CafePress.com vs. LuLu pros and cons

[Seth M. Drebitko]

So I have decided to do a little comparison of Cafe Press and LuLu to point out some pros and cons I have been pondering and get some feed back from people on their opinions. To start things of I will go over every ones most immediate concern, the price. For each example I will use a 300 page black and white book, and assume that the writer is marking the book up at .05 cents per page for himself.

LuLu Charges
$4.53 for binding fees
.02 cents per page
20% commission on your mark up.
Given our example and the following info your book will cost:
$10.54 plus $3 commission (on your $15 mark up) leaving you with a book that costs the customer $25.54 and makes you make $12

Cafe Press Charges
$7  for binding fees
.03 cents per page
Given our example and the following info your book will cost:
$16 plus your $15 mark up leaves us with a $31 product

So in our first example LuLu beats out Cafe Press by a staggering $5.46 but lets take a closer look.

There are some things to consider here:
1. Your $15 profit became $12 with LuLu to bring it back up to $14.4 profit your book price is going to have to be, $28.54.
2. Assuming your book has art in it (which most rpg's will) and you have the artists permission to use that art on merchandise this can b a quick add to your cafe press shop on the same page as your book and net you some extra income on the book.
3. If you don't mind losing the 20% and have the artists permission you could lower the price of your book on Cafe Press in this case by $3 making the cost of your book only $2.46 away from the LuLu option.

Well that’s about all I have for the most part I hope this helps a bit in the decision making of new publishers (or old) I figuring every thing out has got me thinking. Obviously going through Cafe Press would only be a profitable option if you were selling merchandise through for the game as well.
I would like other peoples opinions on this or maybe some one has tried going through Cafe Press in this way and could share a story good or bad.
Regards, Seth

[iago]

My experience with CafePress printing is somewhat dated, but my experience with Lulu's is very current.

I wasn't impressed with CafePress's printing back in the day.  It was okay, but it wasn't exceptional.

Lulu's is pretty consistently strong, and when I've run into problems, their customer service frankly beats the pants off of all other POD customer service experiences (at least as far as I've learned from asking many other publishers about their experiences with various POD providers).

While I dig what you're saying about cross-selling other cafe press merch with my print product, I can always have a cafepress store AND a lulu store, right?  It's not that hard to put in HTML that links the two storefronts to each other as seperate-but-related pages, so the cross-sell shouldn't be that tough.  Yes, it does mean two seperate shipping experiences and all that, but that's a pain I can handle.

[Seth M. Drebitko]

Apologies I forgot to factor shipping as cafe press charges $5 flat fee, and $7 international where as lulu charges $7.64 costing more than cafe press does for international. With shipping factored in the cost for cafe press factoring out your 20% loss from lulu is a bit cheaper.

The above aside iago I am interested in how you factor the 20% commission on lulu's part into your book prices?

[iago]

Apologies I forgot to factor shipping as cafe press charges $5 flat fee, and $7 international where as lulu charges $7.64 costing more than cafe press does for international. With shipping factored in the cost for cafe press factoring out your 20% loss from lulu is a bit cheaper.

The above aside iago I am interested in how you factor the 20% commission on lulu's part into your book prices?

I don't.

Here's the thing:

I can sell it print on demand at Lulu, and eat that 20% commission to them.  This is fine; it is to some extent a cost of doing biz and I'm okay with that.

Or I can buy it at cost, not paying that commission, and send it over to stock up Indie Press Revolution.  If I buy in bulk, the base price of printing the book drops -- with Spirit of the Century, I've tended to print it in runs sized to about 200 copies, which drops several dollars off the printing cost.  IPR then sells those books for me, taking a 15% cut... but since I price SOTC at $30, I eat domestic free shipping, and I had to pay for the shipping to get the book to IPR, so that tends to eat up most of the savings from the bulk discount base price drop and the extra 5% of Lulu's commission.

Which gets back to that whole "I see that 20% as the cost of doing biz".

[Clinton R. Nixon]

How Fred does it is how I go about this, too. I haven't weighed in to compare Lulu with Cafe Press because (disclosure!) I'm a Lulu employee, but I make the same per book when I sell through IPR because of the bulk discount I get when I order multiple copies through Lulu. If I buy 50 copies at a time, I usually end up with the same $/book.

Lulu's shipping is somewhat high, which is why I direct customers to IPR, as I'd rather eat shipping than have them pay it.

[JoystickJunkies]

I think LULU is only in the US - does anyone know of a similar service covering europe - it would be a pain for european buyers to have to pay shipping on books everytime

cheers
Chris

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Lulu's got printing facilities in the UK and in Spain - that's where non-US orders are generally printed and shipped from.

[xenopulse]

They have pages in different languages, too, for example http://www.lulu.com/de for the German version.

[Seth M. Drebitko]

Thanks for the input I think in the end I will use both services. I may set a cart system up on my own site and try and take in most of my orders from my site then process the orders through the two separate companies using them as more of a fulfillment service. I think the extra time spent processing things will pay off with more cross sales in the end.

Thanks again for the help,
Regards, Seth