Publish your book on Barnes and Noble. Start Now

You spent hours nurturing your content and worked hard on writing your book. Now you need to make sure you select the best self publishing platform. Regardless of your book’s genre, the road to its success lies in marketing, promotion, and reaching your target audience.

The good news is that Barnes & Noble can help you publish your book and catapult you right into the limelight!

Publish With Barnes & Noble: What You Need to Know

So you’ve written your book or used a ghostwriter and you are planning to sell it online. Barnes and Noble is one of the best self-publishing platforms out there. It is one of the key players in the industry and gives Amazon KDP a run for its money. Barnes and Noble is a superb choice for indies who want access to loads of booklovers without breaking the bank.

What Barnes & Noble Offers

The most crucial step when entering the self-publishing platform world is the various book formatting options out there. The two most common options are print or ebooks. If you decide on printing, for example, you need to consider the correct page sizes, which fonts to choose, the exact line spacing, structuring your paragraphs, page breaks and margins, chapter titles, headings, subheadings, and so much more!

Formatting Your Book

Different formats are used to create and design your book, and every format has its own set of pros and cons. Barnes & Noble makes formatting your book easy with its individualized guidelines.

You can choose from:

Microsoft Word Formatting Guidelines
HTML Formatting Guidelines
TXT Formatting Guidelines
ePub Formatting Guidelines
eBook Formatting Guidelines for Microsoft Word Documents

You can also find a variety of valuable resources when reading their blog if you decide to format your own book.

Uploading Your Book

Once you have decided to use Barnes & Noble as your self-publishing platform, you will need to create an account. As soon as you are an official account holder, you can click on the ‘Create a New Book’ button to start the submission procedure.

At this time, you’ll be given the option of creating an ebook or a print edition. Just select the type of book you would like to create, or in the case of publishing both format types, you can choose your first option and then return to your Project Dashboard at a later stage to create an additional publication.

When uploading your ebook, you have to first enter your title, then you must load the book’s interior file, and lastly the cover image, which Barnes & Noble also provides services for. You even have options of previewing and proofing your ebook. Once all of this is done, all you need to do is supply the necessary details such as author name, your book description, specific keywords, and, of course, the price. Now you can move on to publishing.

The same applies when uploading your print edition except that you will choose a different format like we discussed in the previous paragraph, including MS Word, HTML, TXT, or PDF. You will have to choose your book’s size, the preferred trim size and cover format, and your print cover, which contains a complete cover image including the front cover, back cover, and spine. Barnes & Noble can help design a cover for you, of course!

Publishing Your Book

After supplying all the relevant information needed to create your book, including book title, cover, author, description, keywords, and pricing, you are ready to self publish. You can also stipulate your book’s ISBN during completion procedures. If you didn’t create your own, Barnes & Noble Press allows you to generate one for free.

If you chose to publish a print book, it is recommended that you order an actual physical proof. Click on the ‘Submit for Approval’ button and as soon as you receive your copy in the mail and you are happy with the final outcome, you can simply click on the ‘Put on Sale’ button, and your book will be published!

Barnes & Noble: How They Sell Your Book

Barnes & Noble’s platform offers more than just creating and publishing your book. There are loads of promotional opportunities when you join forces with a large self publishing platform.

The Pros of Barnes & Noble Publishing

Remember, Barnes & Noble has millions of readers just on BN.com and their NOOK devices, where you could feature in the B&N press emails as well as other affiliate marketing programs like BookTrib, which assists authors in expanding their book’s publicity. Facebook is an extremely popular social media platform and, of course, you can’t go wrong being an active user on the B&N Facebook page. Here you can promote your work, connect with others, and see how authors promote their books. You will stay informed with the B&N Press updates, too.

Spread the word by linking your book back to BN.com when using any free social media platforms like Twitter, your website, or blog when you recommend your work in any way. B&N also has an affiliate program where you actually earn commission for every sale you help make once you sign up. Lastly, there is the B&N Press community, where you can gain more interested readers when loading your link to your book description.

Making Money

Most publishing platforms do most of the work when authors use them, but you need to weigh up the amount of expenses required against the income you generate. According to a press release in February from B&N earlier this year, Barnes & Noble Press authors will obtain a 70% royalty rate for their ebook sales, which is quite a raise from the previous 40% to 65%. The self-publishing platform sped up payments to 1 month after procurement of the author’s book rather than the previous 60 days. In addition, Barnes & Noble Press also expanded its range of retailing opportunities, including curated advertisements on BN.com, improved email location, and increased social media and blog exposure on its channels.

The press release also stated that it totally surpassed the topmost self-publishing platform, Amazon’s KDP, in pricing versus royalty as well as a faster turnaround of sales to payments. Another benefit is constant financial reports, as book sales are tracked meticulously.

Marketing

Every book has an official launch. Create as much hype as possible around this special event. When your book goes live on the B&N platform, stay in touch with your audience. Ask friends and family to help market your book. B&N has millions of potential customers who are hungry for new reading material.

On the chosen launch date, your book will be introduced on BN.com as well as all NOOK devices. Anybody with internet access can go to B&N Press eBooks and will be able to read your publication on the free NOOK app or the NOOK Web Reader which is available 24/7 online.

Your book will be available in all B&N stores countrywide. The stores’ bookseller will mention your book to readers searching for your specific genre, and you will have a graphic icon visible in the store. It’s as simple as placing the book order, and the B&N store will ensure your book is shipped straight to your fans.

B&N has various marketing programs to improve your book’s reach to a magnitude of possible readers.

Your book will be featured in all of B&N’s promotions, direct emails, and all the selected marketing programs.

An image of your book’s cover, back, and spine will be highlighted in scheduled theme-based collections for up-and-coming and well-known B&N Press authors on BN.com.

Readers will get emails, which include a 3-point image of your book in featured categories and deals included in B&N newsletters that reach an audience of 500,000 booklovers.

Your book will be introduced in special offers limited to Barnes & Noble readers during any book sales and promotions with an image of three flags waving.

Turning Your Book into a Bestseller

Through hard work and effort, willpower, and painstaking attention to detail, you can become one of the best authors in the online book publishing world, and specifically in generating bestsellers that are number one on the top ten must-reads.

A brilliant storyline is naturally the first thing readers are looking for, but if you want individuals to purchase your book, they have to be able to find you. If they don’t know you exist, they can’t buy your book. You need to network so people can recognize who you are, what you write, and your new book’s title.

Get in touch with other authors and like-minded people in your industry. Connecting with them allows both parties a chance to get to know each other. From there, you can mention your connections and vice versa for writing opportunities and collaborations.

Reviews are also a good way to inform readers about your book. Some will love it and some will hate it, but the point is that they are talking about your book, and this is key! When you choose a professional self-publishing platform such as Barnes & Noble, you are assured a widespread presence and all the tools to create, produce, market, and sell your story.