DIY publishing: getting Amazon and Lulu to co-exist

My new Publishers Weekly column has just gone up, documenting the progress with my DIY short story collection, With a Little Help. This month, I talk about the Baroque process of getting a book listed on both Lulu and Amazon:

Getting the book on Amazon was much harder than I anticipated. At first, I considered selling the book using Lulu's wholesale channel, which can feed into Amazon. But once both Lulu and Amazon had taken their cut of the book, my net price would have been in nosebleed territory, somewhere in the $20 range. Add to that a $2 royalty for me and the book would be remembered as one of the most expensive short story collections in publishing history.

In order to list on Amazon at a decent price point, I needed fewer wholesale discounts. For me, that meant cutting out Lulu and listing directly on Amazon through CreateSpace, Amazon's own POD program. But CreateSpace, frankly, is a pain in the ass. First, it refuses to print any book that already has an ISBN somewhere else, a very anticompetitive practice. To overcome this, I had to create an "Amazon edition" of the book with a slightly different cover and some additional text explaining the weird world of POD publishing.

But the fun was just beginning. CreateSpace also has a cumbersome "quality assurance" process that effectively throws away all the advantages of POD. For example, every time I change so much as one character in the setup file, CreateSpace pulls the book out of Amazon. A human being must recheck the book, and then I am notified that I have to order (and pay for) a new proof to be printed and shipped from the U.S. to London. I then have to approve the proof before CreateSpace will notify Amazon that the book is ready to be made available again. It can then take three to five days before the book is actually back for sale on Amazon. Practically speaking, this means that fixing a typo or adding an appendix with new financial information costs about $20 upfront, and takes the book off Amazon's catalogue for two weeks.

With A Little Help: Hitting My Stride

• [turn_self_off]

  All in all it reads like Amazon have become one hell of a incumbent in the publishing world. And am i reading it right that using the wholesale channel between Lulu and Amazon results in them splitting $18 on a $20 book?!

  In the end i guess Cory have basically confirmed the O’Reilly quote about artists and obscurity.

• [hdon]

  > Getting the book on Amazon was much harder than I anticipated

  Hosting a website is even harder, if you’re Wikileaks.

  Don’t use Amazon, people!

• [Peter Bodensteiner]

  Lightning Source has some advantages over CreateSpace, but customer service is not really one of them…although you do get a dedicated rep that you can contact.

  LSI has more options for distributing a book worldwide (including non-US Amazon stores), all while taking less of a cut (you have to set your discount at 20%). CS has caught up a bit recently, offering more than just US-based Amazon as a channel, but again, they take a larger cut.

  LSI also charges more for copies that the author/publisher orders for themselves. And their quality for image reproduction is consistently poorer than CS, although that may not be an issue for your average fiction book.

• [Laurel L. Russwurm]

  First, thank you for sharing, as always, but I thought I recalled different info about the CreateSpace ISBN, so I went back and looked, and I’m not sure why you had a problem, Cory. Now, I’m a noob, just gearing up for my first self-pub through CreateSpace, and maybe I’m missing something. Just this is what I found about ISBNS. Create Space offers to assign an ISBN if you don’t have your own (in Canada they are free, but they cost money elsewhere and sometimes even require annual renewals). But CreateSpace web page gives you the option to:

  Provide Your Own ISBN

  If you have an ISBN that you purchased from Bowker® or through your local ISBN agency, you can use it to publish your book through CreateSpace. You must also enter the imprint name associated with the ISBN.

  —Screencap @5 April/2011

  As far as the proof issue, I don’t see that as an unreasonable procedure at all. Back in the bad old days, your only option was to wait for the second edition to correct mistakes or add information. So it seems eminently reasonable to me that Create Space wants you to approve any changes (i.e. check the new proof). I can also see that they wouldn’t want to have to make new changes for every author every day or two (or hourly for some, I’m sure :)

  It may not seem to be a huge problem for a single book, but expecting a POD company to fiddle incessantly with every book, forever, would surely put them out of business. I’ve been amazed with the customer service they offer so far. Which is not to say I’m not going to take a

  For me, the Create Space policy provides incentive to get the proof as perfect as possible before approving it for sale. Then, when time reveals required changes, I’ll save them up and down the road make all such changes en masse and call it the second edition.

  So far my only bone to pick with CS is shipping, and most importantly the border crossing between the US & Canada [free trade agreement - yeah, right - duty by any other name...] Considering I’ve yet to find any Canadian POD publisher that doesn’t want thousands up front before printing a single page up here in the Great White North, I figure I’m still ahead of the game.

• [Laurel L. Russwurm]

  First, thank you for sharing, as always, but I thought I recalled different info about the CreateSpace ISBN, so I went back and looked, and I’m not sure why you had a problem, Cory. Now, I’m a noob, just gearing up for my first self-pub through CreateSpace, and maybe I’m missing something. Just this is what I found about ISBNS. Create Space offers to assign an ISBN if you don’t have your own (in Canada they are free, but they cost money elsewhere and sometimes even require annual renewals). But CreateSpace web page gives you the option to:

  Provide Your Own ISBN

  If you have an ISBN that you purchased from Bowker® or through your local ISBN agency, you can use it to publish your book through CreateSpace. You must also enter the imprint name associated with the ISBN.

  —Screencap @5 April/2011

  As far as the proof issue, I don’t see that as an unreasonable procedure at all. Back in the bad old days, your only option was to wait for the second edition to correct mistakes or add information. So it seems eminently reasonable to me that Create Space wants you to approve any changes (i.e. check the new proof). I can also see that they wouldn’t want to have to make new changes for every author every day or two (or hourly for some, I’m sure :)

  It may not seem to be a huge problem for a single book, but expecting a POD company to fiddle incessantly with every book, forever, would surely put them out of business. I’ve been amazed with the customer service they offer so far. Which is not to say I’m not going to take a

  For me, the Create Space policy provides incentive to get the proof as perfect as possible before approving it for sale. Then, when time reveals required changes, I’ll save them up and down the road make all such changes en masse and call it the second edition.

  So far my only bone to pick with CS is shipping, and most importantly the border crossing between the US & Canada [free trade agreement - yeah, right - duty by any other name...] Considering I’ve yet to find any Canadian POD publisher that doesn’t want thousands up front before printing a single page up here in the Great White North, I figure I’m still ahead of the game.

• [Laurel L. Russwurm]

  errata:

  (or, my second edition comment)

  … where the dangling a was supposed to read:

  Which is not to say I’m not going to take a look at Lightning Source :)

  [yup, proofing can be a problem, especially when one is trying to do a zillion things at once.]

• [Anonymous]

  So far, so good for us as a publishing co-op using Lulu. For our first title, I bit the bullet and bought the distribution package that lists the title at Amazon and elsewhere – a $75 investment – and assigned the title an ISBN I bought myself.

  The book looks great, and as it’s previously received high praise (but no offer to publish) from editors at Simon & Schuster, as well as many small presses, and since one publisher nominated it for the Pushcart Press Editors Choice Book Award, we knew the title was ready. It just seemed like the time to change the rules. Hence, forming a new publishing coop.

  The title is available at $14.95 for TPB, less than $2 for the “File Download” PDF version. We order only the number we need. And each title’s author can decide how to promote her title.

  Profit actually isn’t very important to us – we’re in it to make interesting, unique literature available without trying to go for the grand-slam-sales motivation of the major publishers.

• [therealjasonb]

  I have books on lulu and Amazon, and it didn’t seem to be a big issue. Although, of course, one issue might be that my book is short and I don’t actually expect to make any money from it. :) The royalty for Lulu does suck, though–even with a book that’s about 150 pages, it’s almost 10 bucks without adding any profit. I made a kindle version on my own and uploaded it, which is where almost all of my sales came from.

  I recently tried Smashwords, which seems just as clunky. Just changing the description (for the website!) involved resubmitting the entire book, which seems inane.

  I also am in the middle of trying the new B&N site (pubit.com). I’m not done, but right now I’d say it’s mixed. Setting things up is pretty easy, but there’s not a lot of help for formatting. They let you preview it in the Nook, but then it says if you want to really check you should download the nook software to your computer and try it that way. (Then why bother with the preview?)

• [riazm]

  Is it reasonable to include the 10,000 from Mark Shuttleworth and the profit from the column in your profits? I guess they’re profits so why not, but still.

• [IWood]

  First, it refuses to print any book that already has an ISBN somewhere else, a very anticompetitive practice.

  That’s not anticompetitive at all. ISO requires you to assign a unique ISBN to each edition of a book. The CreateSpace edition is a unique edition, published by Amazon. So you can’t use the ISBN of another edition published by someone else. I’m kind of amazed you got away with making that claim in Publisher’s Weekly. Unless, of course, the fact that PW is the flagship publication of the industry’s dying old guard means that saying anything bad about the new model is OK by them.

• [Ethan]

  Yeah, I really hate that about CreateSpace as well. I’d add that (at least when I last used them) their shipping date estimates are wildly off. Luckily they are way too conservative (i.e., the books ship much sooner than the provided estimate), but it left me wondering how CreateSpace cannot have a better idea of how long it takes to print the books I’m ordering.

  Even so, I still used CreateSpace instead of Lulu because by paying an upfront fee, the printing costs were much, much cheaper than what Lulu was charging (even after factoring in the expense of that fee & the costs of all the proofs).

  • [DaveP]

    Ethan, their ship dates are still ridiculous.

    The best way I’ve come up with to self-publish:

    1. do your own layout and cover (requirement for CS, LS anyway).
    2. publish and sell the PDF[1] ASAFP.
    3. submit the PDF and cover to CS for approval. Do not turn on the Amazon sales channel yet.
    4. get typos and edit requests from customers who bought the PDF for a week or two, depending on the time-sensitivity of the material. Ours is crazy time-sensitive, but I wouldn’t think a sci-fi novel would be.
    5. roll all edits into the PDF.
    6. send all purchasers of the PDF a free ‘second edition’. Submit the updated PDF to Createspace.
    7. turn on the Amazon sales channel.

    This requires you to handle your own sales for the digital edition, but you can easily price it below the printed version and still make more money per copy if you’re willing and able to do so.

    The thing I really dislike about Createspace is their lousy interface for publishers to order copies. I want to send dozens of comp copies to reviewers and media contacts, and that means I have to log in, order each separately, put the address for each in individually, confirm my credit card, deal with their weird long-lead-time shipping dates and pay too much for shipping… the system was plainly designed for people who might want a copy or two sent to a single address and that’s it. Frankly, its not much harder to just order them all in one shipment sent to me directly and stuff mailers with books myself.

    It’d also be great if people who have historically produced many sales thru Amazon had some kind of direct line to Createspace/Amazon, but there’s nothing like this I’ve been able to find.

    [1]: kindle/epub format is where we really want to get with this, not just PDF, but we’re not there yet.

    • [Aldous irving]

      I read in this article http://yep.it/jpnydk that Lulu is simply a free publishing site and that’s it. So if I really want my book to be noticed then perhaps free is not the best way don’t you think?

      • [Kent2011]

        learn the 25/75 Principle here http://yep.it/75work and it won’t matter anymore if you self-publish or if you get your own publisher.

  • [sun_ra]

    We receive orders from both Createspace and Lulu at our POD company. If both are received on the 15th of the month, Lulu’s “ship by” date will probably be the 17th, while Createspace may have a ship by date more than a week away. In either case, our turnaround time is around 48 hours for most of the year.

• [MachineElf]

  I would recommend dropping Lulu and Createspace and going with Lightning Source. Maximise your revenue (80% of retail – manufacture cost per unit) and get professional service. Only ‘downside’ is you have to be semi-adept at being an actual publisher (ie. they don’t hold your hand through the entire process). Which is probably what a publisher should be anyhow…
  ;)

• [bbbarry]

  Hey MachineElf,

  Do you have any direct experience with Lightning Source? I just met a guy at the weekend who recommended them to me.

  Cheers
  Barry

• [Random Royalty]

  +1 for lightning source.

  But you really need professional publishing skills. You get no handholding or services as you do with Lulu or Createspace, even for the basics like ISBN numbers. Mistakes are expensive. LSI is pretty good at account screening as they are really focused at the publishing industry and not authors or self-publishers.

  And believe it or not LSI is so efficient, Createspace and Lulu use them to get their books into the traditional distribution channels and to fulfill orders.

• [emmdeeaych]

  Somewhat off topic, but this reminds me of the people who work in the subway fixing the machinery/electronics that charges people to ride. The wages of the employees and cost of the machines are more than the machines collect.

  The system would be cheaper to operate if it subway fares were free and there were no gates and card machines to keep track of.

  Same thing with the tolls on my local toll road. They barely cover the cost of the personnel and collection infrastructure.

  • [imag]

    Do you know on which transit systems your comment holds true? That is so interesting.

    I googled for about 30 seconds and found this, which says that on the DC metro, each additional rider actually costs the system more money than they pay in fares. It’s a whole different situation than what you outlined, but equally absurd. In that case, it makes sense to charge for a ride just to prevent people from riding.

    Sorry about the tangent.

• [MachineElf]

  bbbarry: I’ve published about ten books through them since 2004. Definitely the way to go, but as I said – you actually have to make half an effort to be a publisher (get an ISBN, typeset your own book) rather than just an author looking for a hand to get your book out. But if I can do it, anyone can really.

  Through Lightning Source you can sell on a short discount to Amazon (20% of retail to Amazon, 80% to you), non-returnable, with setup costs under $100, and being print-on-demand you can print them one at a time as they are ordered (and Amazon takes care of buying/fulfillment). Takes most of the risk out of publishing a print book (apart from the time investment).

  I wrote about my start with Lightning Source here:

  http://www.selfpublishingcommunity.com/features/self-publishing-with-lightning-source

  • [bbbarry]

    Thanks! I think I can manage that!

    bbb