SCAM ALERT! Stay Away From Lulu: How to Self-Publish a Book — Part 5
Lulu will take your book files and sell your book without paying you any royalties. Avoid them like the plague.
Note — update: you can find Lulu’s response at the bottom of this post.
For the first time self-published authors, there is no end to pitfalls, scams, and abusers who prey on the inexperienced. That’s one of the main reasons why I’m writing this series — to save you the trouble and money, or at least as much of that as possible, by sharing my experiences with you.
So Lulu is just… beyond words horrible. I will not even go into the print issues and how dreadfully slow and unresponsive they are. The only good thing I can say about them is that the paper they use for book covers is of a bit better quality than Amazon KDP’s, but that’s it.
Lulu abuses writers and withholds their royalties
The main concern with Lulu is what one of the writers on Consumer Affairs website pointed out — they are thieves. I can confirm that they’ll keep most if not all of the money from the sales for themselves. What’s worse, they will trick you into ‘agreeing’ to this when you sign up and opt for distribution with them.
What happened to me was that I unwillingly ‘agreed’ to being paid 0 (zero!) royalties without ever being warned that this is what giving Lulu the rights to distribute your book really means. This only became clear after I checked the book details later on and there, to my utter horror and disbelief, I found this:
So not only are their print costs pricy in comparison to Amazon KDP, they are giving me $0.00 (zero dollars) royalties for any retail sale they make with my book! I mean, WHAT?! According to this, I would only make $1 (from a book they priced at $18) if somebody ordered it directly from Lulu’s website.
That sure as hell is not what I did or would ever willingly sign up for.
And even less so since Amazon KDP pays me notably more than $0 royalties for the very same paperback of similar quality sold at half the Lulu’s price!
What happened next was that I found my book available from some obscure sellers I’ve never heard of before. Apparently, Lulu just takes your files and sells them to just about anyone. *Correction, big thanks to Nate Hoffelder, nope, that was not Lulu’s faults. Apparently there is no way to stop or control that.
Avoid Lulu like the plague
The bottom line is, if you’d like to receive royalties, just do NOT give Lulu your book files.
Another thing to remember — Lulu is one of way too many companies and people who take advantage of writers. There is no end to those who are preying on people like you and me. This can make self-publishing process even more frustrating, time-consuming, and costly than it already is.
Given how much effort goes into writing and publishing a book, be very, very careful with who you give access to your files to.
I, of course, then tried to unlist and delete my book files from Lulu— guess what, they didn’t let me delete the files and they notified me it takes 6 to 8 weeks for them to stop selling it. Yeah, that’s Lulu and that’s a life of a writer. With Lulu, I learned my lesson and I will sure remember it.
The problem with such companies is that they can start as legit businesses and built their reputation before turning rogue for whatever reason. I’ve seen quite a few people recommending Lulu and that’s why I gave it a try.
People, however, often recommend something without having enough information or ever trying out the service for themselves. And also, there are those who give good reviews to a horrible business because they’ve been hired to do so in order for the scam to continue.
My advice would be — if you see a combination of many 1 star and 5 star reviews with little or nothing in-between, play it safe and trust those 1 star reviews over the 5 star ones. Also, if people who have never personally used a service recommend it, be very, very careful. Their intentions might be good, but do they know what the are talking about? Keep that in mind.
Update (Aug 23, 2017): I just received a response from Lulu, here is what they say:
In regards to your revenue, please note your book cost will increase when you have an ISBN attached to it. If you create your book without an ISBN and sell only on Lulu your revenue would be higher. You may visit this link for more information on retail pricing:
http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Product-Pricing-Information/How-Retail-Prices-are-Determined/ta-p/192781
That’s all they had to say. Note that there is absolutely no mention of the supposed ‘increased cost’ with their ‘free’ ISBN in the above link. This is the first I’ve been informed about this interesting ‘policy.’ Need I say more?
In the next posts, I’ll talk about Amazon KDP and Patreon, so stay tuned.
Note: I suffered quite a few assaults in the comment section here. Do check the number of followers the writers who spitted venom here have (for most that would be 1–10). It seems that many of these account were created for one purpose alone — to publish a nasty comment on this, so keep that in mind when trying to make sense of it all.
Update August 25, 2017 — The Writing Cooperative notified me today that they were forced to remove this post from the publication due to the controversy it caused. Here is my response:
Go back to the Part 1 of this series or go to the next post in the series.
