Lulu's storefront pays more than its wide reach does

The writer's problem

An author choosing how to sell a print-on-demand book through Lulu has to weigh the platform's own storefront against wide retail distribution, two options with different requirements and different payouts. Lulu's own selling terms page describes both.

What the documents show

The page states that selling on the Lulu Bookstore is the fastest way to make a book available, pays an 80 percent revenue share after printing costs, requires no ISBN or in-depth metadata, and carries no fees or charges to make and sell a book. Retail distribution to what the page describes as over 40,000 online retailers and libraries, including Amazon and Ingram, requires the opposite: all necessary metadata, including copyright, ISBN and description, plus approval from each retail site before a book is listed. The page does not state a separate royalty percentage for retail-distributed sales, describing only the requirements to enter that channel. Lulu's own homepage confirms the same two-track structure and adds that Lulu has been a certified B Corporation since 2016, a certification describing the company's governance rather than its royalty terms.

The editorial choice

The Bookstore option trades a simpler setup and a higher published revenue share for a narrower audience, since it lacks the retailer discovery traffic of Amazon or the Ingram network; the retail-distribution option trades that reach for a metadata and ISBN requirement and a review process before a book goes live. An author or small press has to decide which trade-off matches how a given book will actually be found by readers, a decision the page frames but does not make.

What stays with the author

Preparing the metadata and securing an ISBN if retail distribution is the chosen path, and deciding whether to use the Bookstore, retail distribution or both at once, remain the author's task. These terms reflect the selling page as retrieved on 16 September 2026.

• Does an 80 percent Bookstore share outweigh the reach a wide-retailer listing would add for this book.
• Is the ISBN and metadata package ready for retail-distribution review, or does the Bookstore's lighter requirement fit the project's current stage.
• What royalty rate applies once a book is live through retail distribution, since the selling page states the requirements but not that figure.

An 80 percent figure and a 40,000-retailer figure describe two different products from one company, and the requirements attached to each, not the headline numbers alone, determine which one actually fits a given book.