Today I read the article ‘Lulu Borked Their Platform in the April Update, and It’s Still Not Fixed’:
The publishing services provider Lulu has been in something of a tizzy these past few months. The company updated its platform on April as part of launching its new services marketplace, and things did not turn out as planned.
There hasn’t been much discussion in the FB groups or author forums I frequent (I actually heard about this third-hand) but apparently the update broke, basically everything. Multiple authors have reported:
lost sales,
lost books,
lost covers,
lost projects, and
lost accounts.Lulu informed authors on its FB page on 12 June that the issues are being fixed on an ongoing basis, and also telling authors that all revenue since the end of April has been reported. What is especially scary about that is that there are authors who have recorded no sales since the April update, so it would appear that they have had no sales through Lulu for the past couple months.
Lulu also posted a link to a Google form you can use to submit support tickets for the more common problems, including:
missing or incorrect cover thumbnails,
missing projects,
unable to download files,
unable to Add to Cart, orpreviously approved projects incorrectly requiring proof purchase. I know I have a well-earned reputation for being melodramatic but I do not think I am exaggerating too much when I say that this looks to be the worst system update since the PennCentral merger.
If you are one of the authors or publishers who was affected by the borked update, now might be a good time to locate the exit.
The above was written a couple of months ago and Lulu still hasn’t solved its problems. Today I tried several times to download the August 2020 revised file of The Fair Race and always got error messages.
As soon as either Lulu fixes its problem or I find another platform so that hard copies of The Fair Race are again available, I’ll notify it in another post.