Lulu.com, a self-publishing company that offers publishing, printing, and distribution services has launched a new ecommerce platform along with site upgrades that seeks to give authors and readers the best self-publishing experience for buying and selling books in any format worldwide.
Powered by Elastic Path, the upgrades are designed to maximize author agility and ensure that readers can easily buy books online anywhere in the world, including the places they already shop like Amazon.com, the iBookstore, and Barnes and Noble’s NOOK Bookstore.
Lulu.com’s soon to be available ecommerce APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces) enables businesses and publishers to build Lulu.com and Elastic Path’s ecommerce tools into their own branded websites, absolutely free.
Since their founding in 2002, Lulu has published over 1.1 million titles by creators in over 200 countries and territories and adds 20,000 new titles to their catalogue a month.
How Lulu works
Authors are guided by menus and instructions on the website as they upload files. Material is submitted in digital form for hard publication. Uploaded items that are not distributed beyond Lulu are immediately available for order and the author is not required to purchase a copy. However distributed items require the author to first order a draft and to approve it.
Lulu allows anyone to upload content to Lulu and sell it through a global network of retail channels as a print book or eBook, all for free. Creators set their own price for their titles and keep up to 90 per cent of the profit whenever their works sell.
The retail price for the published item is determined based on printing costs, the author’s selected profit margin, and the fee charged by the distributor for distributed items.
