NookPress Printing Service is not what it appears to be

NookPress Printing Service from Barnes and Noble

posted in: Self Publishing | 0

Several of our authors have had comments left asking if Bite Me Books intends on pursuing paper copies of our books through NookPress Printing.  There appears to be an assumption that we would do that because some of our titles are currently available on NookPress e-Books.  We will NOT be pursuing print copies from NookPress Printing Service at this time or in the foreseeable future.

NookPress Printing Service from Barnes and Noble uses the same call center service as Comcast, a call center that’s located in South America with non-English speaking customer service representatives who read from scripts.  This customer service center is notoriously bad and one of the main reasons customers have left Comcast.  Comcast consistently gets the worst reviews of any digital service provider.  One of our authors tested NookPress’s Printing Service and the software is riddled with bugs.  Page numbers don’t work, bleed areas are off, formatting changes even when uploading PDF files (and now PDF files are the requirement), and customer service does not answer the phone or respond to emails.  Dealing with other issues would be manageable if there were a two-way dialogue between NookPress and authors, but there isn’t.  The customer service representatives are in South America and speak very poor English.  Their scripts don’t include troubleshooting software problems or giving feedback to Barnes and Noble about their NookPress Printing Service program.  Once a project is completed and ordered, it disappears from the author dashboard completely, leaving the author in limbo which is what happened in this instance.

Barnes and Noble rolled out NookPress Printing Service right before Christmas as a marketing tactic.  They give the illusion that the new NookPress Printing Service will market and sell your paperback versions at Barnes and Noble.  That is NOT the case.  NookPress Printing Service is vanity publishing.  Any book that you print through NookPress will not have an ISBN number, will not be distributed through a sales channel or distribution channel, and will only be valuable to the person printing it.  It is not a commercial product.  We are also hearing from other authors that the books are printed in CHINA where toxic ink and paper are used.

There are many other printing service providers, but they hide behind contradicting “terms and conditions” which give them permission to keep digital files indefinitely which is a clear violation of copyright law.  This is why most of these services are geared toward vanity publishing rather than an alternative to traditional publishing, Amazon’s CreateSpace and Lulu’s Print Publishing included.

Some of our titles have already been pulled from NookPress e-Books due to their software problems.  When a book is purchased, its rank changes and the purchase shows up in the author’s dashboard panel.  In September, October, and November NookPress e-Books rolled out new software which took them a week to complete each time.  During those weeks, no sales were recorded although sales were made.  Ranks changed among the books so we knew roughly how many copies of each were sold, but those sales were never recorded or paid to our authors.  Since Barnes and Noble has moved all of their financial operations to India, it’s difficult to prosecute them.  We are currently in negotiations with an e-book retailer to set up a distribution channel solely for Bite Me Books e-books.  All books would be in PDF or EPUB format; viewers for both are free.  Anyone who previously purchased a copy of one of our titles on NookPress and emails us their receipt can pick up a complimentary copy of the same title through this system.  That information will be released when the new system is finalized.

Bite Me Books currently has over sixty titles.  We currently have fewer than twenty available at Barnes and Noble.  Our authors continue to write prolifically.  Rowan has an entire line of Homeschooling Unit Study books, Molly has an entire line of Gardening and Miniature Gardening books, Maggie Maguire has an entire line of Health books, and Caty Callahan has her Marriage Lottery series which is wildly popular.  Jacob will have a dozen Kids’ Gardening books ready by spring.  We have explored the possibility of having a paid membership site in which fans could pay a monthly fee to read all of our titles online, but that posed too many problems.

The publishing world is constantly changing.  The old brick-and-mortar publishers are aggressively planting fake reviews on Amazon and other sites while vanity publishers are sprouting like weeds.  Currently there is no viable way to print our titles without going through a dishonest vanity press like Amazon CreateSpace or Lulu Printing.  So we will patiently wait for the market to change again.  In the meantime, please enjoy our e-books.

 

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