Self-publishing company Lulu has made a flurry of new management hires as the company shifts strategy and prepares for a rollout of new products and services.
Lulu’s changes follow layoffs at the Raleigh company late last year. Last November, Chief Operating Officer Tom Bright confirmed to WRAL Tech Wire that nine people were laid off and more could be cut as part of a reorganization.
“Based on extensive customer research, Lulu – a ten year pioneer in open publishing – is refining its strategy and platform focus,” Bright said in a statement at the time.
Bright went on to say that Lulu’s broader mission is to help people tell their stories and share their experiences. The restructuring would involve “eliminating or changing the focus of more positions still under review as certain projects wind down through the first quarter of 2013.”
A message with the company today was not immediately returned but It looks like Lulu is making headway on the changes. As Bright hinted in November, and perhaps taking a page from the popular social media tools of today, key to the company’s planned new offerings will be the ability for authors to share content. The company said today that new services would be coming this year.
Lulu recently announced a collaboration with the Book Genome Project which has led to a beta test of what Lulu says is a first-of-its-kind tool that allows authors to compare their writing against a database of well-known books. The tool is called Helix and it’s the product of a multi-year “digital humanities effort to analyze the universe of the written word.” Lulu describes Helix as a tool to help writers.
Six management hires at Lulu were announced today: Brian Matthews, executive vice president, strategy and marketing; Gary Feder, general counsel; Shawn Barber, vice president, product management; Arik Abel, director, online marketing; Dan Dillon, director, product marketing; Meg Crawford, manager, social media marketing.
Lulu was founded in 2002 by Bob Young, co-founder of open source software company Red Hat. The company enables writers to publish for free; authors keep 80 percent of the profit they set when their books do sell. The company says that it has published the work of 1.1 million creators and that it adds 20,000 new titles each month.
