Publishing Your Book on Lulu w/ Chelsea Bennett of @luludotcom

About this video

Dale interviews Chelsea Bennett, public relations and events coordinator for Lulu.com. Chelsea says Lulu has operated since 2002 and was founded by Bob Young (co-founder of Red Hat) after a bad traditional publishing experience, with an open-source ethos of removing gatekeepers. She says publishing on Lulu is free — creators pay only for print copies they order — with revenue splits she states as 80/20 in the creator’s favor for print books and 90/10 for ebooks, plus free global distribution through the Lulu bookstore, Amazon, Ingram, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo and more. She introduces Lulu Express, a stripped-down upload-and-print platform for items like course materials, manuals, journals and workbooks that don’t need distribution or an ISBN, and says it was being integrated into Shopify as a print-on-demand plugin. On cheap marketing, she recommends focusing social media where your audience is (testing small ad spends of $10–$50), collaborating with authors in your genre instead of treating them as competitors, building an author website, and starting an email list. The biggest mistake she sees is authors not knowing their end goal, which leads to wrong formats and metadata for their intended distribution channels; she advises working backwards from the dream outcome. On ISBNs, she says authors building a business should buy their own (Lulu sells them for $99, per the interview), though Lulu also offers free ISBNs and lets publishers change the imprint name. Asked how much a new author can make in the first year or two, she declines to give a figure, suggesting instead dividing a yearly income goal by the number of engaged fans, thinking in a three-to-five-year horizon, and choosing passion over profit.

Key takeaways

• Per Chelsea Bennett, Lulu publishing is free with creator-favorable splits of 80/20 on print and 90/10 on ebooks, plus free global distribution.
• Lulu Express offers simple upload-and-print without distribution or ISBN, and was being integrated into Shopify as a print-on-demand plugin.
• Cheap marketing starter kit: focused social media with small test ad budgets, collaboration with genre authors, an author website, and an email list.
• The most common mistake is not defining the book’s end goal first, which causes format and metadata problems for distribution later.
• There is no realistic universal first-year income figure; work backwards from a goal divided by your number of engaged fans and think long-term.

Episode details: published September 27, 2018 · 27:46 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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