Did Lulu and Bookbaby Really Lose Their Bite At the Apple?

Rumors are swirling that Bookbaby and Lulu have lost their distribution deals with Apple's iBookstore.

A little birdie tells me--the same little birdie that alerted me to the Kobo deal some months back-that both Bookbaby and Lulu have lost their status as Approved Apple Content Aggregators. Now, no word on this, overtly, is forthcoming from Apple, of course; but a quick check of Apple's approved list of Aggregators shows that Lulu and Bookbaby are glaringly absent.

Sources say that Apple's sick of dealing with content upload problems, and is paring down their exposure to Aggregators to the companies consistently delivering quality content. Other sources state that while Apple claims that it wants to "own" the ebook space, it also has no desire to own Amazon's staffing requirements, put in place to deal with the Niagara of self-publishing authors. For the purposes of this post, we'll ignore the cognitive dissonance those two goals invoke. So for now, only a very few channels remain for self-publishers and indies to get their content on Apple--Ingram, InScribe Digital, InGrooves, and Smashwords...and there's heavy money being bet on Smashwords going the way of Bookbaby soon. The lesson here? Before deciding on distribution deals (in the biz, "distro"), make sure you've signed with a firm that can bring something to the table...and last through dinner.

Latest Blogs

11 July 2020

KDP, Print on Demand and Printing books in Color

"But, but...what do you mean, that it ...

02 July 2020

Fourth July Closing Announcement 2020

Holiday Closing Alert! Independence Day (July 4t...

02 July 2020

Phone Call Ban Notice

Phone Call Alert! (Please read, thanks.) ...

02 July 2020

Contact Page Problem Notice

Waiting for a reply to your inquiry? (Please rea...

20 December 2018

2018-19 Winter Downtime Closing Announcement

2019-20 Winter Downtime Admin Office Hours: Merry...

20 December 2018

Holiday Closing Announcement 2019

Remember our Fallen Memorial Day, originally call...

Phone Call Alert! 

(Please read, thanks.) 

Old Timey Switchboard Operator Cartoon

 

Due to the COVID-19 onslaught, we currently cannot take incoming phone calls.  

And since nobody reads anything, I've simply removed the phone number from the site.  

A notification about phone calls:  due to the COVID-19 plague, we've significantly increased our incoming inquiries--nearly double our usual volume--and the number of incoming inquiries by phone has been literally overwhelming.  Although most writers will say that their call "will only take 15 minutes," the truth is, that after 10 years of doing this, most author inquiry calls take an hour.  45 minutes at best. I'm currently receiving 7-10 calls/day, and due to that, I've had to stop accepting incoming phone calls, which my voicemail will tell you. You can leave a message--I can't call you back without one--and if a call is needed, I will of course call you.  But we have very complete and extensive email replies, handouts and our website is very informative. Almost all the questions that I receive during a call are actually already answered on our site, or are, in fact, publishing questions, not questions about our services, what we do, what we offer, or the like.  I already handle between 90-130 emails/day, as it is. I can't handle that many emails and take 7-10 hours of calls each day. I can't. So, in order to be able to answer this huge email volume, to help the greatest number of people, with my time, I've had to stop accepting calls.  I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. I'm in the process of setting up a call-appointment function, for free 15-minute calls to answer questions from new prospective customers and longer paid sessions for folks who generally want consulting on "publishing," generally (and for prospective kids' book publishers, as a special category of paid consulting).  But that functionality isn't yet set up. I hope to get that working the 3rd week of July, sometime.  

Thank you for your understanding.   
https://www.booknook.biz/ebook-news/did-lulu-and-bookbaby-really-lose-their-bite-at-the-apple
www.booknook.biz
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-39
71675
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:W2EJ2V3KOZERHGA573ZNK6LF6VJG3W6O
<urn:uuid:52a463c6-be4f-479c-89d4-99a80416f30e>
2021-09-23T20:26:01Z
158.51.63.193
text/html
sha1:56Y7SVNYMHWKZQSHQ2I465G7G2FZ75SP
<urn:uuid:0e68bdfb-4c45-4a14-9769-182321aa7e00>
https://www.booknook.biz/ebook-news/did-lulu-and-bookbaby-really-lose-their-bite-at-the-apple
response
<urn:uuid:fa8409eb-7a76-4122-b41b-3ade0afc5344>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-142
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/