Thalasar Ventures

In my previous post I covered where to buy wholesale merchandise below cost and how this can give a entrepreneur and advantage. This post is how Lulu.com can give another advantage – and that’s in custom published products.

Competing in a world dominated by big box retailers is difficult. While closeouts and liquidations offer one avenue for success another route is to create value in having a unique product to sell. Lulu.com isn’t a vanity press. Instead it is a print on demand publisher, coupled with an online marketplace. Creating your own book, ebook, DVD or even educational video is a time consuming process but it provides you with some great advantages. Your original content can then be merchandised across multiple sales channels with Lulu.com handling the hard work of fulfillment, order taking and customer service.

You own the copyright
That means you can experiment with different distribution methods, vary the price point and try other channels of distribution. Retaining ownership of your copyright means you ultimately control the product.
Lulu.com features a marketplace.
This automatically gives you a distribution channel for the work. You don’t have to worry about building a website to sell the product since, Lulu.com provides a marketplace. This makes things far easier for both marketing and fulfillment. Your product once it is set up at Lulu.com, immediately has potential customers for it.
Lulu.com handles all the hard stuff
A friend of mine investigated setting up a print on demand company (His imprint was going to be Singleton-Price). It is incredibly complicated and expensive. Lulu.com handles both product creation and distribution. There is no set-up fee and no minimum order to publish and sell on Lulu. They manage the online business, including printing, delivery and customer service. This is a huge barrier for most people looking to self publish. They usually do the minimum print run and then have to market the materials, fulfill the orders themselves, build a web site to take orders. In other words, Lulu.com allows you to focus on creating quality content and then marketing your product. In other words they handle the hard, painful stuff.

Lulu.com is a trustworthy company
The company was founded by one of the founders of Red Hat Software, Bob Young. With a strong belief in open source software and transparency, Lulu.com puts authors in charge of their publishing careers. It is Bob’s attempt to change the way the current publishing paradigm works.