The Flower Girl Saves the Day

So, you may recall, that last winter, I hired an illustrator and created a children's book from a story I made up for my neice to give it to her as a Christmas present.

She loved it.

It turned out very well, and I'm quite happy with it. You can see a preview of it on Lulu.

Lulu offers a promotional program called Global Reach where you pay them a fee and they list your book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and "other retail sites."

I signed up a while back and they informed me it would take 6-8 weeks for my listing to show up.

Today, on a lark, I searched on Amazon and finally found it.

They listed it for $147.65. You know, the paperback book written by a no-name author and illustrated by some talented but not very well-known illustrators. Ummmm.... What?

Let's see, you can buy it directly from Lulu for $15. You'd think they'd pick a mark-up for Amazon that allowed them to clear the same margin or something a little higher. I would not think the mark-up would be around 1000%.

Unfortunately, I'm much too busy to do anything about this right now except complain on this blog. But one of these days (after Europe), I'll chase 'em down and ask them for a refund or to explain how their pricing is in any way a good faith offering.

In short -- Consider yourself warned about the Lulu GlobalREACH Distribution service.