Lulu support getting worse?

What was your issue?

Their impersonal touch is frustrating. AI Bots have no actual intelligence. They just dance around all the wrong 'answers' before a ticket is created. Issues take longer to process, not good. Another great fact lulu had was being able to chat/talk about an issue asap.

If you get a quick reply then you are among the lucky. First after all the hard work I did on my last book it took almost five months to hit Amazon. Then it suddenly disappears without reason from all sites. I wasn't told anything by lulu and only found it gone myself. They used to contact you if there was a problem. No more. Then after fixing the problem myself the site wouldn't let me revise the book. After a couple of weeks Lulu finally told me it was a bug. Had to redo the book under a new ISBN. That was almost six weeks ago and it's still not on Amazon or Apple. So months of potential sales down the drain. Next there are the six books that were taken from Scribd and other sites. I was told they would be added back. Only one so far and it's been at least five months or more. More money gone. Then the latest thing is I find one book missing from Amazon and there's no telling how long that was. I tried to renew it just to get it added back and the website won't let me. When I get to the design stage where you upload your interior, it automatically starts converting the old file and won't even give me a choice or chance to upload the new one. Got a message from support that the bug was being sent to the Devs. Still not fixed so I contacted them again and got the above message, you can fix this yourself. Very irritating that Lulu will not personally contact their customers who are making money for them. Adding the AI bot is pointless. Leaving the forum on the site for helping people would have been much better in my opinion. With all of this happening and my books missing online sales have just dropped to nothing. I can imagine Lulu's income at this point.

Due to the fantabulous two-day-going-on-a-year upgrade I'm no longer a fan of Lulu Press, however...

Back when I was doing corporate work I could get three times as much work done in half the time at home as I could in an office, simply because I didn't have one boss or another nearby asking questions. There were times when the constant interruptions were particularly galling because it's hard to focus when the main thing you're hearing is "How do you know this is the issue?" or "Is it fixed yet?". [At times it can really suck to be a subject matter expert, like hard vacuum next to an open airlock.]

It was worse when I was working under a loaner assistant manager from a different slice of the corporate pie who was well known for being the guy you gave a project to if you never wanted to see it get finished, because he was not the brightest bulb for the socket.

Having done system support work I can guarantee if personnel don't have either the expertise and / or the tools to take care of issues beyond their control then their hands are tied.

I learned at university that if the horse you are riding is dead, get off. Imagine if you hadn't been so loyal and downloaded your PDF in January/February/March and republished one by one elsewhere. The job would probably be done today and the books all available again. Depending on whether you have your own ISBN or not, other vendors would be Mybestseller.co.uk, draft2digital.com or ingramspark.com. Several people here have reported positively on these and will certainly give you more details if you like.

I can't afford my own ISBN. They cost $99 here each. I also have reasons that I want to keep to companies that pay by PayPal. But I may yet have to change. I may leave for Amazon. Many I know have done well there.