Share an idea or suggestion for how to improve the Lulu self-publishing experience. You can also show your support for previous recommendations by assigning a star rating.
You must be a registered member of the Lulu Community to participate in the Ideas forum. Please review our community forum policies and guidelines before posting.
If you can't find what you are looking for in our knowledge base or community forums, please visit our Support Page to email or chat live with our Lulu Support Staff.
With the old storefronts, we could put all the books on
the page in the order we want them. Now we don't have that option with the new
storefront. I write a lot of series' and I want all my series books to be
listed together. Can't you put that option back? I really don't like that these
just come up my rating or relevance (whatever that means), whatever. I
preferred to choose how they come up. The new spotlight pages are very
inflexible...although I admit I like it better than the old. I just wish it was
more customizable.
Karen Wiesner
My Author Spotlight has 25 pages, and I doubt if anyone, including me, is willing to click through 25 pages.
How about adding an option of "List All Books" to the sorting options of "Relevance," etc.?
All the book would come up on one page, preferably in an order that the author or publisher specifies.
In other words, it would be like the one-page Storefront I had before Lulu changed things.
David Bruce
Following David Woodward, I post this suggestion also here. It was posted in an other discussion and had 8 kudos there.
- I would like have tabs. So, my (and lulu's) client can find easyly the books.
-- First standard tab would be "New" (Nouveautés, Neuheiten): max one page, the newest ones.
-- A second standard tab would be "Bestsellers": all books sold at least for one time, the most wanted on the top.
-- I can tag my existing and new books with up to five tags. This tags appears as Tabs. If I am a publisher, such a tab can be the name of an author with some books or for different series, ... . Or as an author I write novels and children books. ....
This suggestion is important for everyone who has more books on Lulu as appears on one page.
As part of the spotlight, could Lulu allow a listing of all book titles, perhaps under the author profile. The listing would be in any order the author or publisher prefers, thus allowing books to be listed under the name of a series. Along with each book title would be links to print, pdf, or ePub--whatever format(s) the book is available in. That way, the customer can scan the list of titles, then click on a series title or book title and the relevant book(s) would appear in the spotlight. That would keep customers from having to keep on clicking on page after page for those authors or publishers who have many books for sale. Right now, the spotlight is good for authors who have very few books for sale, but bad for authors/publishers who have many books for sale.
David Bruce
The old Storefront page was so clear and simple - one cover picture per book title with print or download options to click on. The new Spotlight page is terrible, especially if you have more than one book for sale. I have thirteen book titles, and now that they are available as print, EPUB and EPDF, instead of having one page with my different titles clearly shown with their different formats on one page, I now have five pages, with the different formats of my books spread out all over the place. My Spotlight page is totally confusing, and if I were a customer thinking of buying one of my books, I think I'd give up just trying to sort through all the mess. Lulu will sell fewer books unless they simplify the Spotlight page, and make the format like the old Storefront page which worked perfectly. Why should something that worked be changed into something that doesn't? That's not progress.
Following David Woodward, I post this suggestion also here. It was posted in an other discussion and had 5 kudos there.
- It should be possible to replace the Name by apicture (image banner) with the compnay name (The text can still be behind for search engine and if the picture is not loaded) .
Dear Lulu,
At the moment, there appears to be little moderation on the forums. A cursory glance today at some new posts revealed a few rude, arrogant remarks made from one poster to another. Although it did not involve me at all I was tempted to enter the particular thread and point out the inappropriateness of the remarks, but having done that already on previous threads, I have a gut feeling that I would slide down the slippery slope of wasting my time attempting to moderate something that shouldnt be my responsibility.
I notice you use Lithium as the software to provide your forums. I do not know what priviliges they give moderators but I used to be a moderator at a retro gaming forum which uses the PHPBB software. When I look at each post on my forum, I have special icons only I can see on each post, allowing me to edit, delete, lock the thread, unlock it, compare ip addresses, issue a warning, send the post to a global moderator for further advice etc.
. If Lithium provides this then those options are being underused. I know you often lock threads but there is nothing wrong with simply deleting the offending post or editing it (adding a note to the community to make them aware of the changes).
So basically, I do appreciate that being a forum moderator is an unpaid, thankless job at times, but you *do* need more. I notice there is no activity on weekends either, none that I have noticed anyway, of the presence of moderators. Like most people who moderate forums, I too have a full time job, but would still gladly offer to help out here nevertheless, and could easly give an hour or two a day.
Many who come to Lulu have no idea of what Lulu do, what they use to do it, and what the subsriber/creator has to do on their part.
Can we not have an easy to navigate to 'Educational' area full of things such as >>>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q946sfGLxm4
And this >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_on_demand
And even make this area plainer >> http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Discuss/tkbc-p/forums_k
(Amazes me how people miss that, but they do!)
Please bring back the option to view revenue earned per book rather than per author. I have many many authors in my account and my own name is listed separately several times. It is next to impossible to keep track of which book and who sold what. I need to be able to see this information daily without having to click through 50 names.
Even author names of private projects are listed, as well as mock names for practice projects.
There has to be a better system than this. At the very least, allow me the option to sort them alphabetically that way all my "Maggies" will show lumped together instead of scattered.
I would like to get busy again with my own publishing. I need a better system please.
Thank you.
Following David Woodward, I post this suggestion also here. It was posted in an other discussion and had 8 kudos there.
Profile name: it should by changeable. As a publisher, not an author, the site defaults to my name in the profile section, where I want it to read my company's name.
Following David Woodward, I post this suggestion also here. It was posted in an other discussion and had 5 kudos there.
- It should be possible to ad more and different fields in the columns left and right of the book section; not only one picture, one film, some links and the profile:
-- more then one text fields (free text)
-- include titles from a RSS feed
-- a counter (maybe also for each book)
shown in red in the picture
I would love to publish my novel on paper that has the look of an old manuscript in certain parts of the paperback or hardback. Paper gradients (dog-eared, worn, tattered) would give us a nice option to push our ideas further and creatively. A slight discoloration or choice in colored paper would also be exciting to work with. Thanks for your service!
Please make it possible to for us sort the books on display in our new Author's Spotlight book store individually.
I have many books, of different importance in my eyes, and I want to sort them as I see fit, as I did before in the Storefront model.
Thanks!
.
- It would be really useful if we could set discount codes to allow selected resellers and institutions to order directly from Lulu. Not to mention promotional sales.
- Right now, the only way I see to do this is to create a duplicate book with restricted access, which is a wee-bit clunky.
.
I recently revised a project, the new publishing file just had a few ammendments to the layout. Content is exactly the same.
In the process of revising my project I lost the only customer review I had which was a 5 star review.
I think it would be helpful not to retire customer reviews when a project is updated, now it looks as though no one has purchased my book.
Should be placed so they are the first thing people see when they click Connect, plus they should be placed stuck to the top of every forum section, then people who seem to randomly visit random sections of Connect, etc, to moan about 'surprise' changes can see them ... ![]()
What would be ideal is if they were actually e-mailed out! (Or do Lulu not split creators from buyers in their mailing list?)
I would like to arrange the 26 book titles as I like them, as we could before
Can old threads in the forums not be removed or at least blocked from further replies? Even archiving them is usually pointless.
I say removed because the advice in them can be out of date very fast, and some of the threads go back years!
I suggest blocked from further replies if you cannot remove them, because people replying to postings months or years old is just as pointless.
Perhaps make the dates on them more obvious if you cannot do the above, then perhaps people may notice that they are replying to a posting years old, so they may realise they are wasting their time. ![]()
Is it possible to allow users to run the Cover Design Wizard independently of starting a new project?
I would like to create a new cover but don't want to go through the whole process of editing or starting a new project first.
For context, see the following thread on the general discussion board:
http://connect.lulu.com/t5/General-Discussions/Boo
It turns out that a written book review, as opposed to a simple star rating, is only posted on the site selected by the viewer at the bottom of each product page. Thus, if a person is viewing the U.K. site, and posts a review (in English), it only appears on the U.K. site, not on the U.S. site, nor on any of the other language sites.
Similarly, those in the U.K. can't see the U.S. reviews. I don't know what those in Aus/NZ see; probably depends upon which of the two sites their computers select by default.
This would be particularly annoying to a U.K. citizen who publishes on Lulu, because their U.K. market would very likely never see any reviews posted on the U.S. site. Furthermore, an author might be completely unaware of the existance of a very damaging review on another site. If it was a U.K. author, and the damaging review was on the U.S. site, the author could be badly damaged by the review but have no knowledge even of what was happening to sales potential in the huge U.S. market.
And even if an English review shows up on the Spanish or French board, what's the harm. I have a website on which I advise people how to help struggling readers (in English), but I get international visitors daily, many of them from countries where English is not the official language. And even if someone in Spain posts a review, in Spanish, of an English author's product, the author should want to know that the review at least exists.
Please, consider making the following change: Cross post all written reviews to all sites, just as you currently do for your star ratings (which increment by one on all country sites no matter which site it's posted on originally.)
Thank you.
Rod Everson

