Obviously, one of the most important aspects of our site is our publishing process. Our wizard helps authors create a book from their digital files, and we want the system to be as easy to navigate as possible. With that in mind, we want your feedback on what we can do to improve the publishing process.

Can we improve the process for adding ISBNs to your book? Is the language used to explain the steps straight-forward enough? Let us know what you think!

 

As many of you are aware, we’ve temporarily removed the hit counter from our product pages. We recently discovered it had introduced a security vulnerability on our site, and are working hard to fix and bring back this popular tool. We would also like to offer other innovative and effective ways to help you analyze the effectiveness of your marketing, generate more traffic, and sell more books. As such, we want to hear from you. What statistics about your book or account would be helpful for you? What tools would best help you improve marketing impact?

Let us know what you’d be interested in seeing, and we’ll see what we can do!

 

For obvious reasons, we want the checkout process on Lulu to be as easy-to-use as possible, and we want to improve the experience for you and your readers. For example, one of the common questions we hear is that readers would like to be able to purchase books from us without signing up for an account. The problem is that if we don’t have contact information for you, then we cannot let you when an order has shipped or send you a record of the transaction. Reporting any issues with your order becomes harder as well.

That said, there may be ideas for how to make the process easier or even solutions for these issues that we haven’t thought of yet. Which is why we want to know what you think. What can we do to improve the checkout process?

 

At Lulu, we believe it’s important to provide as much information as possible in our Help section and to present the information in an easy-to-use way. To accomplish this we have video tutorials, community forums, and an extensive knowledgebase where creators can help each other. However, we also recognize that we can always do better. Part of this is reflected in our continued commitment to improve our customer service, but we also want to make our Help easy to navigate and as useful as possible.

We are already working on initiatives that allow us to easily pull useful threads that our community creates into Help and improve navigation, but we want to hear from you. How can we make Help more helpful?

 

One of the things that is most important to us at Lulu is giving our users a place to sell their content and highlight themselves. The author storefront is a place where you can easily display your creations, provide your readers with more information about you, and more! We want to make these storefronts as useful as possible to you, and so we are asking for your input on them. What can we do to improve our storefronts?

We’ve already gotten some feedback from you on what you want, and we are looking at how we can allow you to easily contact your readers so you can update them when you have new releases or need to give them information, and allowing you to generate your own coupons. Those features are still a ways off, but they are high on our priority list. What other features would you like to see? Modular sections of your storefront you can take with you to your personal website or blog? A search feature so it’s easy for your readers to find content if you have more than a few books? Let us know what would help you!

 

At Lulu, we believe that community reviews and word of mouth recognition help to expose more people to your work. If someone is debating over whether to spend money on your book or calendar, then a good understanding of what the book is like, and why other people liked it can help them decide. Furthermore, reviews can help you refine your work. If people are consistently praising your writing but mention some typos, then you know you need to do some more editing.

We want to give you the most out of the Ratings and Reviews experience on Lulu, and so this week we’re asking you – How Can We Improve The Ratings & Reviews On Lulu? Would you like to be able to review posts on the forums? Would it be helpful to see how knowledgable someone is? Would you like to be able to review a review, so others know how useful it was? Or if a book has 4 stars do you want to know how many people have rated the item 5 stars and how many have rated it 1?

Let us know what you think, so we can make our Ratings & Reviews as useful as possible.

 

The past few weeks we’ve been focusing on eBooks, and following your feedback we are looking into opportunities to develop an eBook product. We want to deliver a solid experience to you, and as a result, this week we want to know more about how you personally use eBooks.

We want to know what makes a good eBook experience for you and how we can try to make it even better. Do you currently purchase eBooks? If so, what device do you use? Where do you purchase them from? Please tell us what you like and what you hate about buying eBooks so we can try to make the experience as positive as possible for buyers.

 

Last week we asked you, “What Features Do You Need To Make Your eBook a Success”, and you gave us lots of excellent feedback. This week we want to dig into eBooks even more, and focus on how you want to use eBooks. Is your primary goal to gain exposure and attract new customers for your print editions (offer free or near-free ebooks as a marketing tool)?  Or, do you plan to create a lucrative new revenue stream by selling your ebook at a competitive price? Do you plan to market them as a green alternative?

Please tell us how you plan to use eBooks so that as we look at options we can try to deliver the experience you are looking for.

 

Today on Lulu we let our authors sell downloadable, unprotected PDFs, but we don’t offer a true eBook publishing option.  Many of you have told us you want your books available in as many marketable digital formats as possible. As a result, we’re investigating developing a better eBook publishing and distribution solution.

This week, we want to know: What features you need to make your eBook a success? Some examples include: licensing/copyright protection; publishing in popular eBook formats like ePub; support for downloading your book to popular devices like Sony Reader, iPhone, and Kindle.  Tell us more!

 

This month marks the beginning of calendar season, and so this week we want to know – what we can do to improve our calendar experience? One of the ideas we’re brainstorming is allowing buyers to add custom events, but what do you want to see us do?

We also want to remind you that if you already have a calendar it’s easy to update it to 2010. Simply log into your account, click revise, select the Properties tab, and change the start date to whenever you like. If you haven’t created a calendar before, then try it out and give us your feedback!