Business ProfileforLulu Press, Inc.

I published my autobiography on Lulu in 2007 & revised it in 2014. At first I made a handful of sales at Lulu & opted to distribute via ****** & other online retailers hoping to boost my sales. I noticed what appeared more used copies being sold on ****** than I'd been paid for & when I contacted Lulu I was told it probably was a case of a handful of copies being resold multiple times. However I have begun to see a number of retailers offering new copies with several listing more than 50 in stock. When I contacted ****** I was told royalties for online sales come from my publisher. When I contacted Lulu I was told sales made by retailers are responsible for paying me my residuals. Who is printing all the new copies being offered online? It's clearly not Lulu as they haven't been paying me anything in several years. ****** does have an inhouse printer so it's likely Lulu shared my book files with ****** to print copies with. Something isn't right with this situation as no one is taking responsibility to pay me what I'm due. Lulu claims to take copyright infringement seriously yet there may be unauthorized copies of my book being sold online in significant numbers. Is Lulu behind releasing my intellectual property into the marketplace in such a way I've lost control of my manuscript? ****** Book Search was a disaster pushed at me by Lulu; as instead of a brief review of my book posted online, my entire book was posted for everyone to read minus a couple of paragraphs at the end of each chapter. That would make pirating my book a cinch; as a person could copy & paste my book then republish it themselves. This situation stinks to high heaven! Of course Lulu has the perfect firewall to protect against disgruntled authors trying to contact them about problems like this, as there's no way to directly contact a real person & the emails appear to be handled by their automated system that only gives generic responses to inquiries. This isn't a good way to do business!

Thank you for contacting Lulu via the BBB. We have reviewed our online ticketing and chat system and were unable to find any contact from the email address provided with this review. If you have additional questions, we encourage you to go to the bottom of our home page and click the Contact Support link (also available via the Resources tab at the top of the page) and fill out the form. This will create a ticket so that our amazing support team can answer any additional questions you have. In the meantime, we will also provide more information about the listings on Amazon you are seeing here. Third-party sellers list thousands of books at a time. They typically scrap data from ISBN agencies and other bibliographic feeds to mass-create their listings. They do not buy books ahead of time or keep stock. Often these third-party sellers list books as "used" or "new" even though they have not yet purchased the book. The seller only places an order for the book once they receive a purchase request from a customer. The book may be purchased by the seller on Amazon (who would then print the book) or through Lulu. In either case, you would receive your author revenue for this sale and it would be reported to your author account on your Sales & Payments page. Third parties from Amazon's marketplace or other marketplaces such as eBay can resell used books if they have existing copies at any price and you will not receive any additional revenue from those sales. You receive revenue when a new book is purchased from us or from one of our distributors. We are aware of third-party sellers listing Lulu books at a markup on Amazon. It is not something that we can control. Using Amazon's marketplace, any book can be sold at a large markup by third parties. Google Book Search was provided as an option to all of our users a few years ago as a way to provide a preview of your title. It displayed 20% of the content at a time; but Google chose how to display it and would pick a different 20% of the book each time. Users could choose to opt out if they felt like it was not beneficial. Lulu does take claims of copyright infringement seriously and we have a reporting link on every product page so that content can be reported. Most other major sites do as well, and if you feel like your title has been published somewhere illegally, we encourage you to find that link or reach out to the store to report it. If you have additional questions or would like clarification on any of the above, please create a support ticket via the Contact Support link and we will be happy to assist you. Kind regards, Lulu Press, Inc.