Barnes & Noble just announced they are creating a distribution platform for independent authors to sell self-published books on the B&N website –- e-books only.

Smashwords allows anyone who can create a MS Word document to self-publish and distribute on nine platforms including Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple, and the Smashwords site itself — e-books only.

Of course, Amazon has offered e-book distribution through the Kindle for what seems likes ages now.

So there are many ways to sell and distribute an independent book as long as it’s an e-book.

But if you want to sell a p-book –- that’s a traditional paper book — as a true self-publisher, you have limited options: your own website and Amazon. That’s about it.  Only Amazon offers a program to allow easy sales and distribution of paper books, books that still make up at least 95% of all book sales.

The Amazon program is pretty simple. For $29.95 USD per year, you can have a seller’s account on Amazon.com and your book is listed in their search engines. They won’t keep many copies in stock, so your sales need to drive their purchase orders. But they guarantee you 45% of the retail price of your book. Not great, but manageable. When you start to sell in volume (i.e., you’re shipping them cases of books rather than one or two books at a time), it starts to pay off. They pay you each month with a direct deposit to your bank account. Plus they are the largest e-tailer in the world, so there is value in the exposure you get.

Oddly, as everyone rushes to compete in the emerging digital market, they are leaving Amazon to its monopoly on p-books for the self-publisher. No one wants to challenge the mighty Amazon? Really?

Tags: Amazon, Barnes Noble, distribution, independent publisher, sales, self-publishers, self-publishing

This entry was posted on Friday, May 28th, 2010 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.