# Is Barnes and Noble finally getting its act together?



## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Got this email just now:

***

Dear Publisher,

We are thrilled to announce the re-launch of our self-publishing platform branded under the new name, Barnes & Noble Press. You will note that we have combined our eBook and print on demand platforms into a single experience and incorporated the brand change to reflect our close alignment with our retail stores.

With the new Barnes & Noble Press platform you will be able to sign in to a single website to create and manage your eBook and print books all in one place. Other highlights include: an increase in the royalty rate (65%) for eBooks priced $10 and above on all copies sold, and the ability for authors to set eBook pre-orders 12 months in advance. On the print side, we have added additional trim sizes, glossy cover options (in addition to matte), and less expensive color printing options.

Starting today, we will begin migrating accounts to the new platform. There will be a staggered rollout of the new site over the next three days, so you may not see all of your projects on the new platform until the migration is complete. Users who login to the current NOOK Press site will be automatically redirected to the new B&N Press website once their account and projects have been fully migrated. Books available for sale on BN.com and NOOK will not be affected and will remain on sale throughout the process.

We will be releasing new features over the next few months, and would love to hear what you think of the new site by emailing BNPressSupport (at) bn.com. Thank you for your continued support, and for publishing with Barnes & Noble and NOOK!

Sincerely,

The Barnes & Noble Press Team


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## It&#039;s A Mystery (Mar 14, 2017)

David VanDyke said:


> Got this email just now:
> 
> ***
> 
> ...


This sounds like good news!


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## The 13th Doctor (May 31, 2012)

Sounds interesting. I think I still have an account with them, but shifted all my books to D2D after not selling anything directly (Strangely enough, I sell on B&N through D2D).


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## Elizabeth Ann West (Jul 11, 2011)

Woohoo!


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

What would be even more interesting is if they rolled out a promotion program similar to AMS or Kobo. B&N is my absolute worst sales channel. I've never been able to get any sales traction there, even though I sell through Nook Press.


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

Just got the e-mail here.  It is very encouraging.  When they announced the removal of several features,  I wondering how long until the whole thing went down.  But this came as quite a surprise.


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## Rick Gualtieri (Oct 31, 2011)

"Is Barnes and Noble finally getting its act together?"

I hope so, but color me skeptical.


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## Desert Rose (Jun 2, 2015)

I don't have an email yet. I feel left out. 

On the other hand, this is the first month in ages where B&N has topped Kobo for sales, so I like to at least think they've unbroken the storefront.


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## Lydniz (May 2, 2013)

This sounds interesting. Maybe we'll get a better sales page now, rather than just a random list of titles that have sold recently.


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## juliatheswede (Mar 26, 2014)

I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I do okay on Nook (for someone who doesn't sell hundreds of copies every day). But I don't get one thing - 65 % royalties for books over $10. Isn't that what it has always been Where's the increase?


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## PermaStudent (Apr 21, 2015)

Rick Gualtieri said:


> "Is Barnes and Noble finally getting its act together?"
> 
> I hope so, but color me skeptical.


Right there with you. They've set me up for disappointment before.


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## Joshua Dalzelle (Jun 12, 2013)

I saw that in my inbox... I really hope B&N retools NOOK and makes it a serious competitor for Kindle, but I'm as skeptical as everyone else seems to be.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

Anything that looks like a legitimate investment in online infrastructure from B&N would be a positive step.


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## Jim Johnson (Jan 4, 2011)

GeneDoucette said:


> Anything that looks like a legitimate investment in online infrastructure from B&N would be a positive step.


Sure, because maybe it'll look good to anyone they're hoping will buy out the company.


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## Nate Hoffelder (Jun 9, 2014)

the answer is no


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## Rose Andrews (Jun 1, 2017)

Dale Ivan Smith said:


> Thrilled to see this! Definitely a turn in the right direction for them.


Yes. This is good news indeed.


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## My Dog&#039;s Servant (Jun 2, 2013)

No letter here.

Maybe I'm getting senile, but my memory says the last time they tried to make a big upgrade the whole site crashed and it was days, in some cases, weeks, before things started working again.


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## Flay Otters (Jul 29, 2014)

Rick Gualtieri said:


> "Is Barnes and Noble finally getting its act together?"
> 
> I hope so, but color me skeptical.


My thoughts.


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## Arches (Jan 3, 2016)

GeneDoucette said:


> Anything that looks like a legitimate investment in online infrastructure from B&N would be a positive step.


I agree that more investment in the B&N online store would be great for self-publishing authors. Stronger competitors to Amazon would benefit us authors, but the problem is B&N's online business will inevitably compete against B&N's brick and mortar stores, thereby speeding the decline of the larger part of the business. That's why the longtime management of B&N has worked so hard to shrink the online store, which was once a genuine threat to the Kindle Store.

Like Jim Johnson, I think a sale of B&N to new management would be best, but that new management will be stuck with the same internal conflict the existing management has mismanaged since the Kindle came on the scene. The better option would be for B&N to sell the online business to a business that could enthusiastically grow online sales, but then the rest of B&N would be creating another competitor like Amazon.

The end result is I think B&N has no good options for the online store. Hopefully, they'll prove me wrong and build it back into what it once was.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

we bring up past sins whenever Barnes and Noble is the subject. I wonder sometimes if we're capable of getting good news about them without Eeyore-ing all over it.


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## My Dog&#039;s Servant (Jun 2, 2013)

GeneDoucette said:


> we bring up past sins whenever Barnes and Noble is the subject. I wonder sometimes if we're capable of getting good news about them without Eeyore-ing all over it.


You have a point...but....

I've recently been moving some of my books back wide. I'd started with B&N early on, but when sales there kept drifting downward, I decided to try KU. Going back wide now--Google Play, smooth as silk (never had an account--they shut down just as I applied). Kobo, even better (no previous account). Barnes & Noble, where all those books were still listed but off sale? Nothing but a headache. Every single one of them flicked in and out of pending/on sale/pending/on sale...including conflicting status reports for the same book depending on which page I looked at. They still flicker occasionally, for no reason I can see. And this was the "new" site they've now had several years to get working

I'd love to see them succeed, but... we'll see. Maybe they really are beginning to understand their future is not in the past. I sure hope so.


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## Guest (Jan 24, 2018)

This is part of the reason:



> I agree that more investment in the B&N online store would be great for self-publishing authors. Stronger competitors to Amazon would benefit us authors, but the problem is B&N's online business will inevitably compete against B&N's brick and mortar stores, thereby speeding the decline of the larger part of the business. That's why the longtime management of B&N has worked so hard to shrink the online store, which was once a genuine threat to the Kindle Store.


There were lots of factors why Nook eBook Store and Nook Color Tablet and Nook ereader, which was once a very serious threat to Kindle Store, is now a marginal player

A) The B&N Founder started talking a lot about how they were selling Jumbo Jets full of Nook Color Tablets. Within 8 months Amazon launched Kindle Fire Tablet. If the gentleman had shut up and let sales go on he might have gotten another year or two to gain market share. I think the figure quoted was 700,000 in one month. At that time there was no Kindle Fire Tablet. Amazon announced one within 3/4 months and released it within 9 months

A2) Apple launched iPad and that basically stalled growth of ereaders and reading tablets

B) A lot of B&N's traction was '1 million free ebooks from public domain'. For a year Amazon resisted it. Then Amazon countered with - 1 million free public domain ebooks AND exclusive free books from indie authors. What was Nook Tablet and Nook Ereaders biggest selling point became a negative

C) B&N is not a technical company. In fact, most of their Nook division software was run by an external california company which in turn had lots of outside US developers
For Nook Color and Nook HD tablets the Operating System was a skin on Android, and that skin was coded mostly by people who weren't even part of B&N Nook. So their core competency for their tablets was outsourced. It's pretty crazy. The Nook team were all very serious and good to work with. great people. unfortunately they didn't keep the technology expertise in house and that meant they never got as good as they needed to be

D) Yes, author is spot on. B&N was always scared of cannibalizing print sales (which were profitable) with ebook sales. That was also a factor

E) B&N just doesn't have the revenues or the additional products to subsidize costs. They were taking big losses on Nook division because of R&D costs etc. Amazon can sell kitchen sinks and shoes and cleaning detergent and use its crazy stock valuation etc. to keep spending. B&N doesn't have any of that

F) Exclusivity of indie authors became a thing. A few indie authors becoming exclusive doesn't matter. However, hundreds of thousands of indie authors being exclusive to one ebook store gives it a very big advantage

So, complaining about Nook being non-competitive is crazy as it's indie authors who made it less competitive

You had

Amazon
Sony 
Kobo
Nook
Apple
Google Play

Instead of doing divide and conquer and leaving each with 20-25% market share and begging for your attention

indie authors gave one store exclusivity and signed up for Kindle Unlimited and let it get 65% of US market. Now indie authors have to beg for attention

**************

The big thing is that everyone in ebooks (especially the current largest ebook stores) is now trying to preserve $5 to $15 ebooks, because they can only survive if ebooks don't go to $0 to $5 range and stabilize there

That point actually creates an opportunity for new entrants

Existing ebook stores are reluctant to go all out with indie authors and lower priced books
So if someone were to start from scratch and build around a world of $1 to $5 ebooks they could take over ebooks. $1 and $3 cannot be beaten by $5 and $10. The stores are throwing everything they can and they still can't kill off low priced books. They are even trying to build entire new bestseller lists to hide low priced books from readers

So the big opportunity for Nook, Kobo, Apple, WalMart is - just go with $0 as marketing and $0.99 to $4.99 for revenue - and let go of print book sales and higher priced book sales

The scary thing there is that you end up with

$0 for marketing. So how do you make marketing money? There's no marketing that's as good as free books (provided authors have other paid books the people downloading free books can buy)
$0.99, $1.99, $2.99, $3.99 for sales. So authors have very little money to do marketing
hardly any cut as 30% of low prices is very low. Note: To beat market incumbents a new store would have to give 70% of $0.99 and $1.99 books

So someone has to figure out how to make a sustainable business from that. That really is the end state, though. Whether or not someone builds something for that, that is what we're going to end up with. All the things you see, are a counter to that. Stores trying desperately to preserve higher priced ebooks and paperbacks


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## Caimh (May 8, 2016)

I don't know about the rest of it but I'm fairly sure Amazon would have noticed the sales of a rivals product even if they'd held their board meetings in a bunker.


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## Speaker-To-Animals (Feb 21, 2012)

I've never seen the problem with B&N as being about the author platform. I see the problems as being mismanagement of the Nook platform on the consumer side leading to poor or more accurately non-existent sales.


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## MissingAlaska (Apr 28, 2014)

One question - does publishing paperback/hardcover through B&N (instead of Createspace) give you access to independent bookstores and/or libraries?  Many small booksellers won't stock books printed by Amazon -- but will they stock those from B&N?  Secondly, will Amazon sell hardcopy POD books printed by B&N?


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

The timing could not have been better for me. I just re-published my first series with BN a few days ago. Time to get my box set up there! Woo-hoo!


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## Used To Be BH (Sep 29, 2016)

MissingAlaska said:


> One question - does publishing paperback/hardcover through B&N (instead of Createspace) give you access to independent bookstores and/or libraries? Many small booksellers won't stock books printed by Amazon -- but will they stock those from B&N? Secondly, will Amazon sell hardcopy POD books printed by B&N?


I think it's up to B&N to set up distribution channels. When they first offered hardcover, they didn't bother. If they list with with Ingram, for example, then yes, Amazon will list them--though probably with the usual non-CS "temporarily out of stock" message.


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## Used To Be BH (Sep 29, 2016)

Arches said:


> I agree that more investment in the B&N online store would be great for self-publishing authors. Stronger competitors to Amazon would benefit us authors, but the problem is B&N's online business will inevitably compete against B&N's brick and mortar stores, thereby speeding the decline of the larger part of the business. That's why the longtime management of B&N has worked so hard to shrink the online store, which was once a genuine threat to the Kindle Store.
> 
> Like Jim Johnson, I think a sale of B&N to new management would be best, but that new management will be stuck with the same internal conflict the existing management has mismanaged since the Kindle came on the scene. The better option would be for B&N to sell the online business to a business that could enthusiastically grow online sales, but then the rest of B&N would be creating another competitor like Amazon.
> 
> The end result is I think B&N has no good options for the online store. Hopefully, they'll prove me wrong and build it back into what it once was.


I wasn't aware they were trying to shrink their online business. If so, I think they're missing the point: avid readers often prefer to browse in a brick-and-mortar store, at least some of the time. Those people will keep shopping in the physical store if one is available. It's true that a lot of people are drawn to the convenience of online shopping, but shrinking their own online business just sends potential customers to someone else's online business, not to their physical stores.

Perhaps the upgrade to their indie publishing operation means they are reconsidering their original position.


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## BillSmithBooksDotCom (Nov 4, 2012)

GeneDoucette said:


> we bring up past sins whenever Barnes and Noble is the subject. I wonder sometimes if we're capable of getting good news about them without Eeyore-ing all over it.


Unfortunately, the skepticism is earned. I hope it is a true improvement signalling a change ... but there's an old story about a scorpion stinging because that's what they do.


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## Arches (Jan 3, 2016)

Bill Hiatt said:


> I wasn't aware they were trying to shrink their online business. If so, I think they're missing the point: avid readers often prefer to browse in a brick-and-mortar store, at least some of the time. Those people will keep shopping in the physical store if one is available. It's true that a lot of people are drawn to the convenience of online shopping, but shrinking their own online business just sends potential customers to someone else's online business, not to their physical stores.
> 
> Perhaps the upgrade to their indie publishing operation means they are reconsidering their original position.


I agree that B&N could benefit from people shopping in their stores and buying from them online, but the problem is those big showrooms are really expensive to maintain. Amazon is creating showrooms of its own, but they're tiny by comparison to most B&N stores. That difference in cost is what's dragging B&N down, although it's happening slowly.

In 2010, B&N.com's sales were $573 million and overall sales were $4.3 billion. In the most recent report, B&N.com's 2016 sales had declined dramatically to $192 million, but it's overall sales grew to $5 billion over six years. From the company's perspective, it might think it managed the digital revolution pretty well. Although it lost more than half of its digital business, it has managed to grow as a whole.

I expect that if you looked at the financials for the Big 5 publishers, you'd see something similar. By suppressing ebook sales, they've managed to eek out a bit of growth or at least keep their sales stable. That's why we keep hearing all these comments from traditional publishing, like "whew, we dodged that bullet."

As the new Author Earnings report shows, though, traditional publishing has survived so far by giving up on genre fiction sales, which have moved strongly into ebooks and self-publishing. If you write genre fiction, like I do, you're publishing options have been dramatically reduced.

The real question is where does B&N.com go from here? This most recent signal might be the first sign that the company has decided to embrace the future rather than hanging onto the past. I really hope that's true. Amazon needs more competition.

But look at the disparity in B&N sales figures. Would you risk hurting an already weak five billion dollar company to increase sales in its digital outlet that makes up less than five percent of the overall business? That digital part may be the future of book selling, but I suspect B&N is too heavily invested in the old ways to change.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

B&N is like Eddie Richardson to Amazon's Tyson.






Sans a miracle, I think they're done.


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## dgcasey (Apr 16, 2017)

ireaderreview said:


> There were lots of factors why Nook eBook Store and Nook Color Tablet and Nook ereader, which was once a very serious threat to Kindle Store, is now a marginal player


I've always thought B&N should get away from the physical readers like the Nook and just develop a free, full-featured app for phones, tablets and computers. Everyone carries a phone nowadays and a lot of people have tablets. Stop competing with the Kindle and just turn everyone's phone into a Nook. I have the Nook app on my phone, but I hardly use it because of the dearth of decent titles to buy.


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## dgcasey (Apr 16, 2017)

Running over to B&N and putting some numbers through their calculator, I have to wonder if it's really that great a deal. If I took _*Wicked Rising*_ and set it up as a print book at B&N, I'd have to price it at $22.72 minimum and I would receive a royalty of $1.14. Where's the upside to that? I sell this title at Amazon as POD for $14.95 and I get a royalty of $2.68. Same trim size, same cover and same number of pages. At this moment in time, I can't see jumping ship from Amazon until B&N gets serious about competing, because right now, it appears that they aren't.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

It is a given fact that digital books take sales away from print. Considering all the ebook formats available (Kindle, Kobo, Google, Apple, etc.), why does anyone think Nook Sales rob B&N brick and mortar stores of print sales? People choose print, digital, or audio. If they want digital, they will get it somewhere even if Nook, or a Nook app, ceases to exist. It seems like a good business move for B&N to capture some of that market. It's not going to affect print sales wherever readers get their digital copies.


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

Nate Hoffelder said:


> the answer is no


Careful Nate, your hate is showing through.  And you have been wrong before. You thought they were killing the nook last fall, but instead they released a new e-ink device. It is too soon to tell. I am also skeptical, but regardless it is a better outlook than say last week (for the moment anyway).

As I said, time will tell. Competition is good, monopoly is not. Sooner or later a monopoly will squeeze the customer. It is as certain as daylight in the morning. There is nothing else in the USA that comes close to B&N for retailing books except for Amazon. I don't want them to fold, but I am not a fan either because of all the crazy stuff they have done in the past. Still, I am keeping an open mind which is what I think we all should do.


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## abgwriter (Sep 12, 2015)

Sapphire said:


> It is a given fact that digital books take sales away from print. Considering all the ebook formats available (Kindle, Kobo, Google, Apple, etc.), why does anyone think Nook Sales rob B&N brick and mortar stores of print sales? People choose print, digital, or audio. If they want digital, they will get it somewhere even if Nook, or a Nook app, ceases to exist. It seems like a good business move for B&N to capture some of that market. It's not going to affect print sales wherever readers get their digital copies.


You took the words out of my mind. If somebody wants to read a book in their reader or tablet and goes to B&N and doesn't find it, that doesn't mean he is going to go to the store and buy the hard copy, no, he is going to open a new tab and find the book somewhere else. I feel like B&N and trad publishing keep fighting against progress without realizing that there is no way to defeat advancement. They are like the clay tablets fighting against paper sheets, or the hand-made books fighting against the printing press. Amazon treats books as a low-priced commodity vehicle to bigger expenses, and not as a product itself. Since they sell many more things, Amazon doesn't care if it loses money in the book department, as long as it gets the visibility that department brings to its other higher-profit departments (Electronics and Prime). B&N and Trad publishing sell ONLY books, so their cost-to-benefit consideration is much higher. If somebody should dominate the market in the e-book selling it should be them. If somebody should be innovating and bringing new options to the table, it should be them. Instead, they persist in keeping business methods implemented almost a century ago and when they don't work, they blame the Big Unfriendly Giant. Amazon is no saint, far from it, but with the publishers and B&N refusal to relinquish control over the industry and be open-minded to the new technologies, they've brought this upon themselves.


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## notjohn (Sep 9, 2016)

> So, complaining about Nook being non-competitive is crazy as it's indie authors who made it less competitive


Indeed!



> But I don't get one thing - 65 % royalties for books over $10. Isn't that what it has always been Where's the increase?


My reaction, too. Was there any bookseller other than Amazon with a sub-par royalty for higher-priced books?

Which brings me back to the first quote. Amazon began with a 35 percent royalty and only went higher when Apple broke the mold. I'm sure that it has plans for restoring that rate when it has muscled everyone else out of the business, with the help of the Kindle Select publishers.


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

Pretty sure pricing above $9.99 was a 40% royalty, so that change is significant.

Also, I was part of the beta for this and I can say that they do care. They do want to improve and make things better for indies. Whether back end changes will result in front end improvements, I can't say. 

Fwiw, I do better on BN than on Amazon.


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## Used To Be BH (Sep 29, 2016)

Arches said:


> I agree that B&N could benefit from people shopping in their stores and buying from them online, but the problem is those big showrooms are really expensive to maintain. Amazon is creating showrooms of its own, but they're tiny by comparison to most B&N stores. That difference in cost is what's dragging B&N down, although it's happening slowly.
> 
> In 2010, B&N.com's sales were $573 million and overall sales were $4.3 billion. In the most recent report, B&N.com's 2016 sales had declined dramatically to $192 million, but it's overall sales grew to $5 billion over six years. From the company's perspective, it might think it managed the digital revolution pretty well. Although it lost more than half of its digital business, it has managed to grow as a whole.
> 
> ...


I actually wasn't suggesting BN operate just as a showroom. People who like to browse in physical bookstores do actually sometimes buy from them. Amazon was surprised because it expected its customers to look at things and then shop online. A much higher percentage than predicted actually bought in the store.

What I was suggested was more along the lines of what Saphire and abgwriter have also argued: someone who wants to buy a digital product and can't do it as easily from Barnes and Noble will go to someone else's digital store. They won't come into a brick-and-mortar BN and do it if they weren't already going to shop there. In other words, BN is just throwing away business, not transferring it from its own online store to its physical stores. To the extent that their in-store grew, it wasn't because they stifled their digital store.

I checked at http://forinvestors.barnesandnobleinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=1031056 and got this data for 2017. I can't figure most of it out, but overall sales seem to be $3.9 billion--down from 5 in your data--but net earnings were $22 million, up from $14.7 million last year. I guess they're cutting costs more than they're losing gross income. It still doesn't sound healthy to me. The interesting thing is that in-store sales are down, but online sales--though not income--are up -6.5% vs +3.7.

I know BN and the Big 5 are both trying to resist ebooks and may think they have succeeded, but it's a little like a whole bunch of horse and buggy salespeople congratulating themselves on having resisted the automobile. Sooner or later, their intransigence will catch up with them. In fact, it already is catching up with BN. In his second to last report I think it was, Data Guy pointed out how the resurgence in print sales was happening mostly online, and mostly at Amazon. If BN is, as you suggest, too set in its ways to change, I think it's doomed.

That said, I'm not sure why a company that had really turned its back on digital would be trying to cultivate indie authors. Perhaps things will work out better than we expect.


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## Used To Be BH (Sep 29, 2016)

dgcasey said:


> Running over to B&N and putting some numbers through their calculator, I have to wonder if it's really that great a deal. If I took _*Wicked Rising*_ and set it up as a print book at B&N, I'd have to price it at $22.72 minimum and I would receive a royalty of $1.14. Where's the upside to that? I sell this title at Amazon as POD for $14.95 and I get a royalty of $2.68. Same trim size, same cover and same number of pages. At this moment in time, I can't see jumping ship from Amazon until B&N gets serious about competing, because right now, it appears that they aren't.


Are you referring to hardcover? I just ran a paperback comparison, and production cost is only a little higher than with CS. Hardcover production cost is about twice that. Or am I missing something?

Hardcovers aren't going to be big sellers, but a few people will want them, and they make nice gifts, giveaway items, etc.


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## Arches (Jan 3, 2016)

Bill Hiatt said:


> I actually wasn't suggesting BN operate just as a showroom. People who like to browse in physical bookstores do actually sometimes buy from them. Amazon was surprised because it expected its customers to look at things and then shop online. A much higher percentage than predicted actually bought in the store.
> 
> What I was suggested was more along the lines of what Saphire and abgwriter have also argued: someone who wants to buy a digital product and can't do it as easily from Barnes and Noble will go to someone else's digital store. They won't come into a brick-and-mortar BN and do it if they weren't already going to shop there. In other words, BN is just throwing away business, not transferring it from its own online store to its physical stores. To the extent that their in-store grew, it wasn't because they stifled their digital store.


From the outside, it's hard to tell what B&N's management is trying to do lately to turn around their slow decline. My thinking is that B&N has been purposefully restricting the online store or letting it suffer from benign neglect because they are concerned that digital sales are cannibalizing print sales. When a reader sees that a certain book on the shelves at the brick and mortar store can be easily purchased online at B&N.com for less, that tends to encourage the reader to buy digital instead of print. If your business is mostly print sales, though, as it is for B&N, management would naturally be worried about anything that would tend to reduce print sales.

Ideally, B&N would see the writing on the wall and accept that it's main business model is out of date. But when you have already invested billions of dollars in a vast infrastructure to support print sales, it is incredibly difficult to change the overall direction of the company. Almost everyone within the company has a vested interest in hanging on to the existing business model to the bitter end, praying all the while that a miracle will save them.

Now, in a big corporation like B&N, there can be sub-cultures much more willing to change, perhaps like the people who run B&N.com. They have a vested interest in making that part of the business successful, and maybe from time to time, they get approval to try something innovative to boost online sales. But the larger they grow those digital sales, the more of threat they pose to the rest of the company. And so far, whenever the corporate management has had to choose between hanging on to the traditional approach or aggressively going digital, the company has stuck with the business model that no long works like it once did.


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## SuzyQ (Jun 22, 2017)

KateDanley said:


> So, I went over to https://print.nookpress.com/ and what has me the most excited is that they offer hardback (with or without dust jackets) for just a couple dollars more than paperback on CreateSpace. Now, I haven't been on their site in a million years (I migrated everything to D2D) so maybe this is old news, but the thought of being able to create hardbacks without the setup fees of Ingramspark has me rethinking a lot of things...
> 
> Also, HOLY 65% ROYALTIES ON BOOKS OVER $9.99!!


This just got me soooo excited!


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## Lydniz (May 2, 2013)

Well I'm glad this thread came up, because I haven't had an email at all so wouldn't have known about the new platform. It looks like all my books are on it now, although on first look the sales reports aren't any better and don't have any way to separate freebies from paid.


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## Sarah Shaw (Feb 14, 2015)

There are a lot of things they could do to get people to come in and buy in the stores without necessarily pitting themselves against digital. I still love to browse in bookstores and if they'd do something like give you a digital copy free for every hardback you buy or give you a special digital discount if you buy and download an ebook AT a physical location I'd be back to going all the time. (Or I would if they had B & N in Europe, anyway.) People nearly always WAY underestimate themselves when they pit themselves to compete head on with the 'big guys'. I just don't get why they never seem to understand their own strengths and how to capitalize on them. 

Like all brick and mortar stores B & N has one HUGE advantage that it's doing nothing but screwing up- IT HAS PHYSICAL PEOPLE WORKING THERE. People you can actually see and ask questions of, who have names and who you can call on the phone, who can get to know your tastes and recommend things to you. Is there anybody in the world who isn't fed up to their ears with tree phones and outsourced calls? We see that complaint about Amazon as one of the big culprits everyday here on k-boards. Seems like B & N would get a clue from that.


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## EllieDee (May 28, 2017)

Huh, interesting.  I kind of expected them to just fold.  Hopefully this goes beyond a new name and new coat of paint.  I've always found their online store frustration to browse through.  Not many subcategories and everything just seems dumped into a big pile without many useful sorting options.  'Sort titles from A to Z?'  Really??


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

EllieDee said:


> Huh, interesting. I kind of expected them to just fold. Hopefully this goes beyond a new name and new coat of paint. I've always found their online store frustration to browse through. Not many subcategories and everything just seems dumped into a big pile without many useful sorting options. 'Sort titles from A to Z?' Really??


Years ago, after the Nook Tablet came out, they did a revamp of the website. Until then it was fast, easy, and efficient. After it was a slow mess. They have improved it since then, but it is still slower and harder to navigate than others. And I think I *may* have found out the reason. I was recently looking at the code of the website to find it is wordpress. That kind of surprised me, and possibly why it never got the speed back it had before the change. Wordpress is a great platform don't get me wrong, but I don't think it has the efficiency needed for a site the size of B&N. Then again, perhaps they don't know how to make it work well for their site.


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## EllieDee (May 28, 2017)

Huh, that actually would explain a few things.  I really thought a vendor of this size would have their own and not use wordpress code.  Maybe they'll take the initiative and fully revamp how things are sorted and accessed.  It's a big job but it only gets bigger every day with the indie pubber explosion.


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

It would seem the roll out is complete:



> Barnes & Noble Press
> 
> *****
> 
> ...


I removed two links which seem to be dead. Hopefully that is only a momentary glitch and not the sign of things to come.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

I got the new dashboard today, but never saw the email.


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## Ellie L (Aug 6, 2016)

NOTHING TO SEE HERE


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## Marseille France or Bust (Sep 25, 2012)

I'm playing around with the platform and adding print books. I've noticed a few things with the migration...

1. HTML markups like < br > are showing in book descriptions and author bio. Needs to be cleaned up.
2. 55%/print costs for print sucks. I had to kick a paperback up to $16.99 so that I could make $3 from it.
3. Easy to navigate!
4. 5x8 covers from createspace do NOT translate into right dimensions for B&N so you'll have to tweek new ones and change the bar codes.

But overall, excited about this.


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## Marseille France or Bust (Sep 25, 2012)

Only for e-books.



KateDanley said:


> So, I went over to https://print.nookpress.com/ and what has me the most excited is that they offer hardback (with or without dust jackets) for just a couple dollars more than paperback on CreateSpace. Now, I haven't been on their site in a million years (I migrated everything to D2D) so maybe this is old news, but the thought of being able to create hardbacks without the setup fees of Ingramspark has me rethinking a lot of things...
> 
> Also, HOLY 65% ROYALTIES ON BOOKS OVER $9.99!!


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## anotherpage (Apr 4, 2012)

David VanDyke said:


> Got this email just now:
> 
> ***
> 
> ...


Sounds like crap to me.

65% for ebooks over $10. Who sells at that price? I think they have it ass backwards and need to go back to the drawing board. Staring by firing whoever came up with that winning idea.

let me guess its 25% for under $10 lol


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## anotherpage (Apr 4, 2012)

Ellie Lynn said:


> Still not allowing Canadian authors to participate. I don't understand why that's such a hard thing for them to incorporate.


I know. Another reason why I will avoid them.

Long live AMAZON!


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

thevoiceofone said:


> Sounds like crap to me.
> 
> 65% for ebooks over $10. Who sells at that price? I think they have it ass backwards and need to go back to the drawing board. Staring by firing whoever came up with that winning idea.
> 
> let me guess its 25% for under $10 lol


I would sell at that price for certain books. Namely, boxed sets. I would like to do a set that has all five of my books from my first series in it, but I don't because that would cannibalize sales of the individual books if I sell it at only $9.99. Three of the books sell for about $5, one for $3, the other is perma-free. I am thinking of bundling them for a Nook only set now and price it around $15. It still saves readers money, and while I lose a bit over individual, I figure that would balance out as not everyone would have gone on to buy every volume.


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

thevoiceofone said:


> Sounds like crap to me.
> 
> 65% for ebooks over $10. Who sells at that price? I think they have it ass backwards and need to go back to the drawing board. Staring by firing whoever came up with that winning idea.
> 
> let me guess its 25% for under $10 lol


How is getting a higher royalty than before (and higher than Amazon) possibly a bad idea?

Methinks you are confoozled.


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## Used To Be BH (Sep 29, 2016)

I wonder if its just coincidence that BN, who hasn't shown much interest in a while, revamps at about the same time Apple does the same thing. Does this herald a mood change? There certainly is money to be made in ebooks. Maybe companies are deciding they'll take at least one more run at Amazon before giving up.


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## RobynB (Jan 4, 2011)

I got an email this afternoon that the rollout to the new "Barnes & Noble Press" is complete. Supposedly everything has been merged/migrated. 

I successfully logged in, BUT none of my stuff is there--none of my books, none of my sales history, no tax docs. Nada.

Anyone else having this problem?

I've contacted support, but I'm not holding my breath.

My ebooks ARE still live on the B&N site.


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## Marseille France or Bust (Sep 25, 2012)

My info is all there.



RobynB said:


> I got an email this afternoon that the rollout to the new "Barnes & Noble Press" is complete. Supposedly everything has been merged/migrated.
> 
> I successfully logged in, BUT none of my stuff is there--none of my books, none of my sales history, no tax docs. Nada.
> 
> ...


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## RobynB (Jan 4, 2011)

Marseille said:


> My info is all there.


So I'm just lucky, I guess. 

Seriously, I'm hoping for a more widespread problem, because then maybe it will actually get fixed. (Also, I wasn't sure if I had to "do" something like re-enter my vendor info...it's saying I'm not an approved vendor yet, which is BS. I've been on the damned thing since it was named the silly "Pub-It.")

Anyone else?


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## Nate Hoffelder (Jun 9, 2014)

Don DeBon said:


> Careful Nate, your hate is showing through.  And you have been wrong before. You thought they were killing the nook last fall, but instead they released a new e-ink device. It is too soon to tell. I am also skeptical, but regardless it is a better outlook than say last week (for the moment anyway).
> 
> As I said, time will tell. Competition is good, monopoly is not. Sooner or later a monopoly will squeeze the customer. It is as certain as daylight in the morning. There is nothing else in the USA that comes close to B&N for retailing books except for Amazon. I don't want them to fold, but I am not a fan either because of all the crazy stuff they have done in the past. Still, I am keeping an open mind which is what I think we all should do.


That was less having the wrong opinion than an editorial screw-up. I used a title that said more than I intended, and then forgot to change it. That was sloppy.


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## Nate Hoffelder (Jun 9, 2014)

Don DeBon said:


> Years ago, after the Nook Tablet came out, they did a revamp of the website. Until then it was fast, easy, and efficient. After it was a slow mess. They have improved it since then, but it is still slower and harder to navigate than others. And I think I *may* have found out the reason. I was recently looking at the code of the website to find it is wordpress. That kind of surprised me, and possibly why it never got the speed back it had before the change. Wordpress is a great platform don't get me wrong, but I don't think it has the efficiency needed for a site the size of B&N. Then again, perhaps they don't know how to make it work well for their site.


What did you see that suggested the B&N website ran on WP?

I checked but didn't see any of the obvious signs.


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## UnicornEmily (Jul 2, 2011)

That sounds like good news!  I hope Barnes and Noble does have a renaissance and become a great platform for all of us!  Nook's an okay market for me now, but I'd love for it to be better, of course.

And 65% on books over $9.99 is great!  Finally we can start doing huge whole-series collections on there!  We already could on Google Play and Kobo because they didn't do the $9.99 ceiling.  Definitely a great move.


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## dgcasey (Apr 16, 2017)

Bill Hiatt said:


> Are you referring to hardcover? I just ran a paperback comparison, and production cost is only a little higher than with CS. Hardcover production cost is about twice that. Or am I missing something?
> 
> Hardcovers aren't going to be big sellers, but a few people will want them, and they make nice gifts, giveaway items, etc.


I actually I made a mistake in the creation of the book. I left it as a Standard Color book and that bumped the price up. But, yes that was for a paperback. I went back just now and redid the calculations with the correct characteristics and found that, to get the same level of royalty as I do with KDP, I'd have to price the paperback at $17.95 vs. $14.95 with KDP. So, still not incentive to make the jump.


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

Nate Hoffelder said:


> What did you see that suggested the B&N website ran on WP?
> 
> I checked but didn't see any of the obvious signs.


A couple of months ago was having a problem with the site and was digging in the code to see if I could block an aspect of the site to get around the problem (I was in a hurry to take advantage of a ending sale with my e-book credit). I came across several wordpress references/tags regarding site generation/version. I forget exactly where. Perhaps it was a mistake and removed since then. But it would explain a few things.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

the longer I think about this change, the more I think we're all missing the most important detail: they removed the word "NOOK' from the site.


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## Christa_Tomlinson (Nov 29, 2017)

Hello! Recently joined and I've been lurking for several weeks. But all this news from Apple, B&N and Wal-Mart has me excited enough to make my first post. I just checked out B&N's new platform and I think it's a huge improvement. Pre-orders are enabled now and of course as others have mentioned, you can do ebook & print set up in one place. That's great. I did print set up for two of my books last year and it was such a nightmare I gave up on the rest. Looking forward to seeing if they've streamlined that process. And the new platform looks so much cleaner and easier to navigate as well.

But I have to agree with the others who've said they need to fix the customer side too. I'm a Nook reader, but I usually search for books on Amazon first then go and make my purchase on B&N because their search feature is so awful. 

Really hoping this is the first step in turning Nook around.


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## Marata Eros (Jul 23, 2011)

*


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## Arches (Jan 3, 2016)

GeneDoucette said:


> the longer I think about this change, the more I think we're all missing the most important detail: they removed the word "NOOK' from the site.


Ha! Just like Apple removed the letter "I" from "Ibook" and Bloomberg saw that as the telling signal Apple was reengaging in the self-pub wars.

The truth is that both of these companies could become much stronger competitors against Amazon if they want to. Each has had reasons they haven't gone all-out against Bezos in the past, but that could change at any time if they want to fight for market share in ebooks. My own thinking is that Kobo-Walmart is a much more serious opportunity for self-pub authors, but time will tell. I'm optimistic that we will have lots of options going forward.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

There is one key data point that might make sense why the retailers who compete against Amazon in the book market are starting to shake off the dust and do something at last.

After the Amazon vs. Hachette kerfuffle, book market analysts were reporting that ebook sales were collapsing---and they were. In 2016, sales numbers on ebooks were definitely down and shrinking. At least, according to the data analysts were looking at. The problem was, they were only looking at reports from the Association of American Publishers, whose membership is composed of traditional publishing houses.

After A vs. H, publishers hiked up their ebook prices. Naturally, their ebooks sales plummeted and print sales began to rise at a non-equivalent rate. The analysts couldn't account for the unbalanced performance of sales. Until they looked at the 2017 numbers and included independent authors' sales in the analysis.

The book sales market is currently worth an estimated $120 billion.

In 2016 and 2017, ebook sales increased significantly. According to Authors' Earnings, 2017 showed that of online sales, _ebooks by independent authors now compose 48% of the market!_

Very roughly, that's $58 billion dollars. While Amazon owns about 85% of that, the other companies are waking up to the fact that there are huge profits to be made. B&N could put their accounts in the black if they can steal away just 10% of that market.

So, there are 58 billion very compelling reasons why the other retailers are suddenly announcing that they are making changes.

The problem is not authors going exclusive with Amazon. It is getting customers to buy from the other platforms. The other retailers MUST improve their front end to encourage customers to come to their stores if they want a bigger slice of the pie. Apple desperately needs to make lesser known authors/titles more discoverable on their website. B&N seriously needs to send a firm message that they are as committed to online sales as they are their brick and mortar operations.

One point that must be remembered is that ebooks are significantly more profitable than print books because once posted, an ebook has no further production costs for the retailers. No warehousing, distribution, supplies, wages, or maintenance costs. Most ebooks are smaller than the images the retailers use to promote products on their websites. So saying storage of the file is a cost is a pretty weak argument.


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

GeneDoucette said:


> the longer I think about this change, the more I think we're all missing the most important detail: they removed the word "NOOK' from the site.


I didn't miss it. I suspect it is trying to make it a more generalized publishing portal. Also when they created the publishing platform, it was only for Nook. Later on they added print but not many used it. They seem to be *actually* taking notes and making improvements (takes a moment to pull jaw off of floor). Being the system has print and e-book (Nook), and you are rebuilding the site, it is natural to rename it to better show what the service encompasses. After all, when you hear "Nook Press" what do you think of? Print and e-books or only e-books?


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## Used To Be BH (Sep 29, 2016)

WDR said:


> In 2016 and 2017, ebook sales increased significantly. According to Authors' Earnings, 2017 showed that of online sales, _ebooks by independent authors now compose 48% of the market!_
> 
> Very roughly, that's $58 billion dollars. While Amazon owns about 85% of that, the other companies are waking up to the fact that there are huge profits to be made. B&N could put their accounts in the black if they can steal away just 10% of that market.


I got 42.6%, but I wasn't including uncategorized few authors and uncategorized many authors, because they might not be self-publishing. (Uncategorized one author publishers clearly are self publishing under another name.) Still, your general point is valid either way.

I wonder how much of the willingness of Apple, BN, and Kobo (with Walmart) to enter the fray comes from Data Guy's figures. These moves would have to have been planned before Data Guy's newest report went live, but doubtless there were at least rumors floating around, and some of the some basic points were made in earlier reports.

It's one thing to not worry about ebook sales when they seem to be declining. It's quite another to not worry about them when they're growing rapidly.

It will be interesting to see if the other stores have the same takeaway that we do: that indie authors are an ever-growing part of the market. When I first started publishing, Apple was making a conscious effort to woo indie authors, including showcasing some. In practice, that meant taking authors who were already selling well and getting them to sell better, but still, it was far better than nothing.

Getting people to leave Select might not be as hard as it used to be because of the KU mess. However, the ones doing really well in Select will need to get the feeling that these other stores have something compelling to offer. An important piece, as you pointed out, is getting customers to make the move. Right now the other stores have a combined customer base for ebooks not much bigger than the KU base. The more their base grows, the more sticking with KU will seem like a missed opportunity.

However one looks at it, the think the situation for indie authors will improve.


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## ruecole (Jun 13, 2012)

Ellie Lynn said:


> Still not allowing Canadian authors to participate. I don't understand why that's such a hard thing for them to incorporate.


  

Oh, well, D2D gets me sales on B&N.


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## It&#039;s A Mystery (Mar 14, 2017)

New interface seems great... but how on earth do you find the link to your live book?!


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

A.G.B said:


> New interface seems great... but how on earth do you find the link to your live book?!


I always searched my author name in the store for links. If they had a method in the old system, I never noticed/used it.


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## It&#039;s A Mystery (Mar 14, 2017)

Don DeBon said:


> I always searched my author name in the store for links. If they had a method in the old system, I never noticed/used it.


Ah ok, thanks.

I thought I was missing something obvious as it seems like something they'd include!


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## Mercedes Vox (Jul 22, 2014)

Using the new interface, what's the general amount of time it's taking for new titles and updated titles to go live?


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## 75845 (Jan 1, 1970)

Barnes and Noble category choice is now screwed up at least for non-fiction. It will only allow a category to be complete by choosing something from the final category and if you want something else you cannot go on to set a price or ISBN on the subsequent screen. For example for my Martin Luther book which came out of Select yesterday I have run up aginst the following dead-ends.

Biography - historical biography only permitted if it is ancient biography. 
General Biography only allowed if it is for cooking or sex workers.
History - outside US and Canada only if it is the social history of cooking
History of Christianity - only if it is Catholic and then you need to choose from a very limited range of categories
Christian Theology - only if it is Catholic

I managed to get Biography>Religious Biography>Spiritual Biography>Spiritual Biography. Without the spiritual biography repetition I would be stuck with gurus. Otherwise it would have been back to D2D or Smashwords and lose my 5% extra earnings.

Act definitely not together in this alpha software.


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## Nate Hoffelder (Jun 9, 2014)

Don DeBon said:


> A couple of months ago was having a problem with the site and was digging in the code to see if I could block an aspect of the site to get around the problem (I was in a hurry to take advantage of a ending sale with my e-book credit). I came across several wordpress references/tags regarding site generation/version. I forget exactly where. Perhaps it was a mistake and removed since then. But it would explain a few things.


I think i figured it out.

B&N runs their blogs on WP, but not the rest of the site. For example:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/bnpress-blog/updated-sales-reporting/

you were right - it was just more complicated than expected


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## DmGuay (Aug 17, 2016)

RobynB said:


> I got an email this afternoon that the rollout to the new "Barnes & Noble Press" is complete. Supposedly everything has been merged/migrated.
> 
> I successfully logged in, BUT none of my stuff is there--none of my books, none of my sales history, no tax docs. Nada.
> 
> ...


I logged in and my stuff is all missing and suddenly I Have to enter my tax information and verify my account all over again. Ugh.


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## Lydniz (May 2, 2013)

I just logged in for the first time in days and saw the new line graph, like Amazon used to have. I love it! The interface is so much better now.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

Lydniz said:


> I just logged in for the first time in days and saw the new line graph, like Amazon used to have. I love it! The interface is so much better now.


That is a pretty sweet-looking line graph I have to agree.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

GeneDoucette said:


> That is a pretty sweet-looking line graph I have to agree.


It'd be a lot sweeter-looking if I could just get some sales on B&N!


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## notjohn (Sep 9, 2016)

For me, B&N has dropped to a distant second behind Apple (well, third if you count Amazon) as a sales outlet. Some months, even Kobo runs ahead of the largest bookstore chain in the country, if not in the world. Sad! (as the Tweeter-in-Chief likes to say).


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

B&N continues to grow for me, now constituting about 16% of my English ebooks sales (wide). The rest is about 16% Apple, 16% Google, 10% Kobo, 40% Amazon and 3% everything else. Ish.

Is B&N using their ebooks to prop up their bottom line? Has someone finally realized that reinforcing success is smarter than reinforcing failure? Are they becoming more competitive by some method? Is Amazon losing its cachet in the ebook world? Is it a fluke?


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## Randall Wood (Mar 31, 2014)

David VanDyke said:


> B&N continues to grow for me, now constituting about 16% of my English ebooks sales (wide). The rest is about 16% Apple, 16% Google, 10% Kobo, 40% Amazon and 3% everything else. Ish.
> 
> Is B&N using their ebooks to prop up their bottom line? Has someone finally realized that reinforcing success is smarter than reinforcing failure? Are they becoming more competitive by some method? Is Amazon losing its cachet in the ebook world? Is it a fluke?


Funny how we all seem to have different ratios even when we write in the same genre. B&N is a consistent 20% of my income, but I know others that claim its their worst.

As to Amazon losing its cachet? Maybe the scamming and poor titles dominating the charts there is finally having an effect. That, and the NOOK, for all its platforms faults, was still a pretty good ereader. I know many people that love theirs.


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## Loosecannon (May 9, 2013)

Mercia McMahon said:


> Barnes and Noble category choice is now screwed up at least for non-fiction. It will only allow a category to be complete by choosing something from the final category and if you want something else you cannot go on to set a price or ISBN on the subsequent screen.
> 
> Act definitely not together in this alpha software.


This_. 
Non-Fiction category selection drop downs are still all screwed up..as of today when I added a new title. Ugh! So, I sent them a bug report ofn the issue via 'Customer Support'. Based on their track record it should be fixed approx. sometime _late summer_ I'd guess..


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## Randall Wood (Mar 31, 2014)

Jeff Tanyard said:


> Randall! Welcome back, man.


Heh, been lurking for a bit.

I'll try to be more social.


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## Debbie Bennett (Mar 25, 2011)

First month in over six years of being wide that my B&N ebook sales (via D2D) have outstripped Amazon. Something's working over there ...


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## Accord64 (Mar 12, 2012)

Debbie Bennett said:


> First month in over six years of being wide that my B&N ebook sales (via D2D) have outstripped Amazon. Something's working over there ...


I feel left out. 

While the new interface is slick, I've never been able to get anything going at B&N. I can count on one hand the number of sales over the past few years. Am I making sacrifices at the wrong volcano?


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

The only complaint I have with the new system is you make changes, it won't give you an option to "publish" those changes until you go back to your projects and select that book again.  When you reopen the book, a pop up banner at the top appears offering the option to publish your changes.

This could lead to people thinking their changes went though to the store, when in fact they haven't.  I also didn't see anything to the effect of "you have changes on **** that have not been published yet" in projects list.  A little odd considering the old system had this feature.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

Don DeBon said:


> The only complaint I have with the new system is you make changes, it won't give you an option to "publish" those changes until you go back to your projects and select that book again. When you reopen the book, a pop up banner at the top appears offering the option to publish your changes.
> 
> This could lead to people thinking their changes went though to the store, when in fact they haven't. I also didn't see anything to the effect of "you have changes on **** that have not been published yet" in projects list. A little odd considering the old system had this feature.


I just changed prices for one book over there for a BookBub, and I didn't encounter this at all. Once I changed the price, there was a Publish Changes option at the top of the screen.


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

GeneDoucette said:


> I just changed prices for one book over there for a BookBub, and I didn't encounter this at all. Once I changed the price, there was a Publish Changes option at the top of the screen.


Figures I would find the odd intermittent bugs.


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## GeneDoucette (Oct 14, 2014)

Don DeBon said:


> Figures I would find the odd intermittent bugs.


It might be browser-specific. It comes down from the top after you hit Save, so perhaps you're not seeing it because of a pop up blocker.


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## WDR (Jan 8, 2014)

Hey! I actually (_finally_) sold a book on B&N! First in over six months for a grand total of 3 since the launch of my second book!

To be fair, my Apple sales have not done much better, beating B&N by only one copy sold. I did expect my Apple ebook sales would be rather weak, but I had originally hoped at the launch of my first book that my B&N sales would at least account for 20% of my total sales including Amazon. That never happened. Kobo, has handily beaten both Apple and B&N sales combined, yet my numbers there are fairly low. Amazon accounts for 99.4% of my sales, overall.

B&N's history since the launch of my first book in 2013 has been pretty dodgy with mixed messaging from the management and the company itself seeming to be always teetering on the edge bankruptcy.

I'm going to try this year to come up with some new marketing ideas to see if I can't boost sales in my other channels outside of Amazon.


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## Bookread (Mar 8, 2016)

I hope so! It seems to be the right timing, what with the Walmart/Kobo partnership and all.


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

GeneDoucette said:


> It might be browser-specific. It comes down from the top after you hit Save, so perhaps you're not seeing it because of a pop up blocker.


Yes, that is where I see it (when it works). But I tried different browsers and without any blockers. It also seems to happen more when there is a content update (changing cover or interior) rather than metadata only updates.


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## Christa_Tomlinson (Nov 29, 2017)

I've had mixed results with the new Nook Press. For the most part, it's been fine. Uploading content is certainly easier. And titles go live faster. But I tried to do a price change for a box set and it wouldn't go through. I selected publish on the drop down menu and it said changes saved, but the new price never showed up on the website. After trying multiple times (over a few days to give it time to go through) I finally unpublished and republished. Once I did that, the book was up with the correct price within a few hours. Then this week I changed the cover on a pre-order and it went through no problem. So I guess the failure to update titles is a sometime glitch they'll have to work out.


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## dgcasey (Apr 16, 2017)

The thing that bothers me most about B&N is the invisibility of books from CreateSpace. I am testing a book through CS and B&N has it listed, but unless you look specifically for my book by title or by my name, you won't see it. Trying to zero in on a specific category of books at B&N is an exercise in frustration. They don't seem to have any real idea how to set up a category structure in the online store. That, and it seems my book isn't associated with any category at all. Nowhere on the book page is there a mention as to what category the book falls in. You don't even see the categories listed on the Details page.


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## Used To Be BH (Sep 29, 2016)

dgcasey said:


> The thing that bothers me most about B&N is the invisibility of books from CreateSpace. I am testing a book through CS and B&N has it listed, but unless you look specifically for my book by title or by my name, you won't see it. Trying to zero in on a specific category of books at B&N is an exercise in frustration. They don't seem to have any real idea how to set up a category structure in the online store. That, and it seems my book isn't associated with any category at all. Nowhere on the book page is there a mention as to what category the book falls in. You don't even see the categories listed on the Details page.


Years ago, one of the big complaints about B&N was their online search engine. I can remember an article in which someone published the results of an experiment. Basically, the writer found a lot of books, included some by bestselling authors, that just didn't show in searches unless you searched for the exact title. (A search by author wouldn't turn them up, either.) Apparently, that problem is still somewhat with us.


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## Don DeBon (Jun 18, 2016)

Bill Hiatt said:


> Years ago, one of the big complaints about B&N was their online search engine. I can remember an article in which someone published the results of an experiment. Basically, the writer found a lot of books, included some by bestselling authors, that just didn't show in searches unless you searched for the exact title. (A search by author wouldn't turn them up, either.) Apparently, that problem is still somewhat with us.


Interesting, I haven't ran into that myself. Searching by author name works fine for me. I have also searched for books before without the exact name and always found what I was looking for. I didn't try to browse around by category though, but then again I don't do that on Amazon either. I generally don't have time.


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