Many Authors Report B&N PubIt Is Under-Paying September Royalties – B&N Customer Service Unhelpful

There's a breaking story this weekend which might come to nothing, but since it also reveals an underlying issue which deserves discussion I am going to post on it anyway.

A number of self-published have been gathering on the PubIt Support Boards this weekend, all with the same complaint. It's the first of the month, and these authors have been getting the reminder emails about their duodeciannual payments for ebooks sold in the Nook Store. Unfortunately, all of the authors are reporting that their monthly statements for September 2012 are coming up short.

Nearly 2 dozen authors have reported that B&N is underpaying. There's not a single author participating in the thread who has not reported being shortchanged by half or more, with a couple authors posting that they're missing 2/3 of the expected payment.

The problem here is that one part of PubIt is reporting that the authors made, say 70 sales in September, while the monthly statement is telling the authors that they're only going to be paid for 30 sales. I'm sure you can see why some are freaking out.

At this time it is still not clear if the actual payments match the under-reported accounting. One author has indicated that while B&N had misstated the royalty payment, the actual deposit matched what the author was owed. It did not match the reported statement, and that suggests that this is a glitch in PubIt interface, one which does not affect the accounting software.

The greater issue here is not the payment, but the general lack of a response from B&N. This bothers the authors nearly as much as the possibility that they could be shortchanged, and the B&N's silence certainly isn't helping to reduce the understandable anxiety.

I would like to join the authors in excoriating B&N for their silence, but to be honest they are not any worse than the competition. I have had issues with both Amazon and Google in which they took more than 2 days to respond.  The fact that B&N has not yet responded to this issue by Sunday night barely deserves notice. It certainly doesn't rise to the point of being a serious failure on their part.

With that in mind, I am half expecting to read reports tomorrow that the payments received are correct, with only the paperwork being wrong. But even if the payments are short, it's still not the end of the world. The shortfalls in one payment can always be remedied the following month.

Let's see what happens. If you are an author expecting a payment from B&N, let me know if it comes up short.

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3 thoughts on “Many Authors Report B&N PubIt Is Under-Paying September Royalties – B&N Customer Service Unhelpful

  1. Nate: Just checked my account at PubIt and indeed the ‘Payments sent’ section of the ‘My Sales’ page is showing a $ amount well short of what they are reporting on the same page for OCT Sales results (approx. 55 % too low).
    Checking my bank wire , from B&N, it is in the correct full amount. Sounds like just a webcode error for the PubIt backend site.

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