Lulu xPress Review: What's It All About?
As we mentioned before, printing a book used to be a huge hassle. Therefore, many print on demand companies have surfaced to offer quicker turnaround times and lower minimums for the number of books you order.
That being said, many of the alternatives to Lulu xPress still stick you with some sort of minimum. So, you might end up having to order 100, 200, or 1,000 books. Some of those lower numbers aren't that bad, but Lulu xPress takes it to the next level by shipping out every single one of your book orders one by one.
Here's how it works
A writer signs up for a Lulu xPress account and begins uploading their document files. Lulu xPress offers some solid formatting and book creation tools to make sure that everything looks okay before the items get sold. Although it doesn't seem like you can link this directly to an ecommerce platform (like dropshipping would allow) all you have to do is place your order on the Lulu xPress website, then it gets processed and sent out to you or the customer.
So essentially, you would have to build a website with a reputable ecommerce platform like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Volusion, collect the orders through that ecommerce platform, then jump to the Lulu xPress website to let that company no when orders have come through.
Lulu xPress Review: The Features
Most of the features from Lulu xPress are provided through the pricing calculator and the integrated printing process.
However these are some of the areas that we have really come to enjoy:
- Global fulfillment to over 150 countries all around the world. This includes the ability to accept payment using multiple currencies.
- Beautiful prints and flexible formats that you can play around with to figure out exactly how your book will be presented to customers.
- A seamless pricing and printing process that is all managed through your own dashboard.
- A printing and shipping process that takes around 3 to 5 business days to complete. This depends on the type of shipping you choose, but Lulu xPress seems extremely fast in terms of its turnaround.
Other than that, you can also choose from some of the product types:
- Multiple book sizes such as Executive, Digest, and US Trade.
- Multiple book bindings such as perfect bound and coil bound.
- Several print qualities such as regular black-and-white and standard color.
- Lots of paper types such as cream and white coated and uncoated.
- You can also choose from several templates so that your books are preformatted and ready to print.
Lulu xPress: The Pricing
The pricing for Lulu xPress isn't exactly simple, but that's because they offer a wide variety of prints, formats, and even calendars for you to choose from. This means that you're going to have to choose product specifications, the number of pages, and paper types before you receive a pricing quote.
Having said that, Lulu xPress has a wonderful pricing calculator on its website to ensure that you know what your books are going to cost before selling them. This way, you can set your margins to get the most out of your sales.
In a moment, we will walk through a few examples with the booking price calculator, but we wanted to make a few things clear:
- Lulu xPress doesn't have any monthly fees.
- Lulu xPress doesn't seem to have any hidden fees either.
- All of the shipping costs are shown to you so that you can factor these into your own rates.
- It doesn't look like Lulu xPress offers any type of free trial, but this isn't necessary because there is no payment to start off with.
- Lulu xPress doesn't have any book sale minimums, so you're not committing to any upfront costs at all.
Now, let's walk through an example of the pricing calculator by typing in information about a mock book I want to upload and sell:
I'm going to choose my project type to start off. The only two options are books and calendars, so for this example, it makes sense that I'm going to go with the book.
The next field you have to fill in is called Trim Size. By default, the website has US Trade (6 x 9″/154 x 229mm) selected. However, I currently count about 14 other trim sizes such as Executive, US Letter, and Pocketbook.
For this example, I'm going with the default of US Trade.
Shipping Costs
It's also important to consider shipping in your overall cost. A shipping cost calculator is also included on the website, where you can type in the number of copies you plan on ordering. After that, you specify the country in which are shipping to and then choose the shipping method.
For this tutorial, I selected that one copy be sent to a location in the United States. That revealed all of my shipping methods, of which I chose the cheapest and slowest one. That added $3.99 to my overall cost. The overall shipping cost goes up as you add more copies, but the per copy shipping rate goes down. You also get some volume discounts added as you reach those thresholds we discussed.
Once all of this is said and done you can click on the Create Your Book button to proceed with the creation process.
