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Post by JesusNinja on Jan 18, 2021 0:51:27 GMT
After today's lack of royalties I thought I'd look on Trust Pilot. Seems that many are finding the same results as I have. I haven't checked but this person says that Lulu is taking a larger cut now from the profits. The site is full of one star reviews. So sad because I used to love Lulu.com. But I'm feeling much like the person who wrote the review below. It's almost as if they've read my mind..We've had the exact same issues happen.
What happened to Lulu in the last 10…
What happened to Lulu in the last 10 years? When I started out using Lulu as a naive content creator about 10 years ago, it was an amazing site with amazing tools... For some reason in the last 3 to 4 years it has just been going downhill... and the speed of that downhill trend just keeps increasing with ever new and inventive ways of being self-destructive.
The straw that broke this camel's back was the new charge for Global Distribution of eBooks. On its own, the introduction of new charges are not that bad... in fact, they are expected from time to time. My complaint comes as the compounded mass of issues, the instant jump to $4.99 from no charges at all and the huge jumps in Lulu's cut of the royalties.
Just to outline some of the issues Lulu have ignored for me:
1) Over the last few months I have noticed purchases of my eBooks followed by a 0 royalty line on my account. I have raised this several times to Lulu via the support form only to hear nothing back. The support team seem to be MIA and not bothered in dealing with difficult cases. So not only will Lulu introduce new charges to the Global Distribution but they will not look into why you are not earning the royalties due from those distributions.
2) Books sent for Global Distribution would appear on Amazon with the wrong author and illustrator information. My most recent book had the illustrator marked as the main author... When reported to Lulu, I never received a response, which didn't matter because what happened in issue 3.
3) Books would be marked as Available on Amazon and other sites for about 24 hours before they would appear as "No Longer Available" or "Not in Stock" and when investigated Amazon would say I'd need to contact the imprinter (Lulu) and when they were contacted, guess what, the contact was ignored and no response was given. PS... The books are still showing as No Longer Available on Amazon unless you are in the US where apparently they are in stock.
4) Lulu's cuts of my royalties has cut my profit from Global Distribution eBook sales from 49p per sale to 7p per sale... And as outlined in issue 1, most eBook sales are just showing 0.00 as the royalties from Global Distribution. So even if I was getting the royalties due, I'd need to sell (4.99/0.07=71.28) a minimum of 72 eBooks to make a profit... eBooks are supplementary to my work so I mostly focus on physical copies. But those profit margins have also been slashed to near nothing by Lulu's money grabs.
5) I am aware of a half dozen physical copy purchases made via Amazon in November last year that are yet to appear on my royalties list. As we are now over 6 weeks since the sale was made I'd have expected to see something but haven't. Leading me to believe that Lulu has stolen those royalties. I haven't bothered reporting this... As proven by other problems experienced, what would be the point when the MIA support team don't bother looking into issues.
Throughout my time using Lulu I have defended a lot of the strange behaviour of the site overlords to those who often raise concerns about it, and in the last 2 years alone I know of many people who have moved their creation elsewhere and I know of many more in the community looking to do the same as Lulu continues down the Self-Destructive path.
For those of us that are not famous named authors we run on very tight margins, especially when working on poetry as I do myself. Lulu's changes in the last few years are making it impossible to keep using them for content creation as a unknown author.
Either, Lulu need to engage with their community or they need to do some soul searching, because, if they continue down this self destructive path they will become irrelevant in the publishing world. Over the last 3 months I started using another company for free ebook listing alongside Lulu and now I will be exclusively moving all future work from Lulu and investigating the cost benefit for moving existing work unless Lulu can sort their house out.
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Post by BlueAndGold on Jan 18, 2021 1:05:58 GMT
"Either, Lulu need to engage with their community or they need to do some soul searching, because, if they continue down this self destructive path they will become irrelevant in the publishing world"
EXACTLY! They are committing slow suicide by alienating their client base. It has been a slow-motion train wreck for 9 months now.
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Post by adrianallan on Jan 18, 2021 8:02:30 GMT
I agree with the opening post. Lulu's last nine months have been a monumental disaster. A little bit of humility would help. But instead, they play an almost political game of carrying on as though nothing happened. I'm not seeing this humility come through - it annoys we when I see another video posted by the girl with the nasally voice and the nose-ring, all smiles and "carry on regardless".
I would have made the switch already to another POD. All that is holding me back is the familiarity of Lulu; the need to have to pay a fee with Ingram; the fact that Ingram does not pay monthly. IF these issues were sorted out, it would switch tomorrow. I also know that Lulu gets the job done in terms of deliverly - I have recently got books to customers in Finland, Japan and Australia. I need to have the same confidence in delivery with other PODs.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 18, 2021 11:23:43 GMT
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Post by JesusNinja on Jan 18, 2021 16:00:48 GMT
I agree with the opening post. Lulu's last nine months have been a monumental disaster. A little bit of humility would help. But instead, they play an almost political game of carrying on as though nothing happened. I'm not seeing this humility come through - it annoys we when I see another video posted by the girl with the nasally voice and the nose-ring, all smiles and "carry on regardless". I would have made the switch already to another POD. All that is holding me back is the familiarity of Lulu; the need to have to pay a fee with Ingram; the fact that Ingram does not pay monthly. IF these issues were sorted out, it would switch tomorrow. I also know that Lulu gets the job done in terms of deliverly - I have recently got books to customers in Finland, Japan and Australia. I need to have the same confidence in delivery with other PODs. Yes Chelsie is annoying. I keep watching the videos and they act as if nothing is wrong. I'd prefer a video of her and Paul sitting there apologizing to their customers. Describing all the mistakes that are happening and what is being done to fix them. Maybe even offering free proofs for awhile. But instead whenever you enter the site it's nothing but "buy this , buy that!" Kind of hard to buy things when your books are not selling. And if they aren't online they can't sell. I used to follow a stream on Youtube.com. Self-publishing with Dale. Great guy. He and his wife would have live streams and answer questions about writing, covers, and anything new going on at Amazon. He was supposed to do a review on Lulu with Chelsie just before the update. Dale told me that she called him and said not upload the review. Something went wrong with the update and she was freaking out. She was afraid he might lose some trust of his followers. He told me just to hang in there that Lulu would get it fixed. We know how that ended. But Dale and his wife are very smart when it comes to making money with books. His wife made $17,000 Christmas before last selling books. Because she saw what was selling and new book fads. Yes Lulu is strong with delivery, but if the books aren't online they don't sell. If they don't sell neither of us make money. |
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Post by adrianallan on Jan 18, 2021 16:09:21 GMT
I agree with the opening post. Lulu's last nine months have been a monumental disaster. A little bit of humility would help. But instead, they play an almost political game of carrying on as though nothing happened. I'm not seeing this humility come through - it annoys we when I see another video posted by the girl with the nasally voice and the nose-ring, all smiles and "carry on regardless". I would have made the switch already to another POD. All that is holding me back is the familiarity of Lulu; the need to have to pay a fee with Ingram; the fact that Ingram does not pay monthly. IF these issues were sorted out, it would switch tomorrow. I also know that Lulu gets the job done in terms of deliverly - I have recently got books to customers in Finland, Japan and Australia. I need to have the same confidence in delivery with other PODs. Yes Chelsie is annoying. I keep watching the videos and they act as if nothing is wrong. I'd prefer a video of her and Paul sitting there apologizing to their customers. Describing all the mistakes that are happening and what is being done to fix them. Maybe even offering free proofs for awhile. But instead whenever you enter the site it's nothing but "buy this , buy that!" Kind of hard to buy things when your books are not selling. And if they aren't online they can't sell. I used to follow a stream on Youtube.com. Self-publishing with Dale. Great guy. He and his wife would have live streams and answer questions about writing, covers, and anything new going on at Amazon. He was supposed to do a review on Lulu with Chelsie just before the update. Dale told me that she called him and said not upload the review. Something went wrong with the update and she was freaking out. She was afraid he might lose some trust of his followers. He told me just to hang in there that Lulu would get it fixed. We know how that ended. But Dale and his wife are very smart when it comes to making money with books. His wife made $17,000 Christmas before last selling books. Because she saw what was selling and new book fads. Yes Lulu is strong with delivery, but if the books aren't online they don't sell. If they don't sell neither of us make money. Whatever direction you take, please inform us of your progress. Nobody owes Lulu any loyalty in the wake of the turmoil. I am also looking for alternative PODs companies and will probably go with Ingram Spark. |
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Post by JesusNinja on Jan 18, 2021 16:56:53 GMT
I am going slowly maybe one or two books at a time. I'll keep you up on the progress. I'm choosing Streetlib as they pay with PayPal. I like that as it's much more secure than giving out your bank info.By the way here is a stream by Dale but it's done in May and he's promoting Lulu. But he does tell the best five publishers to go with last year. youtu.be/fJ4Sm995tso And here is a recent QA stream by him. He's good. youtu.be/oSejrlSzNd0 |
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