This YouTube tutorial (Julie Broad, Book Launchers) explains how authors can sell print books directly from their websites using Lulu Publishing. Chelsea Bennett (Lulu) describes two integration options — a Lulu Express Shopify app and a Lulu API — and walks through setup steps for Shopify. The video highlights benefits (keep more revenue, collect buyer contact data, no personal fulfillment), gives concrete pricing examples and revenue splits, and summarizes Lulu's print tiers and quality tips (including recommended 300 dpi images).
When you sell your book through Amazon or in a store, not only are you making less money per copy sold, but you're also not getting the contact information of the book buyer so you can build a relationship with them. But selling a book direct from your website is a pain. Collecting payment, taxes, shipping. If you want a simple way to sell your book on your website with minimal hassle, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will help you have a huge impact on your readers. And done right will help you grow your brand, build your business and make you money. The best part, you keep all rights and royalties. Selling books from your website is a great way to make a few more dollars per copy sold and be able to connect more personally with the people who buy your book. But how can you do it simply and easily? Well, there's a few options, but one that I really recomm recommend is using Lulu. You can find them@lulu.com and the fabulous Chelsea Bennett from the Lulu team was kind enough to take a few minutes and share just how this works for authors with Lulu. But first, if you're not familiar with Lulu, I asked Chelsea to give you a little introduction to the company. Take it away, Chelsea.
If you're unfamiliar with Lulu, we are a self publishing and print on demand platform. So a great thing about Lulu is that we are completely free to use. You just bring your manuscript and cover, publish, print, and then you only have to pay when you want to buy print copies of your book. Another thing I always like to throw in there is that we're also a certified B corporation. So if you're not familiar what that means, B Corp certification is sort of like what organic certification is to milk. So it just means that a third party kind of comes in and makes sure we are transparent and committed to sustainability in everything that we do.
Lulu has great printing and if you have specialty color books in particular, I think they have a really great service. But one thing I didn't really know until Chelsea connected with me was that they have a really great way for authors to use Lulu to sell direct from their author websites. So that's what I'm going to have Chelsea explain to you right now.
We have created an app for Shopify that allows you to sell directly to your readers. You as the author, keep 100% of the revenue. You also get transactional data which can help build out your email list and help you market smarter for future books that you may be publishing. So, just as an example, if you are an author and you published a book on Lulu and you wanted to use our app for Shopify, or alternatively, we have an API as well that plugs you into our global print fulfillment network. So if you wanted to use either of those options, we'll say that the book that you publish on Lulu costs $5 to manufacture. That's what you're going to pay as the author. However, if you sell that book for $15 by selling it through your own website, you keep $10 of that profit. If you sell through the Lulu.com bookstore or if you use our distribution options and go through Amazon, we're going to take our cut. Amazon, obviously is going to take their cut. So selling through the Lulu bookstore, there's an 8020 revenue split. So that $10 of profit that I just spoke of would turn out to be eight if you sold through the lulu.com bookstore. So we're going to take 20%. You get the 80.
Okay, check this out. Just head on over to Lulu and you get the instructions right here. And then you're going to set up a Shopify account. After you log into your Shopify account from your store dashboard, you're going to access the App Store from the link on the left menu. From here, search for Lulu Express and add the app. With the Lulu Express app installed, select Lulu Express and complete the login registration process to access the app. Once the app is installed, you'll be able to create a book project. You upload the files, set a price and a shipping cost, and sell your book without ever leaving that Shopify dashboard. If you are more sophisticated or you have a web developer and you already have a business in place for selling products on your website, then you can also use their API, which, just so you know, API is short for Application Program Interface. And that's really just code for instructions to have two software programs connect and speak to each other. Clearly, I'm not a coder either, so that's how I explain it. But for someone with basic coding knowledge, APIs are usually pretty straightforward to implement. So setting up the ability to sell books on your website gets you the contact information for your buyer. You keep more money per book, and you're also not doing any shipping. When you use Lulu, you're not the fulfillment house of these books. Lulu is. So I think that's really valuable. And bonus points because you don't have to try to calculate and remit taxes for a bunch of different locations when you do this because sales tax is handled through Shopify for orders that customers place in their store. If the author doesn't want to pay taxes on the Lulu orders, they provide a reseller certificate and Lulu can stop collecting taxes from them. That's a real load off your shoulders for folks thinking of selling books on their website. Now, before Chelsea finishes for today, I did ask her to explain a little bit about the printing options at Lulu. Because some of you looking for specialty books or even the option to sell full color versions of your book from your website, Lulu could be a great option with when you combine it with the Shopify store option we just talked about. So Chelsea, tell us about your printing at Lulu.
We have four different tiers of print. So we'll do our standard black and white, premium black and white, standard color, and then premium color. This can be really nice because authors across the spectrum who may have just a few color images or illustrations in their book can choose the standard and get some really beautiful high color and high quality images for a lower price point. And then those authors who may have photo books or full color books that they need to have illustrated or colored or really heavy saturation, then you can choose the premium which is going to be a really, really nice representation of those photos. A couple things to note is both of These options have 60 pound or 80 pound coated paper available. So that can be great and really just depends on sort of what you're looking for with your outcome. Another thing that I'd like to drop in here, a quick pro tip. You want to use images that are at least 300 dpi and that's going to give you the best result.
Print quality at Lulu is great and that makes this a really good option for selling from your website or creating color picture books for special events or bulk runs and selling them on the Lulu Bookstore for our clients. We still recommend using KDP Print for selling to Amazon so you make the most money possible per copy sold. And we still use Ingram for the widest international distribution possible for print books. But more and more authors want to incorporate sales onto their website without the hassles. And Lulu really fills the gap in the market in a wonderful way with high quality books. If you want to learn more about all the things Lulu does, here's where Chelsea says you should go.
We have a lot of ways you can connect with us and I hope that you do. So lulu.com is our website. Please check us out if you'd like to follow us on social. We are lulu.com so l u l u D O T C O M.
All right, like this tip. Go ahead and hit that thumbs up button. It makes you feel good and it'll also make me and Chelsea feel good too. So go ahead, try it. Then stop by the comments and let me know what you think of this idea or how you currently sell books from your website. And when you comment, the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet book launcher swag. Like this no Boringbooks mug where coffee, tea and hot chocolate taste better in it. Or our oh so soft journal for writing down all your brilliant book ideas and even the not so brilliant ones too. Now that you know how to sell books from your website, you might be thinking your website probably needs a little work. So this video right here is all about creating a great author website. And this video right here is the latest and greatest from the channel in case you're not up to date either way, I'd really enjoy it if we could spend a little bit more time together today. So go ahead and choose one and I'll be waiting there for you.
