I’m a card-carrying member of Barnes & Noble (literally) and one of my best friends adores her Nook e-reader, so I knew when I published my memoir, I couldn’t skip this distribution channel.
Barnes & Noble has snared 27 percent of the ebook market, while Amazon Kindle has 60 percent, according to a story last year in The New York Times. Sales of “The Percussionist’s Wife: A Memoir of Sex, Crime & Betrayal” are weighted more heavily toward Amazon at almost four Kindle sales to one Nook sale.
Despite Nook’s narrower market, it was worth the trouble for me to modify my formatting for submission to Barnes & Noble; 13% of my total sales can be attributed to Nook. I believe you can download a Nook app on your iPad (if you don’t have an actual Nook), but I haven’t tried it.
To publish a Nook version of your book, begin here at Barnes & Noble’s PubIt site. PubIt accepts all kinds of files including ePub, Microsoft Word (.doc and .docx), HTML, RTF, and TXT. I used Word.
PubIt’s formatting guidelines for Word are a little more specific than Kindle’s, especially regarding symbols, fractions and ordinal endings (1st), but they’re not onerous; they can be time-consuming if you’ve written a 307-page book, as I did. Yes, you need to look at every page. PubIt offers a great proofing mechanism that shows you exactly how your book will look on Nook; use it, especially if you don’t own a Nook to test on.
Like Amazon Kindle, you can use your own ISBN or get one assigned by Barnes & Noble, and you’ll need a cover image.
PubIt pays 65% royalty and charges authors no delivery fees.
As far as promoting the Nook version of my book, I haven’t done anything special, but I am always proud to say “yes” when anyone asks me if it’s available on Nook.
Yesterday: Self-publishing with Amazon Kindle
Tomorrow: Kobo
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