Brad pretty much hit the nail on the head – it’s all about the expectation of how many units you think you’ll sell. Put more money up front, print lots of copies and get a better rate per unit or go the on-demand route and make your customers pay more (or the same amount but make less money) but with less work on your end.

Regarding doing it all yourself – yes, you can set yourself up quite inexpensively these days with a decent high-volume laser printer and binding machine (and probably a cutter) but you’ll be wanting to move a lot of units to make it worthwhile. I know someone who does this with medical training materials.

You’re also transferring the risk of stocking finished units printed by someone else with stocking the raw materials to do it yourself. On the plus side it opens up the arena to printing and selling other items easily. On the negative side you have to deal with the shipping, etc.

Without those costs you’re making a whopping 68% gross return. In small time retail that’s pretty damn good, the bike store is in that range and our accountant is very happy with us. That gross is also very close to your net return as I don’t imagine you’re incurring a great deal of expenses at this point. Bike stores can be very successful with as little as 30% net profit so I’d say your doing just fine.

The saving grace though is that combined shipping turned out to be very reasonable. A single book order was a full third shipping, but ordering two books only added a couple of dollars to the shipping cost and made for a more palatable ratio.

That’s not a criticism of choosing Lulu at all. What it is, is that it’s interesting to consider how new technologies (and various implementations thereof) impact buyer psychology. From my experience ordering Diaspora, one of the things that I think Lulu could do to improve is provide a shipping cost calculator at the first stage of the checkout—where you can still easily twiddle the quantity ordered to see what you’re buying and for how much—rather than leaving it as a potentially purchase-souring surprise at the very end after payment info has been painstakingly entered. Their current implementation of the checkout process cuts across the grain of how buyers evaluate and commit to a purchase price.

The upshot for Diaspora might be that some people who decide to forgo buying it, while others like myself will resolve to buy it only in pairs or greater.

I wonder if Lulu keeps stats on how many people get to stage 4 of the checkout and then don’t complete the order?

All that said, I’m glad Lulu exists despite its warts. Knowing history and tech, too, I can be confident that this kind of implementation issue will get smoothed out, either by Lulu or whoever usurps their niche.

Speaking from my own experiences.. If your friends become your business partners, then you will soon need new friends. If your hobby becomes your profession, you will soon desire a new hobby. In either case, the losses are not worth the potential financial rewards.

Diaspora technology: government -> corporate -> private
Business technology: corporate -> professional network -> amateur network

The core change in technology is always about automation and not gizmos. The way business is changing is the degree to which individuals are empowered by technology to produce as though they were networks of people. Below a certain threshold the risk is reduced or evaporates entirely, and it can become a hobby.

In publishing, there is still a corporate advantage in volume — WotC can dump hundreds of thousands of units on people, but VSCA is only talking hundreds. The place in the middle needs to demonstrate that its volume is also in the middle.