Articles by Adam Guida

by Adam Guida
November 7, 2008
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Lulu Site Highlights

In Events, Lulu News —

Last week we made several exciting changes to the site, rolling out some new features and a few new publishing options we hope you’ll enjoy.

Here are some highlights:

New Publisher Grade Paper – A new lower-cost paper option is now available for Lulu users. Books published in 8.5″ x 11″ B&W or the brand new “digest” trim size of 5.5″ x 8.5″ B&W will now have an option for this new economical paper. If you’re a cost conscious author wishing to reduce the cost of your books, while still maintaining the high quality you’ve come to expect from Lulu, then you’ll want to consider Publisher Grade Paper. Specifically, the Publisher Grade Paper is a little thinner than our Lulu “Traditional” paper, resulting in a thinner book with pages that may be slightly more transparent. After seeing some side-by-side examples of books produced with this paper for myself, the differences appeared rather marginal with the Lulu Traditional paper comparative to what you’d find in any bookstore. Click here for more information on using the Publisher Grade Paper option for your next Lulu book.

Revised Volume (BULK) Pricing Structure – We’ve just rolled out a new volume pricing structure, meaning better discounts for you at lower quantities. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a chance to update our Book cost calculator before including these discounts, but for more information please check out this page in our Help section.

Updates to Lulu Studio - Development on the Lulu Studio publishing platform continues. Here is a list of some of the most recent improvements we’ve made:

  • Preview Functionality - Users can now preview their photo book prior to publishing.
  • Two-Page Spread Navigation - The Studio interface now shows a two-up spread view with a page navigator. Navigation controls are also improved.
  • Undo/Redo - Single-action undo/redo functionality is now available.

  • New Studio Cookbook themes with page numbering and a table of contents. After trying out these new themes for myself, it was really hard to  describe just how much these themes have improved Cookbook design and made it easier  to publish a book of recipes. If you’re looking for a unique personalized holiday you really need to check this out for yourself.

Price Changes – As you may recall back in September, Bob Young, Lulu’s founder and CEO announced some Price Changes to Lulu’s product catalog. With the rise in cost of raw materials, freight and shipping, we have made a number of adjustments to production and shipping costs.   If you’re interested in how these increases may affect you,  please check out the newly updated Lulu Book Cost Calculator which has now been updated to reflect these price changes:

If you’d like to learn more about recent changes on our site, please check out the Developer’s Log in the Lulu forums for more details.

Regards,
Adam

by Adam Guida
August 21, 2008
Comments (4)

What’s new with Lulu Studio™ Photo Books and Calendars

In New Features — Tagged: ,

We’ve recently added several exciting new enhancements to Lulu Studio™ for both Photo book and Calendar publishing. Most of these changes are aimed at adding greater flexibility and options for customization as well as making the Studio easier to use. Here’s a look at what’s new:

Reordering pages – With a click and a drag of your mouse, you can now move and reorder individual pages to appear exactly where you want them to inside your book. Simply click on the “Reorder Pages” button in the lower portion of the Studio™ to pull up the page editor. Then, click and drag the page thumbnail to reorder that page within your book or calendar.

Autofill Pictures - Along side the new page reordering feature there is also a handy time-saving Autofill button that will allow you to pre-populate your book with the photos you’ve added to your project. From my own experience, this tool can be especially useful when used in combination with the page reordering function, especially if your book contains a lot of photos.

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by Adam Guida
June 24, 2008
Comments (10)

A couple recent happenings here at Lulu…

In New Features — Tagged: , , , , , ,
  • Free ISBNS and Expanded eligibility – Did I stutter? No, seriously! For a limited time only we are offering our PBL (Published By Lulu) ISBN service w/ retail distribution, free of charge! Click here for more details.

In addition, we’ve also just recently introduced a new expanded eligibility plan for distribution which should allow more published content into our distribution programs than ever before. Check to see if your book is eligible and sign up today!

  • Lulu users in the UK will be pleased to learn that we’ve expanded our payment options to allow payments using the Visa Electron in £ (GBP). In the coming months, we hope to offer even more payment options in both £ Pounds Sterling as well as the € Euro.
  • For Photo book creators we’ve expanded on some image editing features in the Lulu Studio™ allowing users to rotate the angle of their images within a photo book. If your digital photos were taken at an angle that prevents them from displaying right side up, simply hover your mouse over the image to display a “rotate” icon which will allow you to rotate your image 90 degrees at a time.

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Lulu Studio now allows you to rotate imageswithin your photo book.

 

  • Flash Previews are now available for Lulu Studio™. We’re happy to announce that we are able to offer the same Flash-based previews for Lulu Studio photo books that we offer for our full line of book products.

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  • Lulu’s Community Homepage has had a bit of a makeover. While aside from appearance, not a whole lot has changed, we think you’ll find the new layout much more appealing and user-friendly.

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Additional release notes and other fixes have also been posted here in the forums.

-Adam

by Adam Guida
March 18, 2008
Comments (2)

A look at some new features on Lulu

In Lulu News — Tagged: , , ,

Last night Lulu released several changes to the site, introducing some interesting new features, enhancements and fixes. Here’s the scope:

Lulu’s Homepage

If you haven’t noticed already, much of Lulu’s homepage and marketplace has undergone quite a facelift.

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Lulu Marketplace, and Featured Content

With more and more unique, extraordinary, interesting, or just plain unusual content being published on Lulu every day, it’s about time a small portion of it gets the recognition it deserves. In the recent changes we’ve made to Lulu, a greater emphasis has been made to highlight and feature a small portion of what we consider as some of best content in Lulu’s marketplace.

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With so much great content out there, choosing the features for our marketplace can be quite challenge. But don’t take my word for it. To view some of this great content yourself, check out Lulu’s Buy page to access the Lulu Marketplace. You never know what you’ll find.

Bringing back an old classic – The Services tab is back on Lulu

We understand that each author has different needs, each facing their own unique set of challenges. Everyone, regardless of their skill level could use some extra help from time to time, and whether it’s just about seeking some professional advice, editing your manuscript, designing an eye-catching cover, or simplygetting your book into electronic form, Lulu provides a wide variety of services tailored to suit your needs.

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In addition to the tried and true distribution services we offer such as “Published By Lulu” and “Published By You” which helps get your book into online bookstores, or the free marketing tools that serve a wide variety of the do-it-yourself authors, Lulu offers a wide variety of individual services in pre-publishing, marketing, and distribution. Here are just a few of the new service offerings available on Lulu. Please note that many of these services are only available in the United States.

  • PDF Conversion – Takes the guesswork out of converting your manuscript to digital PDF format for print on demand.

And much, much more…

For increased value, Lulu also offers heavily discounted bundled service packages which include a number of individual services starting at just $300.00.

And don’t forget, Lulu still offers a wide variety of high quality publishing services provided by our official Lulu Service providers. For more details please check out of Services page.

Distribution – 40% off revision fees for PBY and PBL books

Those of you who have a distribution package associated to your book will be happy to know that the cost ofrevision fees for books in distribution just got cheaper! Revisions to books with Published By You or Published By Lulu distribution are now only $49.95.

Lulu Celebrates the The National Cherry Blossom Festival

The National Cherry Blossom Festival, taking place in Washington, DC is just around the corner. To celebrate this occasion, Lulu has created a new theme for our Lulu Studio™ Photobooks.

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Celebrate the occasion by creating and sharing your own Photobook on Lulu.

As always, we hope that you like what’s going on at Lulu. Please let us know what you think about these new changes by commenting in Lulu’s Community Forums.

Regards,

Adam

by Adam Guida
January 25, 2008
Comments (2)

New Release: Calendar BETA and Flash Previews

In Lulu News —

Lulu Studio™ Calendars BETA

Lulu is proud to announce a whole new way to produce your custom-made calendars online with the all new Lulu Studio™ Calendars BETA

For those of you new to Lulu, back in November we introduced a new and innovative process for publishing professional quality Photo Books on the web which we call Lulu Studio™ for Photo Books. Taking a similar approach, we’ve taken the Lulu Studio™ application and applied it to Calendars, adding some additional improvements:

“Lulu Studio Calendars offer a choice of 9 attractive themes as well as a number of different templates to suit virtually any collection of images. To give your calendar that personal touch, you can upload your own images for your calendar, or, using our partnerships with Getty and Colligate Images, purchase professional images from our huge image library for the cover and interior of your calendar.”

Please bear in mind that with introduction of any “BETA” feature on Lulu, this is the start of something new for us. As such, we acknowledge that some features may not work as expected for everyone (though, we’ve done are best to prevent that from happening for the majority of our users). With this in mind, we are continuing to offer the original Calendar publishing wizard on Lulu which you can select when creating a new calendar project.

To get started creating a new Lulu Studio™ Calendar wizard, click here or select “Calendar” from the options available above on the Publish tab.

Flash previews for newly published books and documents

Awhile back we announced the introduction of Flash-based previews available on the public display pages for newly published content. Unfortunately, the wide variety of material published through Lulu and the different ways users interact with it posed several challenges for us we had not initially anticipated. And so, at the time we formerly announced this feature, we were unable to provide a consistent experience for everyone and for consistency we were forced to revert back to the original design. As of today however, thanks to the hard work of several of our very talented developers, we are happy to announce this functionality is ready for everyone as of today!

Books and documents will now have high-resolution Flash-based previews. These previews are now integrated into the content pages, allowing shoppers to peruse books immediately.

The new embedded preview functionality is available for newly published print content only. And if offering a preview for your content simply isn’t the right choice for you, you can easily turn off this feature in the preview settings for your book. Please also note that previews associated to previously published content have not been altered.

Finally, as part of this release we’ve also included several tweaks and bug fixes throughout the site, for a full list changes included with these new features please be sure to check out the latest release notes in the Developer’s Log.

We invite you to try these new features and tell us what you think. Please post your questions and comments in our forums here.

Regards,
Adam Guida