Self-Pubbing with Barnes & Noble

I was about to discuss this, so I will leap onto your thread. My statistics with B&N are bleak. Most of my ads direct people to my personal site (www.motthavenbooks.com) where you will see "BUY NOW!" buttons for Amazon, Amazon.co.uk, and B&N. I used to have a Kobo button as well, but I gave it up to get room for amazon.co.uk. I took the time, effort, and money to double publish, using CreateSpace for Amazon and Lightning Source for everyone else. The result? Despite offering the same product at the same price, my Amazon:B&N sales ratio is 27:1 for e-books. For physical copies, it's even worse: the only physical copy B&N sold was the one I bought just to make certain I was receiving the royalties, despite Amazon doing a decent job selling paperbacks.

Is my experience unique? Or is there no point in bothering with B&N at all?

My book has only been out for a month, so who knows what my statistics indicate? I published directly to B&N, Kobo, iTunes, and GooglePlay, as well as Amazon, naturally. By far the most sales have come via Amazon, however the second most sales have been via B&N. That isn't a lot, but I haven't had a single sale on GooglePlay (unless their software isn't working), only two on iTunes and two on Kobo.

The advantage of going direct (with any channel) is that you don't pay the middleman's cut of royalties. It's a good approach if you sell a lot of books through multiple channels. In my case, it wasn't worth the bother of setting up multiple accounts.

Kevin, I did the same as you did. And my experience has been the same.

Whimsical Writing said:

I'm wondering if there is an advantage to doing it directly with B&N, rather than through a 3rd party? I'm talking about data, such as how many views of the book, sample downloads, etc. That information (I don't think), is available on Smashwords for the vendors.

Click to expand...

I put my first collection directly on BN. Their dashboard is basically worthless.

For my individual shorts at the <$2.99 price point I actually get BETTER terms using D2D or SW versus going direct and have the option for free if I choose.

Comparing the two, I get no benefit from going direct beyond not paying the aggregator commission. If I were making huge $ that 10% might matter but I'm not and the convenience it totally worth it.