Red Hat founder’s Lulu promotes self-publishing

In 1994, Bob Young founded Red Hat, the popular Linux distribution vendor, in his wife’s sewing closet. Now, the entrepreneur is giving others a chance to create a successful business in the same do-it-yourself way — by self-publishing their creative projects through his new venture, Lulu Inc.

Young formed Lulu in 2002 out of the same philosophy that inspired him to start Red Hat, he said. He saw a need in the marketplace for an alternative to an existing way of doing things, and so he set out to give customers a new option.

At the time he founded Red Hat, “the big issue [in the marketplace] was who was going to restrain Microsoft from owning the future of the computer industry,” Young said. He offered Red Hat Linux as an alternative to running Windows on low-end servers, and it has been extremely successful.

When Young was ready to launch a new venture, it was during the same time the recording industry began suing consumers for downloading songs without paying for them, and this gave him the idea for Lulu.

“I looked at the publishing [market] in general,” he said. “I thought if they are going to be that defensive in the face of technological changes on the Internet, there had to be an opportunity for businessmen to use the Internet to provide a better service.”

To give artists more control over their own content, Lulu allows them to self-publish their works — such as books, digital music, or movies — without having to go through a publishing company, Young said. To do this, Lulu takes advantage of several aspects of the contemporary Internet that many refer to as its Web 2.0 phase. Those aspects include online auctions, community development, and industry-standard technology that allow users to trade files and photos over the Web.

It is these evolutionary features of Web 2.0 that allow Lulu to deliver a relatively easy self-publishing service to customers, Young said. To get something published, an author, for example, uploads a digital file of the work to the Web site and uses tools on the site to design the layout of the book. Lulu then has hard copies of the book created and fulfills orders for the book via its online marketplace.

Lulu does not charge customers for uploading and publishing a project, and the authors retain all the rights of whatever they publish, Young said. However, if the author sells the book on Lulu’s marketplace or wants to purchase it themselves, the company gets 20 percent of the profit made once the cost of printing the work is deducted, while the author takes home 80 percent of that difference.

Melinda Roberts, who published Mommy Confidential: Adventures from the Wonderbelly of Motherhood on Lulu, raved about the benefits of self-publishing and said she was happy to skip tricky navigation of the publishing industry to get her book on the market.

“The business model puts total control into the hands of the author,” she said. “You can print something just for yourself, just this once, or you can go whole hog and publish it to the world…. Lulu.com allows authors to publish on their own terms, in their own time, for free. No one, including the author, pays a dime until a book is purchased. If that’s not freedom of the press, I don’t know what is.”

Of course, the self-publishing aspect of Lulu also means there are probably a lot of books on the site that editors in the corporate publishing business would scoff at. Young said that’s just fine with him as long as the site provides a service and a marketplace everyone can use.

“Yeah, we have a lot of crappy books out there,” he said. “In a free market, there is a lot of crappy stuff on sale on the streets of New York, [for example].” The important thing, Young said, is that the consumer — not corporate publishers — gets to decide if a book is worth reading or not.

Currently, about 80 percent of the works published on Lulu are books, while 10 percent are electronic files, such as music and video files, that customers can download directly on the Web. The other 10 percent are a variety of DVDs, CDs, and services, such as transactions between authors via the marketplace for editing, creating photos, or artwork for books and the like, Young said.

Of course, Lulu’s self-publishing process is not without some quirks in the system. Gary Kosman, who co-wrote a book called Bonding While Learning: Activities to Grow Your Relationship While Preparing for Reading Success, said that using some of Lulu’s online tools can be difficult to use if one is not computer-savvy.

“The Lulu.com service is easy to use, but based on our experience, the formatting requirements people need to set for PDFs and their custom covers means that people need at least a medium degree of comfort with PDF-creative and graphic design software,” Kosman said.

If computer novices run into problems using Lulu’s service, they can hire consultants through Lulu.com to help them set up their books for printing, Kosman said. And he said the quality service and experience he had with Lulu’s self-publishing experience seems to be improving even more as the company works out the bugs.

“In the few short months I’ve been with Lulu.com, I have noticed a dramatic improvement in their customer support efforts and the quality of their personnel,” Kosman said.

Kosman’s book, co-written with Grace Chiu, helps parents and grandparents teach young children to read and write while also building their relationships with them. He said the book has had sales across four countries, and schools have even purchased copies for teachers to use.

Young recently began expanding Lulu’s business by licensing content from the first two of what will be many partners, he said. Now, users who want to use photos or other images that are licensed by either Getty Images or Universal Press Syndicate can do so through the Lulu marketplace.