Publish & Prosper
Where publishing, ecommerce, and marketing collide. Brought to you by Lulu.com.
Publish & Prosper
Creating a Custom Book Business Using Lulu's Print API
In this episode, Lauren & Matt explore Lulu’s open source Print API. Don’t know what an API is? We’ve got you covered. We also talk through the value of personalized products and creative ways to use Lulu’s Print API to power your custom book business.
Dive Deeper
💡 Learn more about Lulu’s Print API
💡 Sponsor Magnet by Justin Moore
💡 Listen to These Episodes
- Ep #31 | Your 7-Step Guide to Building an Online Bookstore
- Ep #43 | Make Your Self-Published Books Stand Out with Custom Details
- Ep #58 | Creative Ways to Use Print-On-Demand to Support Your Business
💡 Read These Blog Posts
- Personalization at Scale: How Lulu’s API Enables Customized Printing
- Scaling Your Business with Custom Books Using the Print API
💡 Watch These Videos
- Webinar | The Business of Books: How To Use Lulu's Print API To Scale Your Business
- Lulu U | Selling Direct with a Print API
Sound Bites From This Episode
🎙️ [13:40] “This is not a new concept. What this is is a more evolved technology for how to create these kinds of products in a really cool way and also get even more personalized and even more creative with them.”
🎙️ [27:10] “You are trying to build personal relationships with your customers, with consumers. Consumers are more conscientious than they were in the past. They are looking for - whether they realize it or not - they are looking for a personalized relationship experience.”
💀 Can’t wait for our next episode? Check out our Resources page for links to our blog,
our YouTube channel, and more.
💀 Find us on Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn at luludotcom!
💀 Email us at podcast@lulu.com
💀 Sign up for our mailing list.
Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome back to Publish & Prosper. We are up to episode 61, I think. Time isn't real and numbers aren't real either, but I'm pretty sure this is episode number 61. And it's gonna be another one of those episodes that Matt and I are probably going to at least once say, hey, challenge us to come up with a creative way that you can use this to help support your business and your brand.
Matt: Yeah, probably so.
Lauren: So, any excuse to get creative and nerdy about book ideas.
Matt: And I agree, time is not real.
Lauren: Time is definitely not real.
Matt: What are we talking about today?
Lauren: Today, we are talking about Lulu's print API and how you can use that to support your book business and come up with really cool custom creative ideas for a book business.
Matt: So APIs, which is an automatic programming language.
Lauren: Yeah, I definitely didn't learn that 30 seconds ago.
Matt: And a way to make a custom book business from these APIs.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And hopefully lots of money.
Lauren: Hopefully lots of money.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: If you're doing it right.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: The opportunities are there. We've seen - I mean, this is something that will probably be vague about throughout this whole episode, just going to hang a lantern on that in advance. We've seen a lot of companies build really, really successful book businesses using our API. I don't think we're going to reference any of them by name.
Matt: Well, yeah. And to be a little more clear and not so vague, you can hang a lantern on that however you want.
Lauren: Sure.
Matt: Like, yeah, obviously for some certain reasons, and we'll get into this. The API is a tool set that we provide that allows businesses to transact in a way that it's all white labeled for their business. So the idea is that your end customer, they don't know who the backend vendor is that's printing and shipping the books - it's Lulu - and many businesses choose to keep that non-transparent and to continue that sort of branding and customer journey all the way through. And so out of respect to them and their brands and what they're doing, we probably won't be able to really mention any company names, no, but all of the the use cases and the data that we're talking about It is all tied to actual brands using using our API's right now, so. Yeah.
Lauren: Yeah I also do want to before we get into the finer details of it and Matt explains to all of us what an API actually is and what Lulu's API is. If you listened to that just now and you're like, well, I'm not a business. I'm a single person with an author brand or something like that. I don't know how this is relevant to me, so I'm going to stop listening. Please don't do that. Mostly because we want you to hear the interesting advice that we will have for you, hopefully, in here. But also because it is absolutely relevant. This is not -
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: - just something that we're talking to enterprise level businesses or something like that. Our API solution is kind of just another arm of the direct sales solution, which is accessible to anybody from a small individual creator to a big company. So this is...
Matt: For the most part, yes, we'll get into this, but an API can be used by anybody -
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: - and it certainly is used by individuals. Our friend Justin Moore is using it right now to sell his book, Sponsor Magnet, that just launched, and he's doing really well with it. He had a little bit of help integrating the API. So it is code. It's not a lot of code, but it's code that has to be embedded into your website, integrated. So, you know, if you're not a developer or don't have a developer nature, you definitely should have a friend who's a developer or be willing to pay for a couple of hours of a developer, a freelance developer's time. And then once it's integrated, you know, it's pretty low maintenance if much. It's kind of set it and forget it. So it is an arm of selling direct, you're right. The API is best suited for people who already have a website. They don't want to use Shopify or any of these plugins that are out there right now for ecommerce. We should probably just jump right in.
Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. That's what, yeah. Just go for it. I just want to say out the top, like -
Matt: Yeah, no.
Lauren: - don't, don't write this off as like this is not relevant to me because I'm not a business.
Matt: Sure, yeah.
Lauren: Just trust us for a little while. Hang out with us for a little while.
Matt: Yeah. And even if you can't make use of it, I think this is good information for people to have.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: And, you know, just knowing more about what's going on in the publishing industry and the printing world and you know things you can and cannot do. This all kind of supports all of that, so.
A hundred percent.
[4:50]
Matt: An API, basically - API stands for application programming interface, right? An API in the way that I'll explain it is the way that I explain it to my friends and family or anybody else And the way that I had to have it explained to me, by the way, because I am NOT a developer. I can set up my own iPhone. So I'm, I'm pretty tech savvy.
Lauren: Wow, look at you.
Matt: That's right. But I'm not building any websites from scratch anytime soon. But an API, it's basically a bridge, right? Think of it as a bridge, as a way for two systems to speak to each other on the back end without requiring that either system or platform knows the inner workings of the other really well. And so if you want - consumer examples of this, by the way, mass consumer examples would be if anybody's ever used Zapier or Zapier, where you create zaps. What you're essentially actually creating in many cases are APIs, little bridges between one tool you use and another tool you use.
A newer thing that's out there right now is Make.com. A lot of people have been having a lot of success with that. But again, APIs are just, just think of them as little information bridges between two systems, platforms, backends from various different softwares or solutions. So an API just allows one system to talk to another and it does it in a very automated and quick fashion. So when we say API, that's what we mean. At the end of the day, if anybody's using, let's say, a Shopify plugin or something like that, it's a form of an API as well. So again, it's very similar. But understanding now what it is and what it does, I think will help frame this conversation for a lot of people.
You'll also understand why we said if you're not a developer, you don’t have a friend that's a developer, which these days most people can throw a rock and hit one of their friends that does something in programming and coding. But if you're not that lucky, there are freelance developers and coders out there that you could probably get a couple hours of their time Inexpensively, to a degree, to help you integrate the API if that's the route you wanted to go.
So that's what it is, that's how it works. Now we'll get into kind of how you would use that to build like, a custom book business and do some of the other things that you can do with the API.
Lauren: Right. So feel free to correct me if I'm and please do correct me if I'm wrong about this, because like Matt, I am -
Matt: You're wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Lauren: Like Matt, I am not a developer, right?
Matt: Correct.
Lauren: Okay. So yeah, this is definitely one of those things that I have a working knowledge of, but not personal experience with. But one of the things that makes the API so customizable is the fact that it is this open source code that anybody with the know-how or the patience can customize the elements within it. So it's more… I'm not going to use the word customizable again three times in one sentence, but it's more bespoke. So if you have some really cool ideas for something that you want to do with a book project or with a whole bunch of different book projects that would be fairly complex to use, just like, the regular Lulu publishing tool to do it. The right person can use this code to build those functionalities -
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: - into their own website instead. And then you're just plugging that into your like plugging your website into our worldwide -
Matt: That’s right.
Lauren: - print network.
Matt: Open source just means we take the guardrails off.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: You can use our APIs and we'll let you customize it on your end to do what you need to do. It's more for purposes of personalization. I think that's typically the word that is used more often with what people are using it for and what type of books they're creating and what they're doing with it. But again, yeah, open source is just another word for, you know, whoever's letting you use that API or giving you that API. If it's open source, it means a lot of the guardrails are removed and you can kind of alter it and customize it to your benefit. Other APIs aren't open source in many cases. If you're, you know, let's say tapping into Google and using their APIs to pipe in and pull out information around Google Analytics or something like that, they're not going to take the guardrails off and let you customize their APIs to a certain degree. Some of them maybe depending on what it is, but open source just means you can, you can customize it. A lot of stuff in the academic world is open source too. That's really important to them is making things open source. And that's kind of where our company even came from. Right?
Lauren: Right.
Matt: So Lulu was founded by a gentleman named Bob Young. Bob Young was the original co-founder of Red Hat, which is an open sourced software solution, essentially. So our founder came from tech. He came from software. He came from a tech entrepreneurial sort of mindset when he started Lulu and he started Lulu as somewhat of an open source online self-publishing company.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: There really wasn't anything at the time like Lulu. And again, Bob saw a gap and he filled it. So that's why a lot of the stuff that we do like our print API and some of the other things we do, we still keep true to that open source sort of code. That's something Bob always believed strongly in, so.
Lauren: Yeah, it was something that Red Hat was like founded on the principle of the best way to foster growth in technology was to have this open collaboration, non-proprietary tech that was designed in a community focus, so…
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: The same principles kind of applied here -
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Where we'll give you the tools that we have available to us for you to customize it and make… I used the word customize again.
Matt: Personalize.
Lauren: You can personalize… Well, I didn't want to mix it up with when we talk about personalized books later, cause that's a whole different element within this.
Matt: I don't know what to tell you, you're just stuck with the word customize then.
Lauren: This does happen to me. I get stuck on the same words and just use them repeatedly. I think that's why that's one of my like editing nitpicks all the time when I'm editing other people's writing is if a very specific words use the same time, multiple sentences in a row, I will always call it out because I'm very aware of myself doing it. So I always get hung up on it when other people do it.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: Yep. Look, if this podcast has taught me anything. It's made me very aware of both of our like, verbal tics and and habits and the way that we say things and the phrases that we use over and over and over again.
Matt: I have no idea what you're talking about.
Lauren: That's okay.
Matt: Zero idea what you're talking about.
Lauren: Let's keep it that way.
Matt: Yeah i feel like you're baiting me into something -
Lauren: I am not.
Matt: - with tropes or niche or whatever but -
Lauren: What'd you just say?
Matt: Let's just move on.
Lauren: What'd you say though?
Matt: Nothing.
Lauren: Uh-huh.
Matt: I said trope.
Lauren: Yep okay.
Matt: If you really want to know, I combined the two. I said niche.
Lauren: I know I heard the T in there.
Matt: I was trying to give you a little bit of… yeah.
Lauren: I'll take it. I'll take it. I will - I will share some resources in the show notes that go a little bit deeper into what our API is specifically. So we don't have to dive too deeply into that if you don't want to.
Matt: Yeah, I don't think we want to spend this -
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: - this episode going through all the technical -
Lauren: Right.
Matt: At the end of the day. That's what an API is. It's a way to communicate between two systems. It’s a stripped down plug-in if that’s how you choose to look at it. But again, it does require a little bit of developer understanding, or a developer to integrate for you.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: So.
Lauren: So, I will have in the show notes a link to a webinar that we did, a blog post that we did, and also just link to our landing page on our website that goes into more detail about the API and includes a form for you to connect with our onboarding team. So if you are curious about that, go check those resources out.
Matt: Very good.
[12:18]
Matt: So why in the world would we want to use an API when we could just use plugins, Shopify or WooCommerce or Wix, or any of these other…?
Lauren: Because you want to get really personalized with your book business and create some really cool, really neat custom products. Personally that would be my -
Matt: Yeah. I mean, that sounds like fun.
Lauren: It does sound like fun. I was - I actually had a lot of fun outlining this episode. I kept cutting things out of the outline because I kept going off on tangents of like… you could do something really cool like this idea.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And then it's like alright, let's bring that back in a little bit.
Matt: Let's be clear. Most people have seen an example of what we're talking about, right?
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So most people have seen these books where… at a mass scale I've even seen it as recently as this past holiday and like Target, there'll be a whole shelf of little books, right? And it'll have names already there like, you know for Matt or Lauren or Joe or whoever, right? So the book is personalized to some kid and that kid's name is also throughout the book for the main character. Or there are examples of this online and have been for years and years where you can create a book, put your kid's name in there as the superhero or whatever it might be like, whatever the book is about. And then, you know, they'll send it to you.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: It’ll show up in the mail
Lauren: I got one of these books as a Christmas gift when I was four.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So over thirty years ago. This is not a new concept.
Matt: Right.
Lauren: What this is is a more evolved technology for how to create these kinds of products.
Matt: That's right.
Lauren: In a really cool way and also get even more personalized and even more creative with them.
Matt: Yeah. What you received thirty years ago, and I'm almost positive I got one too when I was probably a little older than four, but I won't tell you how long ago that was. What you probably got was some poor sap had ordered, you know, 5,000 copies with the name Lauren in it and 5,000 copies with the name Sarah in it. And like the top twenty names for girls and the top twenty names for boys had them sitting in a warehouse and every time somebody ordered one with a particular name, you know what I mean? So a lot of it was done offset printing. Digital printing at that time was around, but not in the way that we have it right now.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: These days we're spoiled to a degree, but nonetheless, yeah. Personalization. We've all seen some sort of example of that. It's a way for you to personalize or customize a book for each individual customer. You know, there might be something, one little thing, lots of little things that are different each time. Whether it's the person's name in the book or their likeness. With the onset of AI, we've seen some really cool stuff happening with personalized books.
Lauren: Yeah, because it's also, you know, not just personalized as in the name or the character description or whatever, but the content of the book itself can be personalized.
Matt: Yeah, yeah.
Lauren: And that's where we see things get really cool. Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. Especially in like, the health and wellness space and some of those areas.
Lauren: Yeah. And if you're suspect about whether or not this is relevant, I did actually, I was looking at when I was outlining this episode, I was doing some research. And according to Technavio, Technavio, I don't know, it was founded in a Yahoo Finance article, the -
Matt: Yahoo?
Lauren: What did I say?
Matt: Yahoo.
Lauren: Oh, okay. I apologize for that.
Matt: I'm just wondering.
Lauren: Yahoo. Better?
Matt: I mean.
Lauren: Kay.
Matt: Depends on what kind of niche.
Lauren: How would you say it?
Matt: Yahoo.
Lauren: Okay.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: All right. Anyway, the - based on a study they've been doing for the last few years, the global personalized gift market is forecasted to grow by 10.76 billion US dollars between 2025 and 2029. So it's - not only is it still a relevant market, but it is an actively growing market.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: I think we've seen a lot in general and not - and again, we're not just talking about things like I got a picture book for my niece that has the main character's name is her name in the book. When we're talking about personalized content. We mean really like personalized, bespoke, customized to the individual buyer so that this content is made just for you.
Matt: Yeah. And, and obviously we're talking about more than just fiction.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: In fact, more nonfiction than fiction.
Lauren: Absolutely.
Matt: There's so many different uses for it from everything like finance to marketing, to business, logistics, you know, supply chain stuff. There are tons and tons of ways you can customize and personalize content that you might want to send to an existing client, a potential new client on the fiction side, there's still lots of ways to use this that make it really creative and fun to set yourself apart from other authors. You know, you could do something really cool where somebody starts their journey with your book or books on your site first, they choose one of three paths they wanna start, and based on that choice, that's the book that's dropped into their cart, and they purchase it, and that's the path that they take into your series.
Like you can do all kinds of really cool, personalized or customized things that, you know, are different for every reader and or group of readers or things like that. It's also really cool then, on a more practical level too though. Like if I'm an author, let's say fiction author, and some book club wants to buy fifty copies of my book, I could do something really cool. And for that order, I can automatically have an update or a personalized piece of content slipped into that first page of that book that's addressed to that book club that speaks to that book club. You know, thanks for purchasing my book. I hope you all have a great time reading and discussing, you know, blah blah, whatever you wanted to put in there. But it's a really cool way to, again, personalize for any number of different reasons, fiction or nonfiction.
Lauren: And we did also do an episode about personalizing books like that, personalizing content like that without using the API.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So if you are listening to this and you're like, okay, I'm still not entirely sure about this open source developer code, blah, blah, blah, whatever. There is another episode you can go listen to if you want to check that out for -
Matt: Right.
Lauren: - for a little bit more user friendly ideas that are just going to be like, a little bit more of a manual process for you to do this. So if you - that's something that you're like, oh, love that idea. But I'm not sure how often I would do it. And I'm not sure that it's worth the time to set up the API for that. Fair. Go listen to that other episode. It's episode number 43, I think. I will double check that and I will make sure it's linked in the show notes. But if this is something that you want to do on a regular basis or if this is something if you can think of a bunch of different ways that you could make this useful to you then it's worth taking the time to set up for sure.
[18:56]
Matt: Yeah, and you can do lots of the really cool things too. You have a note in here. Maybe if you're a food content creator, you know, or a blogger, and you happen to have recipes or things on your blog or your website, you could build out an API process whereby your user, reader, customer, however you want to refer to them, could choose all their favorite recipes from your site. Or buckets of dessert, soups, whatever, and check out, and they get a fully customized cookbook from you -
Lauren: That would be so cool.
Matt: - that would just be their favorite recipes or even includes some articles that you wrote about food prep or you know how to build and maintain the perfect spice rack -
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: - for somebody who likes to cook. I don't know.
Lauren: Or even something as simple as you know if you have a customized - same example - like, cookbook… it always drives me a little bit crazy when I'm going through cookbooks and the recipes are either all different serving sizes.
Matt: Oh.
Lauren: or they're always serving sizes that are like, serves eight people. I'm like great, so I'm gonna have the same meal eight times this week or I have to do math and unless I write it on the page -
Matt: To quarter the recipe?
Lauren: - then I'm inevitably gonna wind up like not quartering one thing and then I put way too much salt in or something like that.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Yeah. Yeah, so imagine if you could just have a customizable like, you enter in like what the what you want the serving size to be. Like I want the default serving size and all the recipes to be -
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: - serves two people.
Matt: No that’s
Lauren: And now you can generate the same book that you would send to anybody else but it's two people or three people or so an odd number or something like that. Like that could be really cool.
Matt: Yeah or, or somebody has such a, a diverse range of - you know again we'll stick with this one - recipes, that maybe you want to create separate books for each type of food, right? So maybe first you want all their, I don't know, recipes for Greek food.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Right? And then you're gonna have that one book. And they have the flexibility and the freedom to do that. You know, and then they want all of your, I don't know, Eastern Russian food.
Lauren: Sounds wonderful.
Matt: I only eat chicken nuggets and pizzas so I'm really bad at this but -
Lauren: That’s also true.
Matt: you know, yeah.
Lauren: I want to… I want your complete recipe collection, but I want to filter out any recipe that even has the barest hint of a suggestion of blue cheese in it.
Matt: Oh, see there you go.
Lauren: There you go.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And that's just Deselect all recipes of blue cheese in it, everything else published into a book and send it to me.
Matt: Just give me all the pizza and chicken tender recipes.
Lauren: I'm still waiting for your 52 weeks of burrito recipes
Matt: I forgot about that.
Lauren: I don't know how you possibly could have forgotten about that, it was probably the best idea we've had on this podcast to date.
Matt: Oh, okay. I'll do that.
Lauren: I'll remind you again, don't worry.
Matt: Dang. I don't know how to forget.
Lauren: I have started leaving reminders for myself when I edit these episodes of things that I need to bring back up with you.
Matt: You should.
Lauren: I should definitely do that.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Because I always hear back things that I'm like, I forgot again, I gotta put that Disney book in the show notes.
Matt: Oh, Steven's?
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, I think it's finally released.
Lauren: You gotta send me the link for that.
Matt: I did. Did I not?
Lauren: No, you showed -
Matt: On Instagram?
Lauren: You sent me the Instagram story, but I don't think there was a link attached to it.
Matt: Oh, okay.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: It's okay. Well, we'll figure that out later. But see, there's so many creative and fun and cool ideas that you could come up with when just spitballing about custom book ideas.
Matt: Yeah, I mean we didn't even touch on like, journals and notebooks and things like that where, you know -
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Personalizing and customizing is a really big thing right now as well as again health and wellness being able to, you know, have somebody take a quiz about their height, their body type, what goals they're trying to achieve. And then what they get from you is a highly personalized book of, you know, all different types of exercise routines and recipes and things like… I mean, there's just so many ways to use the API to personalize the content. It's, it's wild.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Even for stuff like taxes and finance stuff, right? Like setting up budgets and helping people plan financially for certain things.
Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. And I do want to go back to the point you made at the top of that, which was -
Matt: The 52 burritos?
Lauren: No, we're definitely coming back to that, though.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: The low and no content books. Because it is very popular - this is a great idea for notebooks, planners and journals. In which case like, I want to highlight the point that we're not exclusively talking to authors about this, because I know that people that create low and no content products might not be thinking about themselves as authors, because they're not actually writing books.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: They're more like publishers because they're creating the content of the book and selling the content of the book, but you don't really think of a planner as a written book…
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Or something like that. But that is another thing that we've seen people have really cool success with, have really cool ideas about, something that I would love. I'm so picky about my planners and I've just given up on trying to buy my own every year, and I hand draw, custom create my own every single year now. And it would be really cool if I saw somebody like, spin up a website that was here are different page layouts and we'll let you modular design, choose what kind of pages you want within your book.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: We'll spin it up for you, send it out for you.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: That would be great.
Matt: Different template of pages -
Lauren: Yup.
Matt: - and things that they can choose from.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: That's a good idea too.
Lauren: Exactly.
[24:15]
Matt: I see you have something in here around the benefits of offering custom and personalized books.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: I'm really liking this first sentence that you can appeal to niche audiences with curated content that feels more personal.
Lauren: I'm going to start spelling niche two different ways. I'm going to - when it's a bullet point that I think Matt's going to read or touch on, I'm going to s pell it with a T just for you.
Matt: So you think there has to be a T in there?
Lauren: You think that there's a T in there?
Matt: Well. So, how do you pronounce church?
Lauren: Church? There's no T in church.
Matt: Right.
Lauren: Where do you hear a T in church?
Matt: How do you pronounce it?
Lauren: Church.
Matt: Church, niche.
Lauren: No.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Definitely not.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Not comparable.
Matt: Okay, rich.
Lauren: …Okay, now that's comparable. The riches are in the niches.
Matt: See?
Lauren: The reeches are in the neeches. Can't. I gotta figure out how to make a shirt that says the reeches are in the neeches.
Matt: That whole no T argument doesn't stand though.
Lauren: That's right. I also, you realize that we're having this argument, I come from the only place in the country - this is my favorite fun fact of all time - I come from the only place in the country that pronounces Mary, merry, and marry as three different words. So I come from just a regional dialect of weirdos. I recognize that.
Matt: We have already determined and confirmed and validated that you…growing up in upstate New York, you had a lot of weird idiosyncrasies around the English language and variations of the King's English that most other people probably don't speak.
Lauren: Well, people from upstate New York speak way differently than people from Long Island. Thank you very much.
Matt: Yeah, okay.
Lauren: But.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: It's still niche.
Matt: Well, it's also still true that one of the benefits of doing custom and personalized books is that you can appeal to a niche audience using curated content and being able to make things feel more personal for people, right?
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Because we're in a world where most things these days are being generated by AI or some sort of automated tool to a degree. And anytime we can feel some sort of personal connection or personalized sort of attention paid, like… it feels good and we typically will gravitate towards that, so. And again, we're not talking about the tried and failed insert name here email templates that have been running for the last twenty years, right?
Lauren: Right.
Matt: Like that's not the kind of personalization - yes, you can do that, but we're talking about going deeper with your personalization, content modules and things like that. So if you just want to be able to put somebody's name on a book, yes, you can use us to do that. But I would also say please don't do that.
Lauren: Yeah, that's fair.
Matt: Provide more value than just putting somebody's name on a book.
Lauren: Right. But this is something that is providing value to your customers.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And this is something -
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You know, this is something that we've talked a lot about and we will continue to talk a lot about because it's so important and it gets more and more important in our current environment and ecommerce ecosystem -
Matt: Yeah, yeah.
Lauren: - I guess, this idea of like: you are trying to build personal relationships with your customers, with consumers. Consumers are more conscientious than they were in the past. They are looking for - whether they realize it or not - they are looking for a personalized relationship experience.
Matt: I think that's always been true to a small degree. But if, if we start leaning a little more where you're going down the consumer psychology path and just buyer behavior and human behavior right now, there's a loneliness epidemic that's going on that everybody talks about, right? Because of social media and the onset of the pandemic and all these other things. And again, I think when you start talking about outside influences external to whatever business it is you're in, combined with personal, and then some of the other stuff that might be going on within your industry… Yeah, it all just is kind of culminating in this perfect storm of people needing to feel more connected -
Lauren: Right.
Matt: - to the brands that they choose to spend their money on or the creators they choose to follow and engage with or the authors they choose to read and support. And so that's why we continue to push not only more and more technology to help people sell direct, but just the concept itself of, you know, again, supporting brands and people directly that you appreciate so that they can continue to create and add that value to your life and you feel a little more connected. I think you're right, gone are the days where people just buy something because it's just there in front of them or it's the cheapest brand or it's the brand that's been around forever. I mean, there's some of that to a degree and there may be some things where you buy, you just buy what's on sale because it's a product that doesn't impact your life heavily. It's just something you need, paper towels or something. But for anything I think that holds a significant value in your life, most people are a lot more choosy and where they spend their money and they want to spend it where they're going to feel like it's making an impact per se.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: So.
Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we see a lot of that, so.
Matt: For sure.
Lauren: Yeah, and I think this is another great way to do that.
Matt: Well, and you know, the crazy thing is is I was talking to somebody the other day and we were talking about the latest sort of buzz in the literature world is Rebecca Yarros, right? So we have all these authors over the last -
Lauren: Rebecca Yarros, if you somehow don't know, is the author of Fourth Wing.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And the third book in the Fourth Wing series just came out a couple weeks ago and sold… twelve million copies?
Matt: Something ridiculous. Yeah.
Lauren: It broke the record for first week print sales.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: for a book.
Matt: But last…what? Five to eight years, especially the last five really, I mean, it's crazy how much stuff can be tied back to March of 2020, right? When the lockdown started happening, but romance and fantasy or romantasy as a category for reading just went crazy. Romance was always a strong category -
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: - always a big category. Fantasy really, I think picked up around that time. And now with Rebecca Yarros is kind of taking the lead over, you know, Colleen Hoover and a few others, where you're you're talking about straight kind of fantasy, dragons and stuff like that. Like, I think that's just another indicator of where we're at as a culture of escapism, of us trying to kind of like, get away for a little while into some, whether it's, you know, some other realm with dragons or some romance story where nothing seems real and time isn't real. And again, all these things are just pointing back to the fact that we, we need to feel human again, we need to feel interaction and engagement. So I think this stuff is important not only for fiction, but nonfiction, businesses, brands, and having tools like these where you can personalize and customize and make whatever that product is feel like it's an extension of that customer.
Lauren: Yes, and it's also like personalized products like this is a great way to build community with your customers as well.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Because while it is personalized to them, the experience of using it can also be a communal experience.
Matt: 100%.
Lauren: Because that’s a great way to be like, hey, you know, like I just had this custom book that I ordered, how are other people using it? Like, let me go on TikTok and search to see what, how people are customizing their versions of these books in creative ways that I can make the most of my use of it.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Yeah. Also just to correct myself, I mixed up my numbers. It was 2.7 million copies for the first week sales for Onyx Storm. 12 million copies sold last year of all three books in that series.
Matt: That’s a lot of books.
Lauren: Which is insane. That is an insane number.
Matt: Especially for a fantasy book.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Well, good for her.
[32:00]
Matt: Anyways, so we kind of talked about what an API is, you know, why it's used. We talked about… a little bit, you know, at least, why you might want to personalize content, what that means, what are some examples? I think we'll talk a little bit more about the kinds of books that you can do with this and what you would use them for and why they would be great products to do. But again, I think the important thing to understand here is like a lot of what we've been seeing, really again, since the onset of the lockdowns, people have really leaned into ecommerce, the idea of drop shipping, spending up businesses around an entire product set that you never even have to touch, right?
That is so prevalent right now. I would wager a guess, I haven't looked at the data, but I'd bet more than 50% of the ads that are in your social media feed are for products that that company never even touches. They're all drop shipped, they're printed on demand somewhere, they're delivered to you. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I think it's actually a good thing. And so my point here is that now more than ever do we have opportunities afforded to us, many of us, where you could literally spin up an entire business using a couple of different platforms, never touch a single product, in many cases not even put up a bunch of money up front, if any, right?
Lauren: Right.
Matt: This being one of them, and then you're making some money.
Lauren: Oh yeah, this being one of them, I mean the upfront costs of this are like buying a web domain and maybe paying a couple different designers and developers, depending on how much you're doing alone versus how much…
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You're hiring out help.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: I wanted to talk about some different content ideas. This is the fun part where we get to be creative with it, but I kind of broke it out into a couple of different buckets of content types that we can dive into a little bit for each of these. Oh my God, I don't remember what about that - I couldn't tell you what about that just reminded me, but while I did not watch any of Letterkenny, I watched the first three episodes of Shoresy.
Matt: Well, I'll tell you what, he is one of the funniest characters on Letterkenny. And you never even see him for probably the first three or four seasons.
Lauren: Yeah, they don't show his face at all, right?
Matt: Right.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: But what I will say is, go back and start Letterkenny.
Lauren: I'm not gonna do that.
Matt: You should.
Lauren: We'll see.
Matt: You absolutely should.
Lauren: We'll see. But I did mean to - I was meaning to tell you about that and I totally forgot.
Matt: Because I did start Shoresy and I didn't finish it.
Lauren: That's…okay. That's fair.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: That’s fair.
Matt: I don't think he's able to, I don't think they're able to pull off a whole series just on him.
Lauren: Okay noted. Anyway, different types of content, ideas. I kind of broke it out into personalized content, modular content, and bespoke content. And we'll talk about what those are. And those are totally arbitrary. This is not, you're not going to go find a BISAC category for bespoke content ideas or something like that. Well, maybe you might, I don't know.
Matt: I mean, technically isn't bespoke just kind of a fancy way of saying personalized?
Lauren: Yes.
MAtt: Okay.
Lauren: Yes, but I was trying to keep them separate a little bit.
Matt: Alright.
Lauren: But so personalized ideas, we've already kind of talked about this with like the personalized, beyond just the personalized ideas in the sense of like children's books with family names, pet names, whatever, blah, blah, blah in there. Also something that you can use, like logo branded content. If you're doing something where you're doing, like you're using notebooks as collateral at events, or you can help support businesses that are doing that. If maybe the thing that you're doing is you're starting a business where you're gonna create the notebooks for other businesses.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You know, like maybe we wanted to say, okay, anyone that comes to us, just upload your logo here to this website and we will quickly whip up a custom notebook with your logo on it in the cool colors -
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: - and drop ship that out to you for your conference or event.
Matt: My favorite is modular content.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: So the examples I've seen come through over the years that I really like the most are, you know, the travel guide, I always talk about that. Being able to customize and personalize travel books itineraries, you know, curate tailored content for luxury travel packages, things like that. I think is a really cool idea. I love seeing that. Textbooks and workbooks, things that are tied to online courses, I think are great examples of ways to use modular content and personalized books. You know, if you're doing online courses, if that's your thing - creating, promoting and selling online courses, I mean - actual physical workbooks are always a great touch. It's a great way to continue your branding throughout the journey and have some sort of legacy product actually in the hands and the home of your online course purchaser. So always a great idea.
Cookbooks we've talked about with fitness plans, things like that that could be custom tailored to each buyer, pulled from a set of templates that you have on the backend. So I think all of those are really great ideas. We've definitely talked about, I think even in the last episode, this idea of, you know, internal things for, for businesses -
Lauren: Yup.
Matt: - like employee handbooks and stuff like that. So again, there's no, I think, into this idea of modular content that can be mixed and matched in whatever way you see fit. Digitally you can do that in lots of different places, but in print, you know, that's a really cool idea. And we've definitely talked about before as well like, the idea of print these days, I think is pretty much the same as how people looked at digital twenty years ago. So much is digital now, like everybody's looking at print again, like, oh, here's how I differentiate myself. So, you know, what is old is new again, I think in many ways. And again, if I'm an online course creator and I've got ten courses out there on different ways to start up and run a business, having these actual physical workbooks or manuals to go along, I think is a great idea and it just adds more value to my online courses.
So I love all these modular content ideas. And again, you know, bespoke was the third one, but I really think bespoke falls in line with personalized. Again, we're talking about customized photo books or calendars or things like that, so.
Lauren: Yeah, but those are ones - really what I meant by bespoke in that was like, the content is personalized beyond more than just like, putting somebody's name in there or putting a brand logo on there, or having it be in a certain color, or something like that.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So, yeah.
Matt: I’ll give you that.
Lauren: Just like a more specific personalization, I guess. But yeah, I really - I mean, I agree that the, the strength of this more than anything else, and I think the coolest way to use this kind of API tool is the modular content. You know, I think that's certainly the main focus.
Matt: It’s certainly the most frequent way we see.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: Yeah. I think that's where the main focus is. And I think that's where the most fun is. For sure.
Matt: It's certainly where the most money is.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Right? And so the the the brands, creators, projects that we see generating the most revenue typically are tied to projects that are of modular types of content. But that's not to say on that other end, you know, we do see some pretty wild and wacky personalized project stuff that is is just crushing it as well from a revenue standpoint, but…
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, I think them the most revenue generating and some of the most fun projects we've seen fall into that modular content bucket, for sure.
Lauren: And it is to reiterate this point, the modular content model and ideas with that is something that you can do on your own without using the print API. If you wanted to just use a direct sales solution or even just the Lulu website or another ecommerce solution in general, you can. The difference is that you have to manually create every individual permutation, I think.
Matt: Yeah, or variation.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Essentially what you're doing is that's part of the API and part of why you need a developer-
Lauren: Right.
Matt: - or to be a developer, is you want to automate that through some other… so, you know a lot of these businesses they, they combine our API on the back end with their software that might also incorporate some AI, some generative AI. So again, their tools are doing the work for them every time not them and so yeah, technically there's a file update or variation of the file that's needed each time but that's ideally done on the back end with your system.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: So, and again, many times, especially now, it's driven by AI.
Lauren: Right. Because it does, while it is possible to do it manually, it does get unwieldy very quickly.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And I was thinking about, I actually, I think I use this as an example in the other episode that we did on custom books. And I can't remember if it made it into the final episode or if I cut it for time. But we talked about - when we recorded that episode, we talked about how I wanted to create books for going around the world at EPCOT.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And having like a little like pocket book for going around the world. And just immediately just kind of started going off and like, okay, well, there's three different variants that you could create on that because there's heavy debate about whether you start in Canada, start in Mexico or start in France.
Matt: But -
Lauren: - and people are very committed to which path they choose.
Matt: Real ones will start in Mexico.
Lauren: Correct.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: Correct.
Matt: Just wanna make sure we're on the same page.
Lauren: No, we are on the same page and I use the World Showcase entrance gate when I go there. So I literally will walk past Canada and the UK to start in Mexico and then go all the way back around.
Matt: Oh, okay.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: Cause I'm a Beach Club girly so -
Matt: There you go.
Lauren: - whenever possible that's where I'm staying. But yeah, but so that that right there, that's three different combinations or three different possible variants. And then I was like, okay, beyond that, you could have different types of content within there, not just the order that they go in. But what if… if I'm drinking around the world, I want to have an option in there for… I can keep track of like, what drinks we got in each country. But -
Matt: You drink around the world, I eat around.
Lauren: Well, that's so - but that's what I was thinking about was. Like. Okay, but for Matt, a drinking around the world guide wouldn't be as fun, but a snacking around the world guide where you could keep track of what snacks you ate in every country could be really cool. And then what about the different festivals? There's three or four different festivals at EPCOT every year. So do you want a section where you can keep track of festival specific food that you had there versus like, the regular, available all the time snacks? Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, the beauty of using print on demand and the API is that you can update those snack choices real time because you won't know the menu for the wine and food festival -
Lauren: Right.
Matt: - until a short period of time before it actually happens.
Lauren: Right.
Matt: So you'd be able to update your files quickly and appropriately to get those into the hands of your buyers and users.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Absolutely. And so that's the difference. I could do that either way. I could create those journals if I really wanted to and sell them direct -
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: - or sell them on my own and create those manually. But that, I mean, the examples that I just gave right there was something like twelve different books, I think, right there.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: At bare minimum.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Might even be more than that. And that's, that's a lot of work to do, as opposed to using an API plugin and developer tools behind the scenes on the back end there to do that all for me.
Matt: Yeah. And I think the, the main point there for people to take away is, you know, while the benefits and value of using an API are extremely similar to the, the direct plugins, like for Shopify, WooCommerce, you know, no need to have inventory. You're collecting all that customer information from each transaction, so you get to reuse that for marketing purposes later. Keeping all your profits, all those things are the same, yes. But again, the key here is that if you want to be able to offer true personalization, and do it in an automated fashion in a way that is non-manual for the most part, and allows you to scale that business, you know, out to a larger business, you have to use an API, yeah.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: So -
Lauren: And I, just to point out the obvious, the reverse is also true as well. If there was, for some reason you were not selling personalized books, but you were just looking for a little bit more of a customizable solution for just selling your books from your website in general.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: You can use the API as an ecommerce solution with no, with no book personalization or anything else in there. You're just using that as your ecommerce solution.
Matt: Well, you're using that as your fulfillment piece, yes.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: The API does not have its own ecommerce functionality in terms of transactions. Like, you would still need something there to facilitate the credit card payment.
Lauren: Oh. Who knew?
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Not me.
Matt: That's why I say the API is really meant for websites that have they're kind of already established. In a sense where I have a website already, I have my own, you know, merchant processing account with you know, let's say Stripe and all those things. And I don't want to go plugging in like Shopify or something else, I don't need that. You would use the API. Or if you're spinning up an entire business using the API, yes, you need to also plug in a merchant processor. You can just go get an account with like, Stripe or somebody like that. So that's the difference. Yeah.
Lauren: Cool.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Okay, great.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Well.
Matt: I like this around the world idea though, you should do that.
Lauren: I'm going to make one for sure.
Matt: I'll do the 52 burritos and I'll start with one in Mexico and EPCOT. But you need to do that around the world.
Lauren: Well, my goal is to spend my birthday at EPCOT this year. So that’s - I’m gonna, I'm gonna set that as a deadline for myself. I'm gonna have this book that I have made for myself as a fun little birthday trip souvenir by then. So.
Matt: You - there's no way you're gonna - your birthday is July 3rd. There's no way - I'm not good, I only remember that because it's the day before 4th of July.
Lauren: I am actually really impressed that you remember that.
Matt: Okay, well that's. Okay.
Lauren: Yo, I'm not saying I'm going to spin up a whole website and an API plugin and all that.
Matt: No no no -
Lauren: I'm saying I'm going to design this book before July.
Matt: Okay. I hope you do.
Lauren: I'll bring the test copy for myself.
Matt: Alright.
Lauren: I'll bring the proof copy and we'll test it out and I'll be able to make edits in it as I'm going and say, oh, you know, we should change this about it. We should change this about it. We should change this about it.
Matt: So then in time for my birthday, I would be able to use it.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: Because you know I'll be there as well.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: But unlike you, I start my EPCOT journey at Cosmic, which then allows you to just go right to Mexico.
Lauren: Oh, well, I mean, obviously if I can, because I will - also, I am at the point with Cosmic Rewind where I will pay the $20.
Matt: Oh yeah.
Lauren: I will ride it -
Matt: Told you.
Lauren: - twice in one day, so, I will.
Matt: Absolutely.
Lauren: Alright.
Matt: Let's wrap this up. We'll get this off line.
Lauren: We’re gonna - yeah, we'll let you guys know what we decide when we figure out what we're talking about here. But in the meantime, if you have any really cool ideas for custom books that you could create, a custom book business that you think would be really awesome. If you want to weigh in on where is the appropriate country to start in EPCOT - if your answer is France, don't bother.
Matt: Don’t bother.
Lauren: But if you would like to debate Mexico versus Canada, I am willing to. Or Mexico versus I guess the UK, because it goes UK and then Canada from the, from the World Showcase gate.
Matt: That's true.
Lauren: Yeah. So you know, feel free to feel free to jump in on that debate or the niche versus niche debate at any time. You can find us on Lulu social, you can email us at podcast@Lulu.com. You can let us know what cool ideas you had or challenge us to try to come up with some for you.
Matt: And if you don't absolutely hate the way that Lauren says niche, you could leave us a nice review.
Lauren: Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, leave us a review letting us know whose side you're on with that debate.
Matt: No, don't put that in the review.
Lauren: Yeah, come on, do it.
Matt: That's ridiculous.
Lauren: Do it.
Matt: Alright, later.
Lauren: Alright, thanks everyone.