barnes and noble – Moe Lane

GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND will be coming to B&N. In paperback.

I’m keeping the e-version of GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND off B&N because, honestly, I cannot give up the KU sales without better assurances that it’d be worth it. Amazon dominates the e-book market. This is a thing that is known.

I’m also in the process of seeing if I can get a good dust jacket out of this. I… do not know. Getting the paperback book prepped for B&N as it was was a right royal pain. But I’m also getting a smaller royalty from B&N than I will for Amazon*, so it might make a difference to have a hardcover with a dust jacket. We shall see!

Moe Lane

#commissionearned

*Why do it, then? Because some buyers don’t like Amazon. Like, a lot.

Adventures in non-Amazon publishing!

Which is what I’ve been doing this morning. Conclusions: Draft To Digital is fairly comprehensive in getting a book together, including adding things like a table of contents or dedications for you, but their Extended Distribution royalty rates are horrible and I don’t think I can exclude Amazon from them. Barnes and Noble has a better royalty rate than I expected, but its book assembly process is far less useful than KDPs. I may still use it, but I’m first going to need to adjust the manuscript a good deal and possibly skip having a table of contents.

So that was what I did today so far. Illuminating, even if it made my brain a little sore.

Moe Lane

PS: Buy my books!

#commissionearned

Why Barnes and Noble still lives.

Short version: they decided to decentralize the book selection process and concentrate on selling, well, books.

“Barnes & Noble was suffering a remorseless erosion of book sales as they put more and more things that weren’t books into their stores, which weren’t selling,” Daunt told me by phone from Cary, N.C., a stop on an inspection tour of Barnes & Noble stores on the Eastern Seaboard. “Since then, we’ve changed the balance of product within our stores and focused dramatically more on books.”

The result, he says, has been a “nice and healthy increase in overall sales, driven by a significant increase in book sales.” Daunt evicted “a ton of completely irrelevant products” that occupied the stores’ shelves — batteries, electronic chargers, water — “a ton of products you’d find in a CVS or Target where they perfectly sensibly sell you everything you need for everyday life, but which made absolutely no sense in a bookstore.”

Barnes & Noble heading for the rocks?

Mayyyyyybe:

Washington D.C.’s Union Station is a major point of entry for the nation’s capital. Streams of daily commuters from the region, tourists, and business travelers on the Amtrak circuit from Boston and New York can choose from an especially ample array of shopping and dining opportunities. But, as of the end of February, one of the anchor retailers will be gone. Barnes & Noble is shutting down its bookstore in a main concourse after failing to reach terms with the landlord. Browsing the aisles at Barnes & Noble stores has been a core feature of the chain’s strength in the forty years since Leonard Riggio purchased the assets of what was then a venerable seller mainly of textbooks and turned the enterprise into the country’s most formidable shaper of a superstore culture for book selling.

…of course, it was pretty clear a couple of years ago that the big-box booksellers were in trouble across the board; but it’s not apparently news until it affects the Imperial Capital. Or perhaps I am being cynical. Continue reading Barnes & Noble heading for the rocks?