Kindle Forum banner

Nook is starting to make me nervous . . .

1291 Views 8 Replies 8 Participants Last post by  melbatron
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/03/2015/barnes-nobles-dirty-little-secret-author-solutions-and-nook-press/

I knew Nook was bedding down with Author Solutions, which made me cringe, but learning that the B&N ToS basically say they can sell any info you give them to Author Solutions is freaking me out and I'm considering pulling my e-books from them. So, with that in mind, I have two questions:

Is anyone else nervous?

For using a distributor instead of going direct, I've heard a lot of people talking about D2D and not Smashwords. I am currently at Smashwords and I like it just fine, but I have no experience anywhere else. Is there a good reason or two why people like one over the other?
1 - 9 of 9 Posts
There was a long thread about this a month or so ago, and yeah, many now hate Nook for it.

People go with Smashwords because 1) Mark Coker convinced Kobo and Nook to quit discounting on their own years ago, the way Google Play does now. It sucks, but because Amazon price matches, discounting really screws with authors' earnings and 2) Smashwords distributes to more places.

People go with Draft2Digital because it's easier.
Am I nervous? No, not really. because even though I had distributed one of my books directly with Nookpress, I haven't noticed any spam from Author Solutions or anything like that.
I am currently distributing my books with Draft 2 Digital, but I may add in Smashwords so I can get on Oyster, unless D2D gets me in there before I have a chance to mess with the Meatgrinder. There are a couple of things that D2D does for me which I find very helpful, especially with Apple. One is that they make up a page in my ebooks that has links to my other books on the same vendor and my site. I'm not 100% sure Smashwords does that. I can also just upload a .docx to them, and they can make an EPUB out of it. You don't get a fancy result, but it does work. As I've said, I haven't tried doing the Meatgrinder, but I've heard people have had a lot of difficultly with it.
melbatron said:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/03/2015/barnes-nobles-dirty-little-secret-author-solutions-and-nook-press/

I knew Nook was bedding down with Author Solutions, which made me cringe, but learning that the B&N ToS basically say they can sell any info you give them to Author Solutions is freaking me out and I'm considering pulling my e-books from them. So, with that in mind, I have two questions:

Is anyone else nervous?

For using a distributor instead of going direct, I've heard a lot of people talking about D2D and not Smashwords. I am currently at Smashwords and I like it just fine, but I have no experience anywhere else. Is there a good reason or two why people like one over the other?
They already have your info, so pulling out won't really change anything. So what if AS has your info? If they want you to buy something, say 'NO'.
dianapersaud said:
They already have your info, so pulling out won't really change anything. So what if AS has your info? If they want you to buy something, say 'NO'.
My thoughts exactly.
Tempest in a teapot. I never could see what the fuss was about. Unfortunately, our information is sold to lots of people. What's the downside, besides the fact that maybe (maybe) you might get some annoying sales pitch in your email once in awhile from Author Solutions? And I've been with Nook direct for a few years now, and I've never gotten a sales pitch from Author Solutions, so I don't even think that's a problem.

Help me try to figure out why people are angry, because I don't see it.
I quit Nook for an entirely different reason - their new "Manuscript Editor" drove me nuts. It was very glitchy and confusing, the previewer didn't work half the time, and I had no idea what my ebooks were coming out the other end looking like. Nook was my smallest sales channel anyway, so I'm content to distribute there from Smashwords. I wrote about it in a little more detail in a blog post last fall: http://www.thesecondsentence.blogspot.com/2014/11/simplifying-nuts-and-bolts.html

Incidentally, I scoured the Nook site but simply could not find a place to close my account. I fear this means a customer service phone call, unless anybody else knows how to do it...
ElisabethGFoley said:
I quit Nook for an entirely different reason - their new "Manuscript Editor" drove me nuts. It was very glitchy and confusing, the previewer didn't work half the time, and I had no idea what my ebooks were coming out the other end looking like.
+1
I thought I was the only one! I searched forums and didn't see many people having the same trouble. I wish I had stayed with their old system (was it called pubit?) as long as they would have allowed it instead of switching over to nookpress. It's terrible. How can they mess up an epub that works great everywhere else???
Thank you all for the replies.

I've had no major glitches (knock on wood!!) at either Smashwords or Nookpress so far. A little thing with my giant capital letter at the beginning of each chapter creating a weird space in the first word of each chapter at the Apple store, but I just downsized the giant capital 2 points and that fixed it. I had to re-upload to Kindle just to be fussy and make sure all my versions matched, but that wasn't hard.

And yeah, I noticed there's no real way to close an account with Nook. And waaaaaay back in the day before self-publishing was cool, I uploaded a rough draft to Lulu.com, forgot about it, and then found it for sale last month at B&N.com. Not cool, but hey, it's not like I've sold anything at B&N at all. Tried to remove it, B&N said I had to go to Lulu. Went to Lulu -- there's no way to remove it, only "retire" it. I did, it's gone from the store, but who knows what might happen with it from here. Still, yes, if the worst thing that happens is Author Solutions spam me, I can always just delete. If the next worst thing is a rough draft I wrote twelve years ago popping up for sale at B&N, that's obnoxious but not career-destroying. And I plan to re-write and re-title that book anyway.

If a body can use D2D and Smashwords together, I might just do that. See who I like best. Smashwords does not put in a link to the other books in a given store, they actually suggest putting a link to other books on Smashwords at the back. A link back to my books on Apple or Kobo would be nice for those readers.

I will calm down a bit about the Nook hype, thanks!

See less See more
1 - 9 of 9 Posts
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top