You want to try publishing your books on Barnes and Noble but you're afraid that you might fail just like many other people who have tried and failed. Well, this might be a help for you, let me tell you exactly how to self publish on Barnes and Noble.
In today's article, I'm going to give you three answers to today's question. You're going to want to stick around because the third answer is a secret as to what causes a lot of people to fail when it comes to putting their books on Barnes and Noble.
The question that was sent to me today was, how to self publish on Barnes and Noble? Now, this is a question that people all over the place who have been into Barnes and Noble bookstores would like to know. Maybe you have and maybe you haven't.
You've got your book and you're thinking wouldn't it be amazing to get my book on the shelf? I can even remember a friend of mine who got his books on the shelves inside of a Barnes and Noble store. Even though it didn't make that many sales, it was exciting, the process of getting the book into the store.
Even if we could get it onto their platform as a self-published book. Wouldn't that be very exciting? Because we can all sort of remembering back then in the 90s when Barnes and Noble became a giant and that was a period that we all sort of remember.
So in a sense, Barnes and Noble still carry a very heavy name when it comes to thinking about the big players in the area of books, book publishing, and book stores. There's been a lot of stores that have come and gone. I remember Hastings and a couple of other ones.
Check out this related article: Should You Start Self Publishing On Barnes And Noble?
What about Barnes and Noble? How to self publish on Barnes and Noble? That is the question we are going to answer today. But before we get into the answers, grab a copy of my absolutely free seven-point secrets to Self-Publishing Checklist.
Let me get a little bit into Barnes and Noble. I remember my very first time in Barnes Noble back in the 90s, I don't remember if it was like 92 or 93 somewhere in that period. We went into Barnes and Noble for the very first time.
It was a unique experience, you could have it with a cafe. A Starbucks inside the store itself. You could get your coffee and you could enjoy reading a book at the same time.
We had never seen anything like that before. There had always been bookstores in malls but not where you could sit down and actually read the books. In fact, they discouraged that.
They would watch for kids and people who would be coming into those places to do this exact thing. I have very fun memories of sitting and enjoying a coffee or other drink while sitting inside of a Barnes and Noble. But then over some time, we began to see competitors come into that market.
Hastings and Borders some of these have gone bankrupt since this point. But they started coming in and competing. It was interesting because, at the time when it was Barnes and Noble, there were no other competitors.
Except maybe in some shopping malls, you would have some. But they are not competing in the same way that Barnes and Noble were competing.
Take It Easy
Then the giant arrived which was Amazon. And Amazon then suddenly started to take over a lot of the book sales. Bookstores started going out of business.
So many of the stores that we like to buy it previously, suddenly you could no longer go into them because people would just buy their books online. You could get a better deal, a better price for just buying them online.
The thing that I learned from this entire process related to Barnes and Noble is that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. The giants all eventually are going to fall when it comes to that. Whether it's Barnes Noble or Hastings, Borders, or maybe even Amazon.
Even though it seems hard to imagine a world where Amazon is going to take a beating. Or Netflix if you want to look at video streaming. But the giants are just that, they're giants until they fall.
And when that occurs nobody expected it to happen. If you aren't prepared, you're going to pay a big price. This is a little bit of today's secret but I'm going to get into that in just a moment.
So here are the answers if we're looking to self-publish on Barnes and Noble, the first thing is you're going to go to press.barnesandnoble.com. That is where you can upload your book.
I think it was something like within 70 hours. You can expect your book to go live on its platform within 70 to 90 hours. You can put both paperback and your eBook versions. You need to keep in mind you're able to get both of those onto the thing.
You can register your tax information. You will be able to pay, they will pay for you. You'll get a higher royalty rate than you would if you went with an aggregator.
So everything seems great right. Because you're going to have your thing connected with Barnes and Noble which was one of our goals here. Maybe tapping in a little bit to the Nostalgia that was associated with feeling like "Wow! look I've got my book out there".
Now, this doesn't mean you need to remember that just because you put your paperback out there. This is a self-published book, they are not going to take that book and push it directly into their stores. This isn't going to happen unless you have a special deal of some sort with them.
However, it will be on their official site. So that is an important thing to remember. But the secret answer of today. And maybe the most important thing to remember is that you need to be very careful with putting all your eggs in one
basket.
Go For SmashWords
The problem is that first Barnes and Noble is starting to back away a little bit from their ebooks. They are not doing quite the support that they were doing previously.
And the second thing here is that you can get onto Barnes and Noble with your eBook if you go through SmashWords. The benefit of SmashWords is that they will automatically distribute your book to Barnes and Noble and Amazon.
A lot well on Amazon depending upon your number of sales. You should do that independently but a lot of other areas like Kobo where you're going to be able to get your books out there. They will take a small percentage of the royalties that you're earning.
You can expect to see that your books will be there. If Barnes and Noble disappear, well that's not a problem because SmashWords will ensure that the replacement would be the next big company that comes after Barnes and Noble. It will take over that.
They'll just simply plug that in and route your eBooks through there as well. You'll be able to make it. You'll be able to have a presence on each of these sites but not necessarily have to suffer the pain of registering your book on each of these sites with all of your tax information.
Because just the accounting of dealing with the royalties coming in is a real pain. SmashWords is a great way to prevent yourself from having to suffer through the exact pain that we're talking about here.
The final thing is that if for the paperbacks, it's true that your paperbacks will not be on the platform for Barnes and Noble. However, this is a lousy platform anyway since it's not doing much distribution compared to putting your paperbacks through KDP Print.
That's Amazon's Print area and the Ingram Spark also. This combination is powerful. Lulu can do your hardback book version and if you're doing these here we do not need to get our paperback onto Barnes and Noble.
There are some questions about how long Barnes and Noble is going to even be around? If you're using a lot of energy correctly formatting all of your books to fit on Barnes and Noble and all of this, it's going to cost you a lot of time and a lot of money for very relatively few sales.
I've never heard of a self-published author making tons of money off of the Barnes and Noble platform. That is a thing you need to take into consideration when you're thinking of putting your book onto Barnes and Noble. I hope that explained a little bit of that.
My question for you is, have you published your books directly on Barnes and Noble? I would love to hear it. Write "Yes" below in the comments if you have and write "No" if you haven't.
Just so I get an idea of what exactly you found. And check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.