Scale Your Book Printing with Lulu: POD Solutions for Growing Businesses
For many businesses, books aren’t just products. They’re tools for revenue, client engagement, sales enablement, and brand credibility.Publishers rely on books for their core sales. Marketing teams use them as lead generators. Educational companies use them for training and certification. Businesses need them for annual reports, internal training, and brand building.
Books are pervasive and important to so many kinds of businesses. We all use books in some form or another.
If your business uses books, whether as a product or a marketing tool, then you already know how important quality, consistency, and fast shipping are. That’s what makes Lulu’s print-on-demand solution perfect for businesses.
Why Scaling Book Printing Matters for Businesses
As your business grows, your print needs change. Traditional bulk printing is expensive, creates inventory to manage, and leads to waste when your content needs to be updated. Not to mention the logistics nightmare of managing and fulfilling inventory on hand.
Simply put, businesses need to prepare for growth early on to ensure they are equipped for it when their demand grows exponentially. This won’t happen for every business, but if your goals are to grow into a large-scale company, you need your product fulfillment providers to scale along with you.
That’s the great part about Lulu’s print options. We offer a variety of ways to scale alongside your business. When you’re just starting out, using Lulu’s print-on-demand ensures you won’t have funds tied up in unsold inventory. As you grow, our direct sales solutions and API make it easy to fully automate printing.
The Case for Print-on-Demand in Business Growth
Offset printing is cheaper per book. And if you need 10,000 copies, it’s probably the right way to print your books.
For businesses, saving costs on large print runs only works if you know you’ll sell or use all of those books. And you’ll need somewhere to store 10,000 books with logistics in place to fulfill individual orders or package them for events.
The alternative is to use print-on-demand to order precise quantities of your books. When you print your books on demand, you do so one book at a time. That opens up the possibilities for selling directly to your audience, doing custom short runs, and earning from older titles available (you guessed it) on demand.
Paul
Why Lulu is the Best Choice for Business Printing
Each of the printing methods—traditional offset and Lulu’s print-on-demand—has advantages. The most important thing for your business is to know when each one is the right solution.
Lulu’s combination of scalability, speed, and global reach makes it a smart choice for businesses aiming to grow revenue without growing operational headaches or increasing costs.
How Lulu’s API Scales Book Printing for Businesses
If your business has an online sales channel or internal ordering system, the Lulu API offers automated book printing from order to delivery. You integrate directly with Lulu’s international print network to process orders from your store. We handle the printing and shipping using your book files.
This gives you complete control over your book. Each order can use a unique file, meaning you can offer complete customization for your readers. That might include nutrition planners tailored to the individual, location-specific training guides, or translations.
With our global printing network, your business can easily scale up book sales without worrying about delays, inventory, or upfront costs. Just like all of Lulu’s printing services, you only pay us to print and ship. Every penny that your list price is over that, you keep.
The Lulu API is particularly valuable for companies that already have a steady volume of orders and need a reliable, white-label printing partner to handle fulfillment automatically.
Lulu Direct: Integrated Ecommerce for Selling Books Online
Not every business has the resources or need to build a custom API integration. Luckily, Lulu offers a variety of ways to sell your books.
If you’re testing the waters of print-on-demand, you can easily make your book available on our own Lulu Bookstore. This is the fastest option, with your book available for sale within an hour of publishing. And with private links as an option, you can limit who has access or make the book available to a specific audience.
We also have the option to order multiple books for multiple customers at once with our Order Import tool. This option lets you collect order information and funds, like from a crowdsourcing campaign, subscription, or at an event, then place one bulk order at once. Lulu will print and individually ship your books to your customers. All you need to do is upload a CSV with the order and customer information.
For most businesses, though, the best option is Lulu Direct. This is Lulu’s direct sales integration, which is a fancy way of saying you can connect Lulu’s print-on-demand to a Shopify, Wix, or WooCommerce store in a matter of minutes. With Lulu Direct, you sell your book from your website, pay us for printing and shipping, and we handle the fulfillment. Once you’ve got Lulu Direct up and running, it is fully automated.
This option is the best for businesses scaling up book printing. Lulu Direct is fast to connect and easily makes your books available to readers all over the world.
Creating a Flexible Print Network
Lulu’s goal is to help businesses, large and small, use print-on-demand to fill the gaps that offset printing creates. We’re an affordable, high-quality printer with environmentally conscious practices to ensure our carbon footprint is small. If large offset runs aren’t an option or have proven inefficient for your business, print-on-demand is the solution.
With an international network of printers, more than two decades in the publishing industry, and flexible ways to connect sales platforms, Lulu is making publishing and bookselling more accessible for businesses all over the world.
