes sense they can't offer much, but a little cooperation would be appreciated by serious publishers.

Next Time: Marc talks about what Lulu does right.

macopinion@designwrite.com