Wednesday, 30 July 2025

Massive Content Review Fail for Lulu from Amazon



Anyone fancying a copy of Tales From The Bible in colour from Amazon had better get a move on quick, cos I fear it's about to vanish. As are quite a few of my books. Today I got an email telling me a whole raft of my books, including quite a few that they've been happily distributing up until now, have suffered a "Content Review Failure" and won't be appearing there any more.

Over the past year my sales from Lulu have been declining as Amazon have stopped selling books from them, most particularly colouring books. 

Way back in December 2023, as you can see here, items like my Doctors colouring book were selling well (32 copies), as were my various pop colouring books, from 60s Pop to Eurovision. By July 24 that had dropped, but I was averaging about £25 a month in sales from the books that remained. Last month sales were down to £9, most of those being 60s and 80s Pop. Well now those various ships have sailed.

Here are the books that Lulu say "do not meet our partners’ Global Distribution Content Requirements" and why. Some of these concerns I can address, but whether it'll save them I don't know:

Tales Of Nambygate, because "The spine text is too close to the edge"

Comic Book Of Esther, because: "- Copyright year mismatch ~ Copyright year entered in the metadata does not match copyright year in the interior file.
- Spine text ~ The spine text is too close to the edge (or books with less than 100 pages should not have spine text).
- Missing ISBN in interior and/or cover file ~ The ISBN is missing from either the back cover OR the copyright page in the interior file"

7 different foreign language versions of my Eurovision books because, mostly: "This type of content is not accepted by our distribution partners"

Also gone for similar reasons are Eurovision volumes 1 and 2 and the Best of British & Irish; 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2020s Pop, Scottish Pop, Bowie, RomCom, Royalty, Christmas Movies and The Doctors colouring books.

Much more annoying is the loss of Comic Tales From The Bible because: "Insufficient Content ~ This type of content is not accepted by our distribution partners". Insufficient content? 90 full colour pages of 9 panel comic strips? Some of my best work ever. That is just a plain insult.

...also Prince Of Denmark Street and the Shakespeare Omnibus (for "Insufficient Content"- bloody hell, it's 365 pages of solid comics! What more content do they need?). These, luckily, are all still available on Amazon via D2D, and they have always sold best at live events anyway. But it is galling to lose what was once a promising online market, generating £50 to £100 a month in royalties, seeing it dwindle to nothing. 

The colouring books I can wave goodbye to, they were always a bit of a silliness and a distraction from my proper business of writing and drawing comic books. But the graphic novels and 'serious' books not being approved, after happily selling them all for years, seems unfair and is annoying.

My Books And Where To Find Them...

Richard The
Third (Colour)
Doctors Who?
Colouring
Socks Do
Shakespeare
Kids Comics
Annual 2026
Richard 
The Third (bw)
Findlay 
Macbeth
Prince of 
Denmark Street
Midsummer Night's 
Dream Team
Shakespeare
Omnibus

Comic Tales
From The Bible

Joseph, Ruth
& Other Stories

Space
Elain




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