Thursday, July 18, 2013

Kudos to Barnes and Noble for the New Nook Press!

It might be old news to some of the readers of this blog, but Barnes and Noble recently replaced its old ebook publishing interface, PubIt, with a new one, Nook Press. While BN may be struggling to compete with its combination of brick and mortar stores and to carve out market share in the Amazon dominated ebook market, the company certainly took a step in the right direction with Nook Press, making it much easier for authors to self-publish their books for BN's Nook ereader.

I recently finished three new ebook conversions and uploaded them to the Amazon Kindle ebook store. I have long ago stopped worrying about BN's Nook store. I sell very few books for the Nook. But, since I had three new files ready to go, I thought I might as well take a few minutes and load them on the BN site for sale. I am glad I took the time.

The new interface is much easier to use, has more features and actually has some features Amazon's KDP does not!

Here are two I have discovered so far that I wish Amazon made available to authors:
  • You can list your book in up to five categories, making it possible to reach as broad an audience as possible via the search process in the BN search engine. Amazon limits you to two categories when you upload your Kindle file.
  • You can actually edit your interior file! I really wish Amazon would let you do the same, making it much easier to correct errors or update your book.
Competition is good and I am sure the need to carve out more share of the ebook market is what forced BN to improve its ebook interface for authors. It is now easier to use than the Kindle interface, at least in my opinion.

While I doubt my sales will take a big jump at BN any time soon, I will certainly be uploading all of my new ebook files at BN as well as Amazon's KDP in the future.
 


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