As I related before an issue came up with the PoD via Lulu. Nothing wrong with the quality or the speed at which books arrived but it turns out that A4 printing is much, much cheaper (three quid cheaper in a typical case for me) than printing in US Letter format.
Initially they told me this shouldn’t be the case and that they’d look into it for me. That it was obviously wrong and that they’d check the site. They said they’d get back to me on that information.
This took some time and a great deal of badgering but eventually I got a rather brusque and short note from ‘Tracey M’ at Lulu telling me that the reason for the excessive price of the US Letter (American Quarto) format was due to its ‘popularity’. This made little sense to me and was horribly counter-intuitive, not to mention that I’d already been told that there shouldn’t have been such a huge price difference. Undeterred and quite angry by this point I pressed the issue and got yet more assurances of information and an undertaking that I would get a partial refund, both from the live chat/help operatives and from a ‘Brad Tilley’ working there.
I also got phoned – I forget the name of the person involved for the moment – and had a long conversation about the issue where it was admitted that there could be a lot more done to prevent such happening in the future and I gleaned the information that the price change had happened in May and was a result of the popularity of the A4 format… which, of course, made a complete nonsense of what ‘Tracey M’ had told me previously.
I was fairly pleased at this point since I had been promised a partial refund (20%), they recognised there was a problem and had undertaken to either a) fix it to have things more on parity or b) make the difference more obvious.
This was not to be though, I’m now given to understand that they ‘can’t’ apply the discount to my existing order, due to me using an existing discount when I ordered that collection of books. ‘Can’t’ is, of course, code language for ‘won’t’. I am now left with a great deal of work to do in reformatting, re-outputting and re-uploading every single one of my existing PoD books to A4. A lot of time that would be far better spent working on new products.
I am not a happy bunny.
Despite that, Lulu is still the best option. Their system is fussless and free to upload, with the lowered A4 book prices the profits for doing PoD are far more managable and their customer service, despite all these problems, contradictions and so forth, still beats the hell out of Lightningsource’s lower quality output, high costs for setup and incredibly finicky demands for file submission.
If the case were any different I might well be looking for a new PoD supplier about now.
Dis.
Chuffed.
Postmortem Studios 