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Whenever I do a search on lulu.com for “Space: 1999”, I only ever see Born For Adversity and Prentis Hancock’s foreword to ‘The Forsaken’ in the results.
Is there some reason most Powys Media books aren’t visible through their website?
This is a really good question. I went and tried different permutations of Space:1999 with and without spaces after the colon, etc., just to see if it was some kind of glitch you had encountered. The only thing I can think of is that Lulu might on-demand as well as having a backstock of some things. This is absolutely pure speculation, but they do have a range of services. If you go through this site and click on, for example, Prodigal Moon, it is orderable (clearly not a real word according to spell check, but you know what I mean), yet Prodigal Moon does not show up at Lulu. I would guess that Mateo has a deal that is actual on-demand printing only, aside from Born for Adversity for some reason. The fact that they print a PDF exactly as you send it (which I have recently encountered) supports this somewhat. No adjustment of margins, no checking for proper pagination… they just printed what was sent. Probably less expensive this way.
P.
Way back when Mr. Latosa and I had to come up with a business plan that would somehow make this company work as a company. Because we weren’t sure of the size of the Space:1999 market, we had to be really careful not to spend a bunch of money going in to print copies of books that would never be sold. Over the years, with print on demand, that issue has diminished significantly — we really don’t need to worry about printing up an inventory anymore.
However, there’s more to the publishing business than just having books. You may wonder why you can get some books, like “Born for Adversity” on Amazon.com but not other books, lke “Shepherd Moon”.
Well, as you might imagine, Amazon and other online retailers take a nice big chunk of the profits. So when we had printed books, we used to wait until they’d actually paid for themselves (i.e., turned a profit) before we ever went to Amazon. Why?
Amazon has a very wide reach from a marketing perspective. It’s a great way to let people know about the Powys Media books. But it also diminishes the profits when you sell the books through Amazon.
You can probably see where I’m going. Born for Adversity brings people to the Powys site, where we maximize our minimal profits (and get to stay in business as a result).
Sales through lulu.com happen when we release a book to the wider audience (like Amazon). Our goal is always to bring people to the Powys site — that’s really how we make money. So you can’t find many Powys books on lulu.com — only through this site. Some of the older books, like the reprints, we let them go out to Amazon pretty quickly because they help bring in new potential shoppers.
hmm. well, that didn’t quite answer the whole question, for me at least, as I never quite understood why lulu searching was completely useless.
(I fully understand why something isn’t available on Amazon, as they take a big chunk of the money from the sale).
But how would the titles not being searchable on Lulu be a benefit, since they are the place that actually sells the books. Or is it that a purchase via a click-through from the Powys website to Lulu will net a slightly higher profit than a sale done strictly on Lulu?
Powys still has books like Survival, Year Two and the Resurrection audiobook available on the Powys site. These are not available via Lulu (although Survival is available through Amazon.com). Every person who checks the Powys site–especially new readers–is a potential sale of one of these older titles.
And they get clued into the existence of JKM’s THe House Between, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, and TKU’s music releases (yeah, I know, I chuckle at that too).
😛
Thanks for the replies, Bill and Mateo. I understand the general strategy, but I’m still not clear why all the post-Lulu titles aren’t listed on Lulu, unless doing so means you lose a chuck of the sales somehow. Seems to me having a few more titles “out in the wild” would increase the chance that new fans will find their way here.
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