Create a Free Lulu Account

Articles

Resources

Create a Free Lulu Account
Building Your Book Business Using Lulu’s Print APIs

Building Your Book Business Using Lulu’s Print APIs

Podcast 40 min read


Publish & Prosper Episode #106
Published February 11, 2026
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Complete List of Channels


In this episode, Lauren & Matt discuss how entrepreneurs are using Lulu’s suite of APIs to build brand-first book businesses. We break down how savvy creators can use API integrations to automate, personalize, and scale their printing and fulfillment, and why you may want to do the same.

Episode Chapters

💡 Listen to These Episodes

💡 Read These Blog Posts

💡 Watch These Videos

💡 Learn More About

Complete Episode Transcript

Lauren: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. And this time around we are not going to be haunted by any ghost hosts or other forms of static electricity that might try to eat our audio. So sorry to everyone with those last two episodes. Hopefully y'all stuck it out and are back for more this week and everything is going to sound great.

Matt: That’s a lot of manifesting going on.

Lauren: There's a lot of manifesting.

Matt: Keep an eye on that soundboard behind you.

Lauren: I am.

Matt: All right.

Lauren: I am, don't you worry.

Matt: What are we going to try to talk about today?


[1:06] - Episode Topic

Lauren: Today we're going to do our very best to talk about the, the heights of technology that, that our company gets to.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: Specifically our print API and how people are using our open source API to build some really unique and creative and fantastic book businesses.

Matt: Yeah. I'm going to slightly correct you.

Lauren: Go ahead. Please do.

Matt: It's not just a print API, right?

Lauren: You're right.

Matt: I know sometimes we refer to it that way, but you can actually do a lot of things with it.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: So. But yes, people are doing really cool stuff with our APIs, and AI, and some other things, that's what we want to talk about, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Because right now we're seeing a lot of creative uses, like you said, where people are pairing our APIs for back end production and fulfillment, logistics, with front end AI and other software that they're building or, you know, to create custom and personalized books. Which is really cool. Things like children's books, for example. Right? Like you can... you answer a few questions on a site, it inserts your kid's name into the story that you choose. It's fully illustrated, all that's being crafted by AI behind the scenes. Then when you purchase, right? And, and order the book, the order gets transmitted to Lulu and we're doing all of the production fulfillment and logistics to get the book to the kid and his parents.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: People are using it for things other than kids books. You know, personalized and customized cookbooks, health and wellness stuff based on your body type or your goals or... So. There's a lot of really cool uses we're seeing, where a lot of our newest accounts that are signing up, this is what they're doing. Like, you know, whether they're developers, they have friends that are developers, or they're using Claude Code, or they’re vibe coding, or whatever. Right now, it's easier than ever to take something like our suite of APIs that are open to, you know, open source and create some really cool front end for like, personalized books. And then we just handle all of the fulfillment. It makes everything super easy. There's virtually no investments up front, which is why it's, it's really easy for people to do this right now. And once you've got it built, you're essentially just letting it run in the background. It's like you're making money while you're sleeping.

Lauren: Yeah. It's a, it's a really, really like key example of put in the time and work upfront and it'll pay out tenfold what you invested in it in the beginning. And I mean time and not money. I mean it'll get some nice profit off it too –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – if you do it right, and you do a good job and you do all the –

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: – the necessary like, marketing and all that. But this is something that is not a plug and play solution. This is absolutely something that you are going to have to put in some some work and some customization –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – to build it out and get it to where you want to be. But once you have that all set up it's going to make everything just so effortless.

Matt: Yeah it is. You know, the ones that are doing it really well right now, they're also putting some marketing dollars behind –

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: – their brand. But, you know, you've got some that are just absolutely crushing it right now. We see, we see the sales coming through every day, all day long. The holidays were crazy for some of them. You know the, the idea that you'd have this platform or this product where parents can go and create these customized books for their kids as a Christmas gift like that just blew up this past holiday. So there was a ton of that coming through. And I think for me, one of the only acceptable ways to use AI to craft, you know, content in a book is this. Like personalized, customized content. Like we've talked about this, don't use AI to write your next romantasy novel. That's lame. But using AI to generate, you know, custom, personalized books for children or, you know, certain health and wellness body types, or there's a lot of spiritual and religious organizations that are now using it to craft very personalized and tailored types of study books, and it's really cool. So I think it was a good opportunity for us to get on here and talk about, you know, how are people doing this? What, what exactly is an API? What's Lulu's set of APIs? You know, kind of how do these things work? And is this something that, that, you know, a listener, you guys, could possibly do? You know, almost everybody these days knows somebody who's a developer or writes software or has access to something, or – And even tools now, you know, Claude Code and some of these others are getting almost foolproof. Almost where, you know, it's not going to be much longer where you or I could sit down and have Claude, you know, create a front end for us, plugged into a back end like Lulu's API suite, and have a full blown business, you know? So.

[6:06] - Defining APIs

Lauren: All right. So for those of us that are listening that–because, you know, there are definitely some people that saw the title of this one or the show notes on this one and said, oh, cool, I wanted to learn more about this API. Like, I've been looking, you know, I've heard the mention it, I've been wanting to learn more about it. And kudos to you. But to, to those of you that are listening to just kind of soak up the knowledge about publishing because you don't know what you don't know. And like me said, what's an API? Can you, can you help? Can you help those of us out –

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: – with that? What is an API?

Matt: I had to learn all this too, years and years ago, and I still don't know everything there is to know for sure about it. API is an acronym. It. It stands for Application Programing Interface. It's, the way I think about APIs and the way I explain them to people who are like us, not developers and not necessarily develope-minded or developer-minded. Like, they're like little bridges. You know, if you think about a platform, a piece of software, or, you know, a front end, if you will, like if you go to Adorabook. Like, Adorabook has its platform they've built, their front end. That's where you would go and answer the questions about what's your kid's name, what color hair do they have. You know, what are their favorite types of heroes? And you do all the things, right? Adorabook has created this experience. And then that platform needs to talk to our platform, our production cloud, right. To be able to actually print and ship that order. And that bridge comes via the form of an API. So, it's basically kind of a set of rules or, or, you know, guidelines on how data and information is exchanged. Files, if you will. What would happen is, you know, that site sends the file, the complete – the AI generates this file, PDF, because that's what we accept. And it follows these rules that the APIs kind of set in place. The APIs also act as, you know, again, information exchanges or bridges between the two. So in that scenario where you're, you're going from one platform to another, there might be an initial call from that first platform on a price or what a shipping cost might be. Right? And so that bridge is used, the information comes over. Hey, how much is it going to cost? Because this person's ordering this book and it's going to go to Kalamazoo, Michigan. And so the API call goes out, it hits our end. We send back an amount like, oh, it's going to be $7.87. So it's a bridge between two platforms. Some people might be familiar with Zapier or Zapier, which is a platform where you can build bridges, APIs, like you can connect things. Some of you listening may remember, you know, If This Then That, IFTTT, which was another way to connect different things, and create these, you know, scenarios, workflows, between different platforms. And there's lots of different ways to do that stuff. But essentially an API is a bridge. Does that help?

Lauren: I think so.

Matt: It’s –

Lauren: I think it does.

Matt: It's a very technical way to talk about communicating between two platforms. But…some people know this. A lot of people don't. Lulu was always founded as a technology company. We were founded by a technologist. We were founded by Bob Young, who was the original co-founder of Red Hat, which is a massive, you know, technology company, software company. And so when he founded, you know, and started Lulu. Yes, he wanted to create a publishing company that anybody could access and use to publish and create content. But he came at it from the lens of a technologist, somebody who was in the technology world. So every time we build something or create things, and we've talked about this before, it's always from a technology – a place of technology, ground up. Like, okay, how do we build this thing as best in class? Like, yeah, I guess it's kind of hard to explain sometimes, but that's just how we've always sort of functioned around here. There's a lot of us who are book nerds and print nerds and things like that. But, you know, we're still technically a technology company, a publishing technology company.

Lauren: Well, I think it also makes a lot of sense when you understand the perspective that like Red Hat, and specifically Bob with Red Hat, has also always believed in that open access, open source.

Matt: Open source, yeah.

Lauren: Like...

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: You know, this is accessible to anybody with the knowhow of how to –

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: – how to use it.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Like we're not trying to gatekeeping this. So it makes sense that a man who believed in that fundamentally from a technology perspective is also then turning around and saying, and I also want to make –

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: – publishing a book accessible to people. So.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: That, that origin makes a lot of sense.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But it does kind of explain – of course, because when I, you know, from my background, from publishing and marketing and the background that I have, this was like a whole, a whole new concept to me in any way. Like I have – what do you mean, what, what is an API? What do you mean we're a tech company and not a publishing company? Like, I don't understand any of the framework that's going on here. And the more that I learned about it, the more that I was like, oh, no, this actually makes a lot of sense.

Matt: Yeah. And that's a good point, too, about the ethos or the origins, or the DNA of Bob, of Red Hat, of Lulu, of open source in general. Open source really is meant to…there's variations of the definition and what it actually is. But in general, like even with Red Hat, it was meant to allow for customization. It was meant to allow for people to take the the existing code base or whatever it was, and alter it or tailor it to fit their specific needs. And that's why Red Hat was so groundbreaking back in the day. And for a lot of people, they thought it was ridiculous. Like, Red Hat would literally give you their software. You didn't pay for that, it was free. And this was during an era and an age where you paid for all software. That's where the SaaS model was born. But they believed this is open source code. We're going to share it with you. And you can, you can customize it, or we’ll help you customize it to fit your organization's needs. What you'll pay for is the, the service, the support and the ongoing, you know, things. And that was a completely different model and software at the time. Most people thought they were crazy to to give the software away for free and just charge for the support and the other stuff that went along with it, But yeah that, that DNA was carried over into Lulu. And to this day we, you know, that's, that's what even the APIs are for. It's, you know –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – the freedom and flexibility to build businesses off of what we’ve done. What we charge for is the, the, the print, the support, the finished product. Like here, take the APIs, the software, do what you want with it. We're only charging for the books that we print and ship, things like that. So it's the same DNA. You're right.

[13:14] - Explaining the Lulu APIs

Lauren: Yeah. I actually think that the…specifically our API is where that legacy lives on the most, because that is very much what this is. So this is probably a good way for us to segue into what our specific API is, and not just an API in general. Because it is something that is, like I said earlier, it's not plug and play. This is not the solution –

Matt: Right.

Lauren: – for the every day author that just is just getting started and has like, their first book in the works and is testing the waters. This is not your –

Matt: It's not for any run of, run of the mill author.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: I don't care how many titles you have, like this – to be clear, yes, this requires some understanding of software development, of APIs, of code –

Lauren: Or at the very least, access to people that can do that for you.

Matt: Well yeah. Either way.

Lauren: Whether it's you, or you hire an expert, or you have a team in-house or whatever it is.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But for the people that have the know how to use this, it is readily available to you. This is a –

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: – free to use open source API that –

Matt: Sss. Plural.

Lauren: APIs. Good point. That we have, like we provide everything that you need in terms of like the documentation that you need access to, a sandbox environment for you to test out the different things that you want to do with it.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: But we're not building it for you. Lulu isn’t building it for you. We give you all the tools you need. You have to go build your sandcastle in the sandbox by yourself.

Matt: That's right. We're literally giving you the bridge to our production network.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And you get to bypass our front end. Normally, if you want to print and ship books, you can just come to Lulu and you use our front end and you upload your titles and you go through all the things – which is all still free. But you know, you're, you're adhering to what we need you to do. And, you know, this is the same for every platform, right? If you want to go use somebody else to to publish and print your books, you got to play by their rules. And so, eventually your titles make it to our back end where orders can be printed and shipped all over the world. What we're doing is we're cutting out all that front end, giving you access to the back end, so that you can present that customer experience however you want to your customers.

Matt: Yeah. So we're literally just giving you a direct connection to our production cloud and our logistics system. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. Do you want to elaborate a little bit more on that pluralization of API?

Matt: I mean, again, the APIs allow you to do a number of things. So again, if I wanted to build one of these, you know, platforms that are popular right now. Let's say I wanted to create a platform, a brand where you can create customized books that position you as...you know, I don't know, the hero of some story, whatever. And let's say I have access to a developer or a friend that does it or whatever. They'll help me build out my front end, right? So the, the actual website where people can come, you know, the site will ask them some questions. What name do you want to use, what’s your superhero look like, what color’s their cape. Whatever, whatever. Then what's going to happen is I have to know how much to charge that user for the printed version of the book. The price will probably be different each time based on how many pages, whatever. I need to know what the shipping cost is going to be. I need to make sure that the file that my system generates is going to be appropriate for print. There's all these things that need to happen. The, the PDF has to be normalized when it goes into our production. Our APIs do all of those things. So as my user is going through and building the story, and AI on the back end is, is finishing up the files and creating the illustrations and all those things. There are API calls being made, get price for the book, to get, you know, shipping cost, to send the file through and make sure it's, you know, everything's fine, like there's no issues with flattened images and embedded fonts and things like that. So there's these different things that are happening through our APIs in tandem as this work is happening before the final order comes through with the files attached on the API to go into production.

Lauren: So we did an episode last year where we talked through the...like the, the full, I guess, sales, print, production, whatever, cycle of an order placed on Lulu Direct. So I guess my, my understanding of how this would work in the API ecosystem instead is it's still that same process that we were used to from Direct, where the customer comes to you, purchases your book that from you goes to Lulu, and then Lulu prints the order, ships it out to the customer.

Matt: Right.

Lauren: So when a customer is use–or when a store owner is using the API solutions instead of a Direct solution, it's still that, kind of that same process. But those are all separate APIs that are being built to, to customize that experience?

Matt: You can either look at it that way or separate functions of an API. Like there's some grayness there, I think, when you, when you discuss that.

Lauren: But it's all the moving parts –

Matt: That’s correct.

Lauren: – of that.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Are all the different things.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: Okay, cool.

[18:28] - Using the Lulu APIs

Matt: Yeah. There's a number of things that are happening. You get access to a number of different things in our production ecosystem pricing, shipping, you know, production itself. Even things like, you know, sending back information about when the order’s gone into production status, when it's been shipped, when it's been delivered, you know, there's webhooks – and an API calls for that stuff too. So it's an end to end solution for businesses and publishers and people to, you know, build their own book business. It pretty much does everything at the point that you've generated that file and sent it through. And it's all white-labeled. So I think you mentioned that, that just like with Lulu Direct, your customer’s not going to get a box from Lulu, you know?

Lauren: Right.

Matt: They're going to get a box from whatever your brand is. And so it's a great way to make sure that your brand experience stays consistent from beginning to end, right? They found you, let's say, on social media. They came to your website. They liked what they saw. They built this book for their kid or whatever your tool happens to be or your platform. You know, the order goes on through. It's your branding throughout the entire process. So yeah, the white label piece is important, because I think when you're building a business, it's really important that you control not just your content but your brand.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: In all the ways. It's not even just the delivery of the final product.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Like we're – they're not getting confirmation emails from us.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: It's you speaking to them.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: It’s you connecting –

Matt: Because our system is speaking your system.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: And then your system conveys that to them. Yep.

Lauren: Yeah. You could very easily build your entire brand and never tell a soul that Lulu is the one –

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: – printing and fulfilling the orders.

Matt: And we don't care.

Lauren: And – Yeah. Yeah, that's that's your secret to keep –

Matt: No.

Lauren: – as much as you want to. I will drop the link to that episode in the show notes. I think it's episode 70 where we talk about the production cycle for Lulu Direct. So if you're listening and you're not familiar with that as we're referencing that, I'll make sure that one's linked in the show notes.

Matt: Yeah, APIs are used in a lot of different things too, by the way. Like you probably interact with an API every day and don't even realize it.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So there's a lot of apps or applications or software or things that you use where that's how communication is happening, through APIs. While we didn't develop the concept of APIs, we were pretty much the first to have these print-based APIs that allow you to do what you do. And the only one with open source ones for publishing and printing. So, yeah, I don't know. I like them, they're pretty cool.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Well, of course I like anything where people can build a business off of it and make money and not, not get raked over the coals for fees or, you know, stuff like that. So I was really in favor of when we launched these. You mentioned there's a lot of stuff that goes along with it. And that's why we tell people, you know, this isn't just for anybody. Lulu Direct is a great solution for anybody because you can literally, you know, prop up a Shopify store in an hour and use the Lulu Direct plugin for that. And it's the same, essentially, thing, right? The APIs are for people who really are at that level where they're, they're building a business off of books. Or they've got a business right now they want to expand into printed books to support that business. Or they've got a very well-established website presence already, they don't want to switch to a Shopify or something like that. And it just makes more sense to have, you know, our APIs coded into their site so they can access our back end. But, you know, for somebody who knows what they're doing, it's a very easy integration. I think it's like twelve lines of code. It is a RESTful API. It should be pretty easy for anybody who's been, you know, a developer for a little while or understands how these things work. That there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get this thing integrated quickly and then do some testing in our sandbox. Which is an environment where you'll be able to, to test file transfers and API calls and things like that to make sure everything works. That's the important piece too, is that even if you are an experienced developer, you need to have those areas where you can run that end to end testing and not have to worry about messing anything up that's live, you know, or public. And we have a whole team here too that helps support that too.

Lauren: Yes. And they're incredibly knowledgeable and incredibly helpful. I bugged them a lot while I was working on the outline for this episode, and also having a conversation. You know, it was funny because at the same time that I was working on this episode, I was having kind of a back and forth conversation with a creator friend of ours who is looking into using the API for turning some of his content into print products. And this was even an example of somebody who's built this massive kind of ecosystem for himself and is looking for a way to like, integrate Lulu into his existing brand to be a smooth part of the process. In which case being able to customize it to, to fit just right in... Like, he's not going to trash and rebuild his entire website on Wix just so that –

Matt: Right.

Lauren: – he can use the Direct plug in. He's going to use this API instead. Which is one of the like, probably really big differences.

[23:46] - Benefits of the Lulu APIs

Matt: The API is best, I think you alluded to this, for when you need to support heavy levels of automation, of complexity, right? When you get into things that include personalization, there's a level of complexity that's involved. Because every single order the file is different.

Matt: Whatever –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – whatever personalization means for your business, you know, the APIs’ great for automation, complexity, and scaling. So when you're talking about a business that is either in scaling mode and growing quickly, or you're already a very large company that needs to do these things at scale. The APIs are the only way to do it, really. I mean, the security that is afforded through those APIs is unparalleled. We're Soc2 compliant. We have all kinds of security measures in place. You're not going to get that level of flexibility, scalability, personalization with the Lulu Direct plugins. That's not what they're meant for. And you're not going to get that with anybody else either.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: But it's great too, for, like, you know, a lot of authors are getting into subscription models and things.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Right? So there's already brands and platforms that are experimenting with that, I think. Like Reem, I think, does that. And you know, there's obviously Patreon and some of the others, but when you can plug and play a back end API set like ours to your subscription model, and again, fully automate like every month, these things need to be shipped out, these titles or whatever that might be or these different – Like, the more you can automate that business, the more you can spend time on doing cool stuff and not worrying about these administrative things or the production aspect of what you're doing. So I think the automation component to using APIs is really one of the best parts. Others would disagree and say it's the personalization. Others would still disagree and say it's, you know, the ability to scale quickly. You know, and grow ten x in a very fast way that – where you couldn't do that normally.

Lauren: Why not all the above?

Matt: Or you can do all the above.

Lauren: But no, I think that that's a really good point. And I also do want to point out, that when we talk about personalization in this context, we're not exclusively talking about the idea of inserting your name or the gift recipient's name in the book or in some way. We're also talking about personalization in the sense of like, let's say you have a subscription that you're sending out a calendar of events to people quarterly, but the events vary by region. So you've got, a subscription base, but you are sending out, you know, the content for the northeast area to this part of the list and the content to, you know, this part of the list is getting exclusively news about Disneyland events, but this part of the list is getting exclusively –

Matt: I want to be on that list.

Lauren: – Disney World events.

Matt: Oh, I want to be on that list too.

Lauren: This part of the list is getting Disney World and Universal. But this like –

Matt: I don’t really care about that.

Lauren: – I know. So like that's personalized not just in the sense of like insert unique name here, but also personalized –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – in the idea of what kind of content is going to specifically what subscriber or what customer or whatever, and putting all that together into one piece. So they're getting a personalized, tailored to them, piece of content using the the modular creation that you've made, that you've uploaded all of these different pieces of information –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – on your end and then the, the APIs are taking...okay, they want this file, this file, this file, this file, putting it all together and sending it out to them.

Matt: Yeah. In the, in the printing world that people refer to a lot of that as variable data. And so again when you have projects where there's something that changes in each, you know, print job or something like that. Again, being able to automate that and make your life easier, I think, is priceless. It could be, like you said, geographic. It could be genre-based. You know, maybe you write in two or three different genres. Or maybe you have a small publishing company, you represent multiple different genres. Or like – there's so many ways you can use the APIs for personalization or segmenting or things like that. And ultimately automating, you know, everything – or most of what you do, not everything, but most of what you do. I think it's so timely and relevant right now, because of how quickly things are changing every day with AI and AI tools, and the ability too. I don't think it's long before the average person or, you know, the average author can build a small API-run, you know, website for themselves, you know, using something like Claude Code or whatever. I don't think we're far off from that at all, where you're literally just going to say, use these APIs. Here's my website address, the domain I bought. You know, here’s my color palette. Here's the ISBN numbers to my books. Build me a bookstore, you know?

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: That is plugged in over here to print and ship using this particular – You know what I mean? Like, I don't think we're very far from that at all. So.

Lauren: Probably not. And I think that's also kind of indicative of like... none, none of the things that we said so far are new concepts necessarily. It's not – I have a book, I would – maybe four, four or five years old when my grandmother got me a book for Christmas that is, like, my – It's a, it's a picture book that has my name in it, and it's the story – I mean, the, you know, it was very clearly like, the story was the same, the illustrations are the same. It's not me in the, in the book, but it's my name –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – as the character in the book. And like, clearly that was possible to do thirty-plus years ago. So the concept of personalized books or like, some kind of unique insert yourself into this book, whatever, that's not new. The new thing here, or the, the not even new. But like, the thing that makes this next level on that is the automation, and is the fact that it is taking something that would have had to be manually done in the past and would be...you know, the production time would be twice as long and the cost would probably be twice as high, because –

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: – the fact that you, like –

Matt: It was.

Lauren: – were having to do a lot of this stuff by hand or manually or however. And now we're saying you can do all of those things that people – and more, and you can automate it, and you can be completely hands-off with it, and you don't even have to, like, see the finished product once you've put your like, put your trust into the fact that you've built it all out correctly and the system runs smoothly, it'll just get delivered straight to the customers.

Matt: Yeah, you're right. And I had one of those too when I was younger.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: That tells you how long ago you, you've been able to do this, but they were extremely manual on a one-off basis. And typically what was happening there is A. they were extremely expensive. Mine was a Disney book, and my name was inserted into the story, and I’m trying to remember which Disney story it was. I want to say it was Jungle Book. They were doing this book of one, they were running them off on an actual inkjet printer and then binding them. Like, the technology has advanced, because that wasn't scalable. You'd have to charge what they did back then just to justify the work, right, to get it done. Now all of that is automated. It's so much more easier, which drops the cost significantly and the turnaround times and makes it a scalable business. It, it – the flexibility exists so it doesn't have to just be childrens books. We keep talking about that because that's where we've seen a lot of it happen. But there's just as much of this happening in the health and wellness space, in the entrepreneurial space, finance, you know, there are a lot of different sectors and verticals that are making use of this combination of AI and, you know, these print-on-demand APIs and back ends like we offer. Where they're creating an entire business just online. No inventory. No, hardly any upfront costs. So it's not just childrens books, but again, it's the automation that comes with these APIs. That's, that's the biggest differentiator between, you know, again, using something like hard-coded APIs versus a Shopify plugin, that scalability and that flexibility and some of those other things.

Lauren: Yeah, I think that's – I think sometimes when we have this conversation, we fall into the trap of staying vague about like different, different things that you can do with this, or defaulting to the same examples over and over again, because this goes back to that white-label element of –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – of the whole set up here, without explicit permission from any of our customers, we're not going to go out and be like, oh yeah, this is this is a great example of this person doing this, this, this and this, because it is – we're just their service provider.

Lauren: They are the business. And you know, we don't, we don't need to –

Matt: Yeah that's true.

Lauren: – claim ownership of, of –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – their ideas or their business in any way. Like, we're just there on the back end.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So there are definitely a lot of really good examples of these kinds of things that we're like mmm, yeah. That's really cool. Would love to tell you about it. I'm not going to, but would love to.

Matt: Yeah I guess that's a fair point. You know, there are a lot of them that don't care, and we can talk about them. And then there's some that are truly trying to create that, that brand experience where they're not exposing who their vendors and partners are. And that's okay, I mean, but yeah. I mean, that just speaks to, again, the fact that if that's your desire, it is truly a white-labeled experience for you. Like we don't... At the end of the day, that – we just want to provide the technology and the print, you know what I mean? Like that’s where our, our sweet spot is and our revenue is directly generated from print books. So whether or not, ultimately, somebody wants to put Lulu on the shipping label or not, we don't really care. If you don't want to put Lulu on there, we don't care. If you don't want Lulu to be listed as the printer, we don't care. It makes no difference to us, that's not what we're after. I think in that instance, I agree. I think sometimes people think we're being a little, you know, coy or ambiguous or just trying to... But no, I mean, we're just respecting people's, you know, branding experiences and –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – and desire to, to keep some of that under lock and key. There're some people who feel like, you know, if their secret's out, then competitors might also pick up on that. Everybody has their reasons. Whatever. I'm not, I'm not mad at it. What do your bracelets say, before I forget?

Lauren: Idiots in Love. Bothered and Bewildered. And Professional Yapper.

Matt: Okay. Idiots in Love is probably every book that you read.

Lauren: It's my. It's my, like, favorite…these two are so stupid, they don't even know they're in love with each other until they get hit over the head with it. And then they realize they've been obsessed with each other forever and that they're in love.

Matt: God, I'm sorry I asked.

Lauren: You should be. It's all good.

Matt: I'll stick with my horror genre and my, my murder mysteries.

Lauren: That's for the best.

Matt: Yeah. I don't know about idiots in love or.

Lauren: That's okay. That's okay. That one's for me. It's all good.

Matt: Okay.

[35:18] - Is the API for You

Matt: If I'm an idiot, how would I know that I want to use the API instead of something else?

Lauren: Well, that's a great question. As always, it depends on what your goals for your business are. But I think in this specific example –

Matt: To make money.

Lauren: Well, obviously. In this specific one, I think it's really about what problem you're trying to solve, not necessarily what your goals are. Because obviously your goals are, in this case, to make money, to grow, to, you know, perhaps automate, whatever, but that – so, what is, what is the problem that you're trying to solve? Are you trying to get to like, faster turnaround time on your productions? Are you trying to make it so that it is sustainable as you scale your business? Like right now, you're, you're working on an idea that realistically, if you sold one book per day every day for the next month, you could handle fulfilling all those orders manually. But if you sold a hundred books a day, every day for the next month, you would be drowning before the end of the second week.

Matt: Easily, yeah.

Lauren: Like, you know, you, you want – that's a problem you need to solve. How do you, how do you scale that? How do you automate that? How do you figure out ways to make that easier? Maybe it's something as simple as like, right now my business is local, and I want to, to scale it nationally, internationally, maybe even I want to be able to reach consumers outside of my immediate geographic area. So how do I handle international shipping and delivery? How do I handle charging for, for things like that, whether it's charging for like, customs fees or charging to ship overseas or whatever it is. Like, figure out what problems you need to solve, and then decide what could be solved by customizations that come along with APIs.

Matt: Yeah. Like we said a few times before, it's...the APIs’ best and built for three things. Automation, personalization, and scalability. It boils down to the difference of, do I just have a couple of books I'm trying to sell? Right? Like maybe I've even got, you know, two different series of three or four books each and then a couple singles, you know, my catalog’s still under ten titles, whatever. And I'm just interested in selling books in a very easy way, and somewhat automated way. Plugins are your best bet, right? Like Shopify, Wix, whatever. But again, if you're looking for scale or flexibility with personalization and stuff, and ultimately automation, like you said. Like I don't want to – there's no way I'm fulfilling a hundred orders a day myself. Forget it. I didn't sign up for that. I'd love to sell a hundred books a day, but I don't want to fulfill them. I don't want to pack a hundred envelopes. I don't want to deal with any of that stuff. But I'm definitely interested in selling direct and keeping that data. So automating through, you know, the APIs, those are the best scenarios. Those are the easiest ways to try and understand whether or not you know, the API, or APIs, are your, your way of moving forward or if you're better suited to be working with, you know, again, plug ins and things that are a little easier, something you can do yourself in a one day, you know, time period.

Lauren: I think we also, in case we haven't made this clear yet in this episode, this is a form of selling direct. So this is something that is like whether you are using our Shopify plug in or you're using the APIs to customize your store, those are both selling direct to your customer. So –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – all the benefits that come along with selling direct that we've talked about in other episodes, like having access to your customer data and stuff like that, that is still true with the API setup as opposed to one of the, the ecommerce plugins.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: So just in case we were not clear about that yet, so far, you still get all those same access to that customer data and the customization and remarketing that goes along with that side of things as well.

Matt: Yeah, that's fair.

Lauren: Also absolutely a time and place for people to be using it just as an alternative solution to the Direct plugins. So I want to make sure that we're not discouraging anybody – Well, like we've, I mean, we’ve talked about this publicly before. Justin's using the API on his website.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: And he's only selling a, like –

Matt: I forgot about that.

Lauren: He's just selling his single title. And it's not, I – 

Matt: Well. But Justin's an automation freak. Which, you know, I, completely –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – relate to and respect. Like. So yes, you're right. I didn't mean to give you that weird face.

Lauren: No, no, that's okay.

Matt: Yes. You know, counter to what we may have just said over the last thirty to forty minutes, there are situations, outliers, where somebody who is just selling a single book, or a couple, will just go ahead and invest in the API. Again, it's if you're anticipating scale. If you're an automation freak like Justin is. Which is great, right? Like, automate that. Don't, don't spend a minute more, once it's implemented, dealing with mundane administrative-type activities around the sales of your book. Like, automate everything you can, of course. Justin also had access to a developer and also uses, for his website, a platform called Framer. Which is, you know, a great tool, platform for building a website. There's some really great websites built using Framer. But, you know, using Framer, his best option was the API. There's no plugin for Framer. They probably could have created their own API using Zapier as like a bridge, but it just made more sense to use the API for Justin. And again, he's an automation freak. So yeah, you're right there. There are scenarios where you don't fall into that criteria we just gave you around who should actually –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – be using the API, and for what reasons necessarily, and you may still just want to – Great. Yeah. If you have the access to a developer, you know, or whatever, the money to spend on a developer, and you just that's, that's your interest is you're looking out for future scaling and you want to automate now to get to that point. Yeah. Go right ahead.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So you're right, not, not to discourage anybody. We're just trying to give you a better idea of, like, when you're talking immediate integrations and what's easiest and what's best for you based on what you're trying to accomplish. Typically, API users fall into this bucket over here that we talked about, and everybody else kind of falls into the, the standard Lulu Direct using Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, whatever. But that's a good point. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah, I just want to, you know, I just want to not discourage anyone who came in here being like, oh, this sounds like a good solution to something that I'm trying to do. And then it's like, okay, well, I'm not trying to build a whole business around it. I'm just trying to make a more customized experience –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – on my existing business or whatever. Or maybe it is something that you grow into. Which I think is also –

Matt: Sure.

Lauren: – worth considering. If it's something that you want to kind of test the market first and get some good proof of concept before you invest all of the effort into building it out on the API end like, and you want to say, okay, for now, I'm going to sell a couple of books. Like you are your own indie publisher kind of thing, and –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – and you're thinking like, you're going to have a small list of titles that you're going to start with that you might use one of the, the easier Direct solutions to begin with, while you are then building out the more robust and more automated and more customized API version of things.

[42:58] - Episode Summary

Matt: Yeah, I think in the end, to wrap this up, as long as you are taking steps to build your own business, capture your own customer data so that you can continue growing and remarketing, and so that each subsequent new release, you're not shouting into the void, and you're ultimately not giving your customers and traffic away to a third party retailer, then you're doing good. And whether that's with our APIs or Lulu Direct plugins or other form – like, just take the steps to build your own business and stop giving that away to somebody else. Like, with the tools that we have in 2026, what's out there, not just Lulu, but in general. You know, like we said, a lot of people are pairing our APIs with some AI-powered things. Like with what's out there now there, there's just – I don't see a barrier to entry for most people now to building your own business on books. There just, there really isn't. You couldn't say that five years ago. It's crazy the amount of progress that we've made in this space in five years. A lot of that due in large part to the onset of AI and the usability of it. But still just in the, the publishing side, the technology side, the print-on-demand side, the, the logistical components that are involved, like the last five years, there's been a ton, a ton of progress made. Ten years ago, you definitely weren't doing this stuff.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: You know what I mean? And so there's no reason not to start taking steps, no matter how small or large, to start building your own direct channel of sales with your customer base, with your audience, with your readership. I mean, yeah, it's just wild to me if you're not doing that. Like, I don't sell a ton of books, but I'm I'm doing what I can to build my own direct relationships. Slowly, because obviously I do other things, but I just don't see a reason to give that to anybody else, you know? And and I like having the control over my branding and, and the experience that somebody might have when they, they want to buy one of my books – or my book, but hopefully plural at some point.

Lauren: I'm fully confident that you are going to have a second book out by the end of this year.

Matt: I'm going to start my own little publishing company –

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: – called Slacker Press, and you're going to be the very next author that I sign on.

Lauren: Okay. I think you're definitely going to have another book before the end of this year. But I – I do also, I completely agree with that. And I think that, you know, to tie it back a little bit into the last episode that we just did on using your book as a product versus using your book as a marketing tool, I think this is another instance where having the the ability to sell directly and to customize your, your sales experience or your book creation experience and fulfillment experience for your customers supports both of those goals. So whether you are building a business on books like we talked about in that episode, or you are building a business that includes books as a tool within that, there's value to the customization and the automization that the APIs can offer you.

Matt: 100%. Yeah. No notes.

[46:20] - Episode Wrap Up


Lauren: Word. So we're done?

Matt: I think so. What are you reading right now?

Lauren: What am I reading right – I'm between books right now, actually. The one that I have queued up next is Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green. Which is a nonfiction book, actually, which is a little unusual for me, but I read one or two year.

Matt: Interesting.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: I just started The Pathless Path by Paul Millard.

Lauren: Oh, yeah.

Matt: That's the one where –

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: – the packaging is absolutely insane.

Lauren: So, so gorgeous.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Genuinely unbelievable.

Matt: Yeah. If you get the chance, people who are listening, you should go check that out. I mean, the packaging alone was worth it.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: If you're a book nerd like us, it's a beautifully done linen wrapped hardcover. Comes with really beautiful packaging, a handwritten note from the author, some postcards, a notebook, all of it branded, you know very, it's just, it was really well done. And I've just started the book and it's actually pretty good too. I mean, admittedly, I bought it because of the packaging. And, you know, I saw it. I don't remember when I first saw it now. I told you about it when it first came across my desk.

Lauren: You went down, you came across it like, you were going down a rabbit hole.

Matt: I was down a rabbit hole, and I don't remember what it was –

Lauren: And, and came across it. Yeah.

Matt: It turned out the people that Paul Millard work with to help get this book to market, design it and get it printed. It's printed in Italy, offset.

Lauren: Not, not by us. We're not secretly plugging –

Matt: No.

Lauren: – a book that Lulu has produced.

Matt: I wish this was possible with digital printing, but it's just not. It's, it's beautiful. Anyways. But the company that helped him design the book, they're based in Asheville, not far from us. So somehow I did get down a rabbit hole, I found it, I ordered it because I was like, I have to see this thing. I've started reading it.

Matt: It's, it's, it's pretty good. And then I'm also still reading my Japanese murder mysteries by Seishi Yokomizo, which I'm obsessed with. And apparently he wrote like seventy-seven of these.

Lauren: Oh wow.

Matt: And they all have the same kind of a private investigator that pops up in each of them, which I love. But not all seventy-seven have been translated yet. And Pushkin – thank you Pushkin, by the way – is, I guess, the publisher who has gotten most of the rights to to translate these. And I think they've translated six or seven so far, with one being released in June. So I got that on pre-order. I found the others, but I'm going to get to a point soon where it's like, crap. Now I'm waiting on them to translate them and publish them. So I may try to get my hands on the Japanese versions. And just find an AI tool to translate them for me. That's how much I like the books.

Lauren: Or maybe you got to, you got to pick up your Japanese lessons again.

Matt: I do. I fell down on those.

Lauren: And use it as a way to, to, you know, this is my motivation – It's like when, when I was in, like, middle school foreign language classes, and they would put on Disney movies.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: In whatever language it was. So I was like, yeah, of course I know all the words to The Lion King.

Matt: In Spanish.

Lauren: So maybe if I watch it in Spanish, I'll actually understand what they're talking about.

Matt: You know what’s crazy, that Japanese on Duolingo starts out, I won't say easy, but easy enough, and fun. And then almost immediately, like it gets ultra hard and you're just like, whoa, what happened? Like there's no gradual, like. So I did stop. I need to pick that back up.

Lauren: I've never used Duolingo, but I am very bad at learning languages.

Matt: I guess I am too.

Lauren: That is not a skill that – I think it's the way that we teach it, honestly. So maybe –

Matt: Probably, yeah.

Lauren: – maybe it would be – Because there were so many times that I like when I was taking those classes in school and they would be like here, like, well, this is like the parts of a sentence, and this is how, you know? And I was like, well, I don't know what these are in English.

Matt: I don’t care, just teach me how to – Yeah.

Lauren: Like, just tell me how to say the phrase whatever and like I'll learn it that way in the same like in the organic way that you learn languages when you're learning, like your first language.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I feel like if there was a better way to do that –

Matt: Agreed.

Lauren: – it would be easier to pick up –

Matt: I think –

Lauren: – other languages as well.

Matt: I think Duolingo is a little better at that.

Lauren: Yeah?

Matt: But there's still... I think there's still a lot of pomp and circumstance that gets tossed in there where it's like... I don't, like where it really got hard, like literally overnight, by the way, with Japanese on Duolingo. But some of the phrases it was trying to teach me was like... oh, there was a really weird one about my cell phone, like, but something that I would never, ever say.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: Like, I dropped it in the toilet or something.

Matt: I – it was really weird. And it was like, well, sure, that could happen if I'm on a trip to in Japan, but I'm also not going to run out of the hotel room and find the concierge and try to explain them in Japanese that I dropped my phone in the toilet.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: Like, I don't need to know that. What I need you to teach me is how to go to a Japanese restaurant and order pizza.

Matt: Right? Like I need to know how to walk into a 7-Eleven in Japan, which I'm dying to do, by the way, and say, where's the the Coca-Cola Pina Colada Slurpee machine?

Lauren: I literally – the only thing that I need to be taught how to say, well, I guess there's two things that I need to be taught how to say in Japanese. And one of them is, how do I get to Tokyo Disney? And the other one is, where's the nearest bathroom? Everything else – I guess maybe please and thank you would be nice too. But other than that, I'm good.

Matt: Actually, pizza in Japan is pizza, so that's pretty easy.

Lauren: Oh, that is easy.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I can work with that.

Matt: I did learn some other stuff that's very helpful in terms of food because that's all I care about.

Lauren: So that's fair.

Matt: But yeah, anyways.

Lauren: Well if anyone listening has any recommendations on how to learn how to learn a new language when you're well past the formative years.

Matt: Oh I'm well past those.

Lauren: Please let us know. And if anyone is, you know, building a, building a book business –

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: – on how to learn –

Matt: That too.

Lauren: – languages that will help you with very specific. That's a, that – wait. Okay. How cool would that be? Like, not as a travel guide, but like –

Matt: Right.

Lauren: – a travel specific.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: Like, I am traveling –

Matt: Edit this out. We're gonna do that.

Lauren: – to. No.

Matt: We're going to do that. Edit this out. Don't, don't give somebody that idea, that's perfect. I know where you're going with this. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. Like I want like I want a foodie’s translation guide.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: Or I want a theme park goers translation guide. Or a cruise translation guide.

Matt: I’m going to Japan, here's my itinerary where I'm going to be each day.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: These are the things I want. What do I need to know how to say?

Lauren: Yeah. Give me the helpful phrases for how do I say...

Matt: Please edit this out.

Lauren: No.

Matt: If somebody does this I'm going to be so angry with you.

Lauren: I – it's the reward for somebody getting to the end of this episode.

Matt: Oh my god.

Lauren: Okay. So you may or may not –

Matt: The minute we get out of the studio, I'm going to go –

Lauren: I know.

Matt: – make this happened.

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: I wish.

Lauren: All right.

Matt: Maybe I'll try Claude Code.

Lauren: Give it a shot.

Matt: I don’t know, we’ll see.

Lauren: Let us know how it goes.

Lauren: All right.

Matt: Let's wrap this up.

Lauren: If anyone, if anyone is listening and thinks that's a great idea, please let us know. You can like and subscribe and leave us comments on YouTube and Spotify, on Lulu's social media. You can email us at podcast@lulu.com and tell us all your great ideas or –

Matt: So we can steal ‘em?

Lauren: – how great our ideas are, but don't steal them.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And we will be back next week with another new episode.

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: Until then, thanks for listening.

Matt: Later.

Your Free Lulu Account

Create a Lulu Account today to print and publish your book for readers all around the world

Create a Free Account

Tags

Lauren

Lauren is the Content & Community Manager and co-host of Publish & Prosper, Lulu’s publishing, ecommerce, and marketing podcast.

Recommended for you