How good is Lulu.com as a way of selling your digital content online?

It’s not a good way to sell your digital content online.

Lulu.com does exactly what it says it will do; it lets you park your digital files, can turn them into hardcopy – and gives you a ‘shop window’ to sell them from.

But what it doesn’t do – of course – is find a market that wants your stuff. It doesn’t bring people to your shop window. Without a market, Lulu.com is nothing but a delivery vehicle parked in the drive waiting for the phone to ring and that’s something that’s easy to forget in the rush to get out there and sell. Lulu.com offers some kind of marketing and promotion services but they’re unknown quantities and at a price that will make them seem a risky proposition to most self-publishers.

What is it Lulu.com then? According to The Times it is “a collision of the web, new printing technology and a universal yearning to vent and dazzle”. Fairly close, I’d say.

Lulu.com exists because everybody is hungry to sell the digital content that their new technologies have empowered them to produce. It is a response to the dream of finding enough buyers in the much-heralded ‘long-tail’ economy to generate real wealth. In short, Lulu.com is a reaction to the ‘get-rich-quick’ dream that exploded with the Google economy.

At first glance, you would think that, since Lulu.com stands to make a hefty percentage on each digital product or book sold, they would put a lot more imagination and effort into helping people to market and sell their content. But they’re not stupid and if they don’t, there’s a reason why not. The reason is probably because they know better than anyone that, in the words of Linda Stilborne, “books that are not worth reading still won’t sell”. Unless of course, it’s to friends and family – which is why many people consider Lulu.com a ‘vanity’ press.

Having got the (badly documented) but so far highly effective ‘e-Commerce’ plugin for WordPress working, I no longer need Lulu.com as an expensive delivery vehicle. In deleting my Lulu.com account, the only thing I lose is their uncontrolled internal ‘author’ spam which is no great loss.

If you’ve got digital content to publish my advice is to face the challenge of finding a real market before you do anything else.