Seriously. When they made it impossible to search for lulu books at Lulu.com I was a bit annoyed. When they decimated the forums and Bob-the-Founder decided to imply anyone voicing criticisms was some kind of corporate spy, well, whatever. When they described me as a "forum mainstay" a month after I public quit the forum for good, and deleted my comment correcting that description... Oy. And buying notorious scam site Poetry.com? Well. None of these things are major issues.
I stopped buying from them at that point but still thought they were basically okay as a supported self-publishing service. When they published private or retired books to Amazon, and when they crashed their customers Amazon pages, I started to get a bit worried about their underlying competence for the first time. Reports of books not arriving, arriving defective or just being the wrong books seem to be increasing. Shipping costs have gone through the roof at the same time.
As of yet I have never found an ironclad case of royalties not being paid in full and on time--their last remaining virtue? But do they really have to go that far before their reputation gets seriously muddied? At what point is enough enough and Lulu's public status has to go from 'going through a rough patch' to 'circling the drain'?
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Step away from the Lulu! The rest of us have. She never calls. She never writes. It's time to move on.
I just hope no one buys that book. It's an embarrassment now that I know so much more than I did four years ago.