Barnes & Noble Press has increased its ebook royalties to a flat 70% across all prices and has stepped up its payment schedule to pay out authors 30 days after purchase instead of 60 days.
The rise in royalties is a decent boost for authors with ebooks in the lower price range as B&N/Nook previously paid 40% royalties on ebooks priced from $0.99-$2.98 while it paid 65% for ebook sales priced at $2.99 and above .
B&N Press also says it is expanding ‘an array of merchandising options, including curated ads on BN.com, better email placement to promote titles to customers, and social media and blog exposure on Barnes & Noble Press and Nook channels’.
The firm doesn’t give much in the way of details about how it’s boosting merchandising, but one of the ways seems to be by offering a 30% discount on a service called ScoreIt from Inkubate. This claims to analyse your manuscript to compare it with best-selling authors and to offer keywords to improve discoverability. The analysis for a single manuscript usually costs $99.99 but is available for $69.99 with the discount.
It is also featuring a 5% discount on the services of a company called BookTrib which offers a range of marketing services, including a full-length book review and social media exposure for $395 (before discount), and inclusion in a syndicated book column called Bookbites distributed to 10,000 local newspapers ($595 fee before discount).
Barnes & Noble Press had a tough time during 2020 when it was hit by an online attack on its website during October, which took around a month to resolve before the site was fully functioning again. The company also delayed payments to ebook distributors in February when it switched to 90-day payments amid the onset of the Covid pandemic. However, it soon reversed the delays for independent ebook distributors and restored payments.
You can find out more details about self-publishing ebooks and print books with B&N Press on their website.
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